The First Draft of Anything is Crap

One of my previous posts covered how to print a card game prototype without spending a fortune on a disappointing result from the print shop. Printing and testing your first prototype is a great milestone, and should happen as early as possible in the design process–ideally on the same day you start working on the design.

I say this because a game’s first playtest is usually awful, even for experienced designers. Ernest Hemingway said it best:

The first draft of anything is [crap].

Ernest Hemingway (maybe)

I’ll often start playtesting a prototype I’m feeling confident about, only to quickly discover multiple glaring flaws that ruin the entire thing. That’s when you go back to the template, change some things around, and try again. And again, and again, and again.

All this work pays off in the end, though. Taking your time to get the basic game design right at this stage (not the graphic design–there’s a difference), when all you have to do to is edit a few words and numbers in a text document, will save you a lot of time and energy later.

But as you can probably tell from the image above… I don’t always stay in this stage for as long as I should. Making card templates and layouts is one of my favorite parts of designing card games, so sometimes I jump ahead and spend an afternoon developing a layout that ends up being useless later on. Oops! In some strange way, I think this keeps me motivated, but I can’t really suggest that you follow my example unless you enjoy graphic design for its own sake.

In any case, the video game design channel Extra Credits has some great advice about this topic, so I’ll end with that. Happy crafting!