Learn To Love Your Notepad - How Disconnecting From Your Computer Helps Gamedev

I feel like the greatest part of my journey in game development is my newfound (or rediscovered?) ability to have loads of fun with a notepad. Personally, I love staring at a computer for hours each day (I've done it since I was 8 years old), but I've found that I really need some kind of payoff at the end of those hours.

Somehow, without an updated playable build, or a song, or a short film to film to watch, my time feels wasted. Though in theory, this seems to be good (I feel the need to be productive, hooray!), it often ends up making me work on quick, simple projects with short production time, low amounts of depth, and obviously short end experiences.

For example, I find myself making a short edited film from found footage rather than planning to write, shoot and edit my own short film. First world problems? Yeah, well so is everything us first-worlders are concerned about, so tough: I'm disturbed by the lack of investment I have in my creative endeavors.

This is where the title and subject of this post come into play. I know now that I need to get away from my screen. As great as having all forms of digital multimedia at my fingertips can be, it really saps my dedication, patience, and desire to spend long amounts of time on a single project. It makes sense (at least to me) too; why would I spend 1 hour theorizing on how a game's story can be affected by a player...when I could make a quick little Unity webplayer build with some bugs that flee the cursor! Hah!

Well, the previous situation can be solved for myself by simply leveling the playing field for my ideas.  Consider your notebook the New World for ideas, where they can exist equally without any production values or visual flashiness setting them apart from each other. Rather than being able to augment lame ideas with newly-accessible technology, I'm forced to admit that truly, on paper, my long story-based platformer IS way cooler than my particle system fireworks show.

I mean, think about the notes for the latter: "Make 5 particle systems that instantiate randomly, each w/different colors. Uh....and if you click it changes their position. Um...then it looks cool...." Definitely never going to entertain my 21st century mind with that idea, right?!

Another great thing about spending some time with your notebook is that you can dismiss ideas without feeling so much like you "wasted time." I've spent hours copy-pasting, rewriting, and augmenting code that, in the end, I didn't even use because the idea sucked...and I never realized it because I was too busy implementing to zoom out and see that the dynamic was boring.

On the other hand, yesterday evening I went to a tea house with my girlfriend, wrote two pages of notes on random level generation, then realized my game doesn't need it. Somehow, the latter situation was less....creatively taxing(?) than staring at the computer for an hour to no avail. Rather than feeling like I wasted time with my notes, I felt accomplished for figuring out why my game wouldn't work with procedurally generated levels.

Upon further exploration into why notepad work "felt" different, I realized that despite modern programming/implementation being so simple, and having the ability to become one single process (theorizing and writing code in the same sitting), my mind still considers that time to be implementing, rather than theorizing. And somehow implementing things, to the part of my mind still in the 20th century, is more tiring/dissuading than theorizing things. The process, despite being very similar to my time spent taking notes physically, still "feels" like work.

So, for now, disconnecting from my computer actually allows me to be more productive regarding theories/ideas, while connecting to my computer allows me to implement the ideas I am fully charged with (from my theorizing period). Upon writing this, it occurs to me that this is the way many of the game developers from the late 80's-early 90's were forced to operate (seeing as they had to 'go to work' to implement anything they came up with), which sort of confirms in my mind that this process would work for other developers like myself. 

So, even though this might be a no-brainer to devs older than myself (I'm only 23), to all devs raised on Windows 3.1 and up...beware getting too involved in your computer's amazingly diverse abilities, and concentrate more on ideas that work independent of technological implementation. For anyone not as distracted by their computer's multimedia capabilities, hats off to you for unplugging and getting to the root of where "good ideas" come from: you.

Pat Flannery is a multimedia producer working for Ronerberg Media. You can contact him on twitter @pfft_ .