Thoughts on Productivity in Designing Tabletop RPGs

We recently had a coffee chat with Spencer from Gila RPGs (https://gilarpgs.itch.io) and some of the questions that came up revolved around our level of productivity. In short: How do we release a new zine every couple of months? I want to dive into that with a bit more detail.

First, it’s really important to note that we’re a team of two, while a lot of other indie designers are flying solo. We have complementary skill sets, but also a willingness to divide aspects of game design between ourselves to learn as they come up. Having two brains is a big advantage in this space. It means that while Shawn is writing, I am laying out another project for release. Or, while I am writing, Shawn is outlining another project, and neither one of us has to excel at every aspect of game design. 

Despite that fact, I think there are some universal truths about productivity in indie game design, which is what I want to get into here. 

1. Acquiring skills is key. 

We are the typical shoestring budget-having kind of indie design team, so developing as many critical skills as possible has been important to us from day one. We try to keep an open mind about what we’re capable of. It might sound counterintuitive to spend time developing skills when your goal is to make a lot of something, but it ends up being a time savings later. Without a separate publisher and team waiting to take our games and make them products, we can get bottle-necked behind a lack of necessary skills. 

The skills that have been critical to maintaining high levels of productivity for us looks something like this:

System mastery, writing for style, writing for clarity, proofreading, graphic design, layout design, organization, time management, feedback use, leadership, stress management, and marketing. It’ll break them down quickly to avoid ambiguity. 

• System Mastery: Exploring and playing as many new systems as possible with the intention of dissecting and understanding how their mechanics work together and affect game play. 

• Writing for Style: Identifying the tone of a game, and ensuring that tone comes through via word choice, sentence structure, and style. Stereo instructions are boring. 

• Writing for Clarity: Stereo instructions are also necessary. Learning to write out directions succinctly but with enough detail to clearly explain each concept to all readers without being condescending or pretentious is a grossly underrated skill. 

• Proofreading: Using a good word processor and otherwise scanning for easy fixes in a body of text. 

• Graphic Design: Designing eye-catching covers, choosing colors and images that reinforce theme.  

• Layout Design: Arranging the pages of the game to appeal to the eye and make reading easier. Choosing fonts that are legible, compliment each other, and reinforce theme. Having a good hierarchy of titles, headers, subheaders, and so on. 

• Organization: Keeping notes, tasks, timelines, deadlines, and workflow in order to ensure that things are moving along and are being released on schedule.

• Time Management: Organization, part two. Allotting time to finish tasks and working to accomplish them on time.

• Feedback Use: Feedback is fantastic, and also sometimes terrible. Being able to take feedback but also know when to ignore it requires a clear understanding of what you’re trying to accomplish in the first place.

• Leadership: Communicating with a diverse group of people, checking in on them, and keeping them motivated and on task. Being comfortable with hard conversations and making tough choices.

• Stress Management: Things go wrong. A lot. Reliable teammates flake out. Timelines get blown. Don’t panic.

• Marketing: We made the thing, now we just have to figure out how to sell the thing.

Our goal is always to make a game that is fun to play, but also to build an audience and make products that look attractive so we’re in a strong position to get them into folks’ hands in the first place. The gamers who believe in our products and purchase our games ‘in development’ give us the feedback necessary to figure out where to best put our energy. There is a saying about failing fast if you have to fail, but that is overly harsh. Even our underwhelming games, the ones that don’t generate a lot of attention, still find a dedicated fan following and allow us to hone our skills. But the games that do garner a lot of attention tell us “this is worth investing in polishing for.” Because, realistically, we all live in a capitalist hellscape and they can’t all be passion projects.

This is where the other critical skills that we cannot reasonably do, even with practice, come into play. Like creating bespoke artwork. Even if we honed our artistic skills, every game we make requires a different style of art to reflect the tone of the game, so different artists are necessary for us. Or editing, as it is not a great idea to try to edit your own work for a number of reasons I won’t get into here. For these things, we must make a larger monetary investment, which means we need to focus on projects that are most likely to succeed in crowdfunding as through Kickstarter, Gamefound, or Itch Funding. 

2. Productivity is time consuming. 

We work from home, and our local business, the one that paid the bills while we were getting our feet under us designing games, only required about 30 combined hours of work a week from us. As we built up an income from designing games we were able to cut back further on those hours. We currently spend about 10 hours combined per week on our local business, focusing most of our energy on game design. At present, we’re transitioning to full-time game design and putting in about 60 hours a week between the two of us to make less income than our local business provided, but we enjoy it immensely more and can see the potential to grow into the space so it is a calculated risk. Again, capitalist hellscape, sorry.

3. Inspiration is everything.

Making a lot of games requires a lot of inspiration. Even when we’re ‘off work’ we stop to make notes whenever inspiration strikes. It can be about a project we’re already working on, or a glimmer of an idea unrelated to anything in the works; it’s all grist for the mill. We write everything down. Idea generation is so important that we’re constantly trying out new methods of recording and organizing all of this content. Right now, our preferred method is writing notes down on notecards and pinning them to a felt pinboard set up on our office wall. 

Another source of inspiration, but inspiration to act, specifically, comes in the form of game jams for us. Just quickly, a game jam is a sort of themed group project on itch.io that you can join. It may be something like, “make a magical girl game in 30 days” or “build a game on [existing SRD] in 30 days”. These jams are created to push you to act on your ideas and invite you to release a game in its earliest stages of development, and they can be a lot of fun.

We’re also forever picking up new games when they come out, and we read every SRD (System Reference Document) we can get our hands on, which brings me to-

4. Shortcuts exist, and they’re great for productivity. 

We’ve discovered that in most cases, if you have an idea for a game in your head, there is a system already in existence “close enough” for you to build on it. SRDs are open source game rule sets made available for this exact reason. It’s much more efficient for us to build on something that already exists than it is to make every system from scratch. This time savings was invaluable, especially as we were working on our first games.

Games built on SRDs have the added bonus of typically having existing fans of the original system that will take an interest in your new game, simply by virtue of being familiar with the basic rules and liking them. Someone already took this hill for us. This is something that helped us get our foot in the door, and we’ve personally built several games with existing systems. Those games are no more or less fun than the bespoke systems we’ve been working on- but they did come together much faster. 

5. Resisting the urge to let perfect become the enemy of good is gold.

Our first games are not contenders for ‘magnum opus’ status, but they are very fun and they taught us a lot about game design. Getting them out and into folks’ hands and opening our minds to feedback did even more to teach us about game design.  It’s easy to want to sit on a game until it’s ‘perfect’, I personally had this urge with Spirited Cafe. I knew the game was a lot of fun, and it did what I wanted it to do, but I was afraid to let it out into the world because I had concerns. It’s too high concept, what if no one “gets it”? What if no one else can run it? What if we did not explain the new concepts well enough? I sat on Spirited Cafe for months after it was technically ready for early release because I was convinced it wasn’t perfect.

The hard truth is I would have never gotten the answers to those questions if I hadn’t worked through my fear surrounding releasing a game I wasn’t certain of, and I needed those answers to grow as a designer. 

6. To thine own self be true.

I cannot laser focus on a single project long-term without burning out, no matter how much I love the project. I will die. To keep my personal productivity high I keep about 3-4 active projects going at a time. When I hit a roadblock or become fatigued by one project, I allow myself the freedom to jump to another project until I feel inspired or motivated to circle back to the offending article. This has led to us finishing two projects, started at different times, within a short time period. Which, in turn, has led folks to ask how we finished a whole new game in “just two weeks.” Spoiler: We didn’t. We were just working on both games simultaneously over the previous months. 

All that said, I have some general closing thoughts. 

This was purely intended to be a window into how we maintain a high level of productivity, what works for us, and the lens I view productivity through. If you read this looking for tips to help you be more productive in the indie game design space, I really only have one: Figure out what being productive looks like to you, then sit down and write out a plan to reach that goal. 

Until next time, fam!