Dev Log 004: One-Page Sketch – The Mayan Temple

The Dev Log contains tips and tricks that I have found through my personal coding projects and experiments. As I find out new things, learn new tricks, I’ll share them here to help you with your own coding projects! You can follow me at LinkedIn, or on Twitter under @sfdesigner.

I often have ideas that hit me out of nowhere. Frequently they are games or coding projects that I think of and I try to find a way to capture them quickly for me to work on later. Last night, as I was driving alone, I thought of a game idea. I have been looking for a game idea that I could easily make using CreateJS and Cordova to deploy on multiple platforms. As I was thinking about it, I tried to keep it in my mind, because if I stop thinking about it, I often forget about it and the idea is lost. So when I got home, I grabbed my legal pad and did a one-page sketch to map it out.

I won’t walk you through the game—I’d prefer that you play it when I make it! But I thought it would be more important to give you a walkthrough of how I approached sketching out the idea. I hope that my process can be helpful for your own ideas.

Description

I like threes and fives. There is something appealing to me about breaking things down into those number of sections or elements. So I did that here:

• First, I wanted to map out what the game phases would be.
• Second, I wanted to map out the game token elements and mechanics.
• Third, I wanted to test out the scoring scenarios and see if I had something that seemed interesting.

The game is called (at least for now) “The Mayan Temple” and it connects with a childhood fascination I had for the Mayans, Incas, and Aztecs that was fueled by an old 80s cartoon called “The Mysterious Cities of Gold”. It was a show that mixed adventure, archeology, and science fiction. I loved it—but it only had one season—until recently. Over 30 years later, a second season was produced and I just finished watching it and it rekindled my childhood excitement about ancient civilizations.

When I sketch out game ideas I don’t think about the game UI or things like that. I simply want to capture what the player will do, what they will manipulate or work with, and what the possible outcomes can be. I figure that the UI design will come later.

When I sketch out ideas, I love to do them on graph paper. I don’t know why, but there is something emotional about graph paper that helps me organize my thoughts better. I rarely use the graph lines to draw anything with them, but the arrangement and order of the boxes helps clear my mind and give me focus.

Part 1: Game Phases

As I was thinking about the mechanics, I saw the game as mostly being a single-player game. It would be easier to make, and it would simplify the mechanics a bit. I tend to think that simple is better at the beginning. But what I wanted to avoid was creating something like a slot machine that is a single action that can get boring over time. So I wanted to build some anticipation and even a little suspense. So I created three phases, where each phase will have an impact on the final score.

So I just used a single word to capture the intent of the phase and a single sentence to define it. I wasn’t trying to map out each detailed step. I needed to keep myself from getting into the weeds. Keep it high level so I could continue to dance with the game idea in my head a bit.

Part 2: Tokens and Elements

I tend to approach games as if they were physical board games or card games. I like the math that goes with the probability of things like a deck of cards or a set of dice. So I wanted to figure out what those game pieces would be.

I also just did some research on number systems, and one of the things about the Mayans that fascinated me was their number system, which was based on the number 20. Using a combination of dots, bars, and a symbol for zero, they were able to represent value without the digits that we think of today. I thought that would be a neat game mechanic, so I added it in as a game component.

I then wanted to determine values for game components. This game has two elements. The first is a blind selection of values by the player. These values have ten levels, and since they were the basis of points and value, I wanted to classify them as some sort of treasure and then give them a point value. The other game element were tokens to represent the dots, bars and zeros of the Mayan number system. Knowing that I would have the player select six scoring elements, I needed to make sure I had enough tokens to make the game, so I did some math to determine the maximum number of tokens I would need, and then add some additional scoring elements to round up to a good number.

Part 3: Scoring

I then wanted to take the tokens I had selected and figure out what the highest possible score would be and what the lowest would be. I wanted to make sure there was a wide enough range to make the game interesting and challenging. While the highest and lowest were almost impossible to achieve, I figured if I could at least see what the limits were, I could create some automated probability tests and see what that turns up later and I can then tweak things.

Wrap Up

What was important to me was to capture the elements of the game. My own memory can connect the dots between all of these, but I needed to make sure I captured something quickly. By forcing myself to do it on a single page made the process quick and focus on the elements that I would need to remember the following day when I would go back to it.

Sketching out an idea is a very personal thing. Some prefer whiteboards, blank sketchbooks, dictation, or in my case, graph paper. So try different ways and find out what works best for you.