I make games for a living, but I love to do my own projects when I can. Sitting at my desk all day for work, I usually don’t enjoy designing on my computer, there are too many tasks or distractions ready to soak up what little time I have. I’m also not in the flow of design enough to get good use out of a blank piece of paper and a pen.
A few years ago I heard Brenda and John Romero speak about how they made Gunman Taco Truck, the clever, fun and bonkers arcade-action game, conceived of and designed by Donovan, Brenda’s (and John’s step-)son. They spoke about how they’d give him fill-in-the blank template sheets to draw and design on, answering key questions about behaviours, stats, and visual design. “I want a monster that spits fireballs!” Hand him a sheet and let him go nuts.
I liked the idea so much that I made up a series of simple templates for myself that could work for an element in any game and printed out a big stack of them, leaving them in a folder with some pencils. Now and then I’d sit down and sketch out some silly idea, screen or level, date and name it, pop it in a folder and forget about it.
You can get these from my gitlab.
The real joy here was when I had a minute at the kitchen table with Ari and showed him the blank sheets. I asked him if he wanted to try drawing some ideas – he’s never really seen us draw and so I think has never been comfortable doing freeform art in front of us – but he jumped at the chance, grabbed a sheet and drew what was very clearly a rocket. “Look dad, this is a rocket flying through space!”. Then he grabbed another one and drew strange irregular ovals, and explained “this is the bacon on the road on the way to the rocket. Careful you don’t slip on it!”
Now that’s an interesting idea.
Building it
Things kicked off in life and work as they do and this was put on the back burner for a couple of months, but at the end of the summer I sat down for a few hours and pulled together a very simple little prototype using some assets from a pack I’d picked up a while ago.
I deployed the build to a private itch.io page and fired it up on my Steam Deck, connected the Deck to the TV and handed Ari a controller. I had given him one button and a single axis on one stick (he had only very recently turned five and hadn’t played many games). The triumph and the joy on his face was a thing to behold – he had seen it and I had built it.
He immediately had feedback (like any good creative director) – we needed to change the character’s sticky-upy hair, add an inventory, add a punishment for slipping. I took down notes (and some of my own ideas) very quickly:
A few weeks later I had started to make up a list of tasks and was going to tackle them in order when Unity decided to self-destruct, and so instead I’ve been using this as an opportunity to learn Godot, and build a game for Ari in an engine that won’t try to charge him 10c every time he runs it forever, or something ridiculous like that.
I look forward to sharing more of it once it’s a little farther along (which may be a very long time from now 😆).
