I have been writing stories and making (board) games for a while now, and I’ve fallen into patterns. Every idea you have just reminds you of the story you already wrote a year ago. Every time I design new cards for a game I just find myself using the same tricks or colors as those other card games. And if I’m not copying myself, then I’m surely repeating things I read in other books or saw in other games (that I liked).
Once you’ve noticed this, once you have this feeling, it’s hard to get rid of it. You suddenly feel like everything you do is cliché, overdone, the same as last time, and very much uninspired.
You completely block yourself or fall towards the other extreme. You try to be creative and fresh with every idea from now on, which is just something you can’t conjure up on command. Inspiration strikes over time, whenever it wants. New ideas come as you’re just living life or trying to make your next project.
When learning any skill, they always tell you to make tiny projects first. Want to learn how to make games? Make 50 really, really simple games first. You’ll actually finish those and end up with the skills and experience to combine them into bigger games.
And this advice is great! It’s something more people should listen to—yes, talking to you, younger Tiamo. It is absolutely the way to go for learning any skill. Do it a lot, gain a lot of experience, and you achieve that by making it achievable (small, simple, step-by-step) and not overwhelming.
So I sort my ideas based on complexity. I get a nice list from simplest to largest, and I work through that list from top to bottom, and … dang, all my ideas are starting to look the same. The projects are too small to really be very different, and I’ve obviously sorted similar ideas at a similar complexity, so now I’m just making 10 “simple card-based games” in a row.
This is successful for a time, but the fact this article exists probably showed you my personal threshold of “similar projects” has been reached. I’ve made so many board games row now, that it feels like redoing the same cycle over and over. I am very tempted to jump the list, go for that really big and experimental project for which I “am ready now”, but stop myself and stay disciplined. And stay … uninspired.
So I guess this article is really about two questions that ran through my head.
- When do you know you’re “ready” for bigger projects? Or, how do you build a nice ladder from 0 to 100 without becoming repetitive or working in a way you dislike?
- How do you stay creative and fresh, even as your work stays within the same general area / genre / theme?
The Scope Ladder
No, you’re not ready
In general, it’s my experience that people think they’re ready for the “next step” too soon. They have written a single short story and now try to write their own Lord of the Rings. They have followed a tutorial on making a pacman game, so obviously they now create their Fortnite clone.
It has certainly been true for me. My first ~10 games are mostly bad and unfinished. Not necessarily because they were bad ideas. Not at all! I still believe in many of the great ideas I had as a 10 year old. But they failed because the execution was bad.
If you check my One Paper Games, you’ll see that they actually started at too big of a scope and becoming smaller (and better) over time. The first few games tried to do so much that the board was overfull, it took me months to make them (after losing motivation halfway through), and by the end I was just frustrated and wanted to be done with the game.
Similarly, my hard drive is filled with massive fantasy epics … that only received their first 3 chapters. I’d read all Harry Potter books and written a single short story and a fairy tale? Great! Time to write my own 100,000 word novel!
Even when I believed a project had nothing “new” for me to learn or create, it always had.
- Yes, I’d created card games before, but had I created one where the cards could have two suits? No.
- Yes, I’d made games with randomized material before, but had I ever created one where the material had to be balanced much more cleverly? No.
- Yes, I’d written a story about people doing magic with wands, but had I written one with animals as main characters and magic being forbidden? No.
Even if the core idea (game mechanic, setting, plot, etcetera) is identical, the execution will always have loads of details that are different. Loads of new challenges that will surprise you and make the project different.
It’s why, even after making so many games, I still adhere to this approach of making the simplest ones first. Because I know those further down the list will not be “a step forward”, but rather “ten steps forward at once”.
The issue, of course, is that these details only become apparant as you make it. Each idea seems simple until you actually try to make it. It always get bigger, and more complicated, and more nuanced.
This always made me believe you should actually not try to take “the next step” or go for your “big dream project”. At least, not consciously. Because in reality, you’re not ready for the 20 big leaps you have to make for this big project.
How will we ever evolve?
But now I have a dilemma. I keep making the simplest idea I have and never actually reaching the bigger ones. I keep writing the short stories and never actually reach the big epic. If I continue like this, I don’t think I ever will :p
Most creative people get more ideas (on a daily basis) than they could ever execute. The list only grows longer. Sometimes I get an idea for a big game, sometimes for a really simple one. By sorting my ideas based on complexity, this means the list never actually shortens, and I never actually reach the challenging ideas that have waited for me for 5 years.
That’s why I write this article. I keep producing games and they feel more and more samey. I keep writing stories and they feel more and more samey. I don’t feel like my skill is growing anymore. It’s still challenging, sure, and there are always surprising details or difficulties with each idea, but it’s not enough.
How will we evolve? How will we go up the ladder? What’s the right time?
Some mention a fixed number here. Authors who say that you should write 10 books (as in, full finished novels) before expecting to be published. Because that’s what happened to many other authors. For example, Brandon Sanderson wrote 12 novels before getting published. So ~10 is the magic number, right?
Similarly, this number of “50 tiny games” is thrown around a lot. You can make a tiny game in a weekend, so this isn’t some absurdly high number. Yes, making video games is really hard, so needing 50 of them under your belt actually feels fair to me. My experience and data show that making 50 tiny games usually means your next one can be a big success … so, ~50 tiny games is the magic number, right?
I think this is a nice benchmark—perhaps a goal to set for yourself—but it’s not really helpful. Precisely because of what I just mentioned: if you make 50 tiny games that are really similar, you won’t be ready for a bigger game. If you wrote 10 novels in the same series, with the same writing style, theme, protagonists, etcetera … have you actually gained enough experience writing in general?
So …
Small projects as subsets of bigger projects
And that’s how we arrive at the answer I’d currently give.
I’ve stopped sorting my games on the “raw” metric of complexity. That way, we just get 20 “really simple party games” at the top, and I would have to create all of those before ever getting to some juicy experimental game idea. (The same for story ideas, of course.)
Instead, you should still assign some general “scope tier” to each idea, but in a smarter way.
Subdivide your bigger ideas into the smaller ideas (from the previous tier) NEEDED to create it.
For example, say you want to write an epic fantasy novel with a hard magic system, multiple viewpoints, and a major plot twist at the end.
As you see, by writing it like that, you have divided your idea into the subskills needed! Before making that big project, first …
- Write one story all about a clearly-defined, consistent, creative magic system
- Write one story all about many, many viewpoint characters.
- Write one story all about some major plot twist.
These stories can be short. They can suck in all aspects except for the one you’re focusing on. Nobody ever has to see them, of course.
But they are simpler projects (with a smaller scope) that should make you ready to tackle the big one. They are a focused, logical approach to climbing that scope ladder. You’re not mindlessly repeating yourself on tiny projects, but actually using it to build to the bigger ones.
I think this solves most of the issue.
So, another example to make sure it’s clear. For the longest time, I’ve dreamt of making a print-n-play legacy game. You’d go to my website, press the button, and receive a randomly generated PDF with a completely made-up world, characters, cards, etcetera. Then you could play ~10 games (with the same set of people) on that material, as you explore this world and navigate it. (This idea has always had a “space pirate” theme, but don’t quote me on that.)
Each person would get a unique PDF, a unique game, unique challenges. Because it’s all printed on paper, it’s easy to make it “legacy” ( = progress from the previous game is permanent), by writing on it, cutting parts off, folding, etcetera.
Most of all, this would be really cheap and easy, while giving a unique 10+ hour game experience to anybody around the world.
This is a huge idea. Something that has always jumped to the back of the list, because what on earth do we need to make that?
- A website that can easily generate material (cards, boards, tiles) and place them in a PDF
- Code to randomly generate a world + balanced values/icons on all this material.
- The ability to dynamically generate the precise text or contents of elements, especially following a fixed template. (For example, a card with “Draw %X% tokens” where the
%X%is replaced by a random number.) - A design that looks pretty and clear, which fits all these random elements. (Which includes the ability to create icons, illustrations, general symmetric layouts, picking good colors and fonts, etcetera.)
- Simple rules at the core that ensure the game is never stuck, or takes too long, or doesn’t work if you’re unlucky with your material, etcetera.
- (Many more specific things, but I’ll keep it simple.)
But now we have a list of tinier projects we can do to train those skills.
If you’ve visited my Pandaqi website recently, you know I’ve made great strides on many of these.
- After making the first 10 or so games, I’ve built a great system (with support for lots of effects and modifications) for generating material on the fly and putting it inside a PDF.
- Recently, I made the first game with dynamically replaced text. The few games after that, I’ve refined my original approach, fixing some bugs with it, etcetera.
- I even recently made the first game that used text formatting. Once I figured that out, I can now use bold and italic text on game material, and even icons aligned within the text! This instantly made “bigger” ideas possible.
- Designing many different cards, tiles and tokens has given me easy shared functions to call that take away most of the work. (And a better sense of what looks good and how much fits.)
- For example, one simple function places an object on all the 4 corners of a card. This is very common, showing the number/type/suit on all those 4 corners.
- Similarly, I have a folder of built-in “generator tools” with stuff I often need to generate random maps or cards while staying balanced. All of those were gained over time by making other tiny projects and learning a new way in which you can “balance” numbers.
Instead of just blindly picking your smallest idea and running with it, I look the other way around. I look at my biggest (“dream”) idea and see what smaller skills it needs. Then I check which smaller ideas actually require those skills (or include those challenges). Those are the ones I pick next.
The Other Tip: just play around
My explanation above covers this idea of “when are you ready to move to bigger ideas” and “how do you get out of the cycle of just making tiny, repetitive things”. It also helps pick more unique and creative projects, but not entirely.
It’s so, so easy to forget, in this day and age, and especially once you grow older, that you can just play around.
Not every project needs to be finished, or a masterpiece, or earn income. If you’re known for writing fantasy books, there is nothing stopping you from just writing a random horror novel. (And maybe not even publishing it.)
For the past ~5 years, almost 100% of what I’ve made has been finished and published. It’s basically a guarantee now that if I choose to start a project, it has to be finished before a deadline and will be made public. (So an implicit expectation is that it has to be good enough.)
This is the other culprit. The other reason why I feel so repetitive sometimes, not really growing enough.
I haven’t been horsing around and causing chaos often enough :p
Gone are the days when I’d come up with really weird ideas—what if we had a game where you must cut into the paper!?—and just, you know, make them. Even if they end up weird, or unplayable, or nowhere near publishable.
This was quite a big realization for me. I’m 27 now and I just can’t remember doing any experimental project, any “playing around”, anything crazy for many years. When that was almost the definition of my work when I was younger, and that actually lead to some of my biggest sources of income. Make weird shit, try some crazy idea, see what happens.
How do we stop making repetitive card or tile games? By forcing our next game to have no cards or tiles at all. Doesn’t matter how badly it fits with the idea, doesn’t matter if we need to make some huge board or pawns or whatever, let’s just try it.
How do we stop writing repetitive stories? By forcing our next one to do nothing of all the things we’ve been doing so far. We’ve been doing 1,000 word chapters? 5,000 word chapters it is! (Or no chapters at all!) We’ve been writing an omniscient narrator in past tense? Let’s do only first person present tense for an entire story!
And it’s alright if this fails. It’s alright if this simply reminds you why you had these habits and patterns in the first place—because they were generally good. But now you have challenged yourself, learned something new, and surely made something “creative” and “inspired”.
Just play around and experiment.
There’s a reason those AIs, which cause quite the ruckus nowadays with how smart they’ve become, have “play around” and “make mistakes” as part of their training. If the AI only strictly learns, looking at the input and slightly adjusting its numbers to better predict that input next time, it will probably get stuck at a “local optimum”.
In other words, any small change the AI makes to itself just makes it worse, so it thinks it has reached its optimum: its best possible state. But that’s not true! It might just be the best set of numbers locally, but if the AI were to try a much larger step, it might find an optimum that’s much higher.
And so these AIs introduce randomness to their formula. They purposely force it to make mistakes and try the wrong thing, to prevent getting stuck and actually finding better peaks in performance (more reliably).
Well, I guess humans should do that too, if they want to avoid getting stuck in the same (uninspired) patterns.
Conclusion
Let’s summarize my thoughts.
- Yes, it’s absolutely wise to sort your ideas by how tiny and achievable they are, and focus on that first. People always think they’re “ready” for their next big idea when they’re not.
- But don’t mindlessly work through that list. Instead, look at that big idea and see which subset of skills/techniques/challenges it has. Find tiny ideas that each practice just one of those things, and prefer picking those.
- This will be a nice disciplined approach to making creative work and growing in skill … 80% of the time. The other 20% of the time, just do random shit. Experiment, play around, do something completely opposite to your usual work, nobody needs to know and it doesn’t have to be good.
- If you don’t do that, you’re bound to get stuck in a “local optimum”: thinking you have nothing to learn, while actually repeating the same mediocre skill until the end of time.
I’ll give a final example. This is actually the drop in the bucket that made me write the article. My Wildebyte Arcades stories are all different … but also very much the same. Same protagonist, same “we’re inside a game and must fix it/play it as best we can”, same writing style and cover design of course. It felt like I wasn’t growing anymore as a writer once I’d written the first ~8 books.
I wrote this article looking for ways to differentiate it more. To keep challenging myself. The first tip was very useful for picking game ideas (which are easier to break into subsets of skills, I guess), but the second tip applied here: allow yourself to play around more.
I noticed I’d been almost suppressing loads of cool ideas for these stories, simply because my brain instantly thought they’d “not work” or “be too weird” or whatever. Ideas to completely turn story structure on its head, or to make stories interactive in cool ways (which is a lot more work, but also fits the game-theme of course), ideas to write a story backwards, anything! But I was too afraid to actually play around, subconsciously.
We mostly fall into patterns and stop being creative when we fear failing or taking risks. As we get older, and projects perhaps receive deadlines or expectations, it’s obviously easy to think it’s not allowed to fail and you’re not allowed to waste time. So you pick the safe ideas, and you write the safe stories, and it all becomes uninspired and repetitive. You do this subconsciously, telling yourself there is just no other way and you just have no better inspiration.
Hopefully this article helps you (and me) to prevent that in the future.
The worst thing you can do is stop doing anything. The famous writer’s block, the famous artist doubt or imposter syndrome, the famous idea that everything has to be “completely original” and “completely creative”.
While you’re doubting yourself because your story idea “sounds so much like Harry Potter” or your protagonist “shares so many features with a character from my previous book”, some other overconfident fools have already written 2 more books and achieved more success. And probably grown more in skill.
Be an overconfident fool in the ways I just explained, and you’ll be fine!