One Habit To Level Up Your Game Development

Let’s face it- game development is extremely complex. Being both an artistic and a technical medium, there are so many things to keep track of. While working solo or even with a small team, it can be hard to remember the decisions and ideas you come up with during development. As someone with a pretty terrible memory (except for random memes and tv/music snippets), I’ve struggled to remember that awesome game idea I had last night as I was falling asleep, or why I designed that jump mechanic a specific way.

In late 2023, I decided it was time for a change. If my development was going to go anywhere, I couldn’t keep brute-forcing it and hoping for the best. With this in mind, I discovered a simple habit that completely changes how I manage game development projects: taking notes and writing things down.

“Remember kids, the only difference between science and screwing around is writing it down.” - Adam Savage, Mythbusters

Why Take Notes?

Some may ask “well I can just remember everything, so why do I need to write it down?”. If you have this super power, that’s awesome! However for us mere mortals, often our busy lives and other obligations take up room in our heads, causing us to forget all the small details of our decisions. This is even more of an issue for those who work a ‘standard’ day job and pursue game development as a hobby.

In my experience, this often leads to frustration (e.g I can’t remember that awesome mechanic idea I had last week) and stagnation because I’m not sure what to work on next. By taking notes, you can ‘snapshot’ your thought process while you’re deep in the mental flow state and refer back to it later. It’s almost like having a coworker you can ask “hey, what how did we fix that issue we ran into before?”.

Ultimately, documenting your ideas and discoveries allows you to more efficiently learn from your mistakes and experiment in a way so you’re always moving forward instead of getting stuck in a loop. Just like in school, you don’t learn much in the long-term if you don’t write it down to reference later.

What to Take Notes On

Cool, you’ve decided you want to start taking notes while working on your game projects. Awesome! Naturally, the next question is “well what should I even take notes on?”. While this will ultimately vary from person to person, I’ve found a few key areas I like to keep track of in my own notes:

Note (heh): This is not an exhaustive list. Experiment and see what works best for you!

Ideation Notes 🧠

Whether these be ideas for entire games or individual mechanics, writing down your ideas as they come and go can be extremely helpful when trying to plan your next project. Often these types of notes are little ‘snippets’ of a full concept, and don’t need to be meticulously organized. For those familiar with the Zettelkasten note taking method, these would fall under the ‘fleeting notes’ category. Even if they never become a full fledged game, referring back to your previous ideas may inspire even more ideas for future prototypes.

Research and Reference Notes 🔍

Like other artists and engineers, it is often a good idea to look outwards to see what others are doing in their fields of study. This could be simple search for inspiration, or looking to see how others have solved a particular problem you may have run in to. When you find what you’re looking for, writing it down in an organized manner creates a resource that you can refer back to in the future. If it weren’t written down, that time can become wasted once you forget what you’ve just discovered.

Discovery Notes ‼️

Game development is full of surprises, both with what can be accomplished and with what makes an engaging experience. As you run across discoveries, writing down how you got there and what was done allows you to more efficiently recreate the discovery in the future. This can also extend to fixing tricky issues or correcting issues with the design of a game. Being able to refer back to your notes when you come across the situation again is a huge time saver.

‘Decision’ Notes ✅

This is one that a lot of software engineers are familiar with as ‘documentation’. Although essential, writing good documentation is never particularly fun. Although you can cover most of the documentation of code through the inline comments, I find general note taking more useful for decisions on the design of a game. This can be especially helpful for large projects, as documenting these decisions can help you stave off the dreaded ‘scope creep’ and keep your mechanic design cohesive and coherent.

How to Take Notes

Now that we’ve described some of the different areas you can take notes on, we’re ready to get started. While this topic is specific to each persons workflow and should be taken as only suggestion, here’s what I’ve found that works for me. Hopefully this will serve as a starting point for you to work off of.

Tool: Obsidian

Holy cow is this software powerful. With built-in markdown (and image) support, internal note linking and tagging, and a whole ecosystem of editor plugins, Obsidian is a great choice to start taking notes in. While tools like Google Docs, Notion, or even just some well-structured text files can accomplish the same function, I’ve found that the linking capabilities specifically allow me to keep individual notes short and easy to digest while still connecting larger ideas and categories together. Having a mobile app with all the same features makes it a particularly attractive choice for taking notes on-the-go.

Organization

This is something that I’ve changed several times since starting to take notes more. While you may find some highly complex and rigidly structured methods online to create a ‘second brain’, I’ve decided that was way to much effort to invest for my personal notes. More recently, I’ve settled on the PARA method as a loose organizational guide, which seems to be working well for both my game development and other project organization. It keeps all my documents manageable and accessible without needing to put multiple hours into just the organization of my notes.

Experiment, Experiment, Experiment

The best kinds of tools are the ones that don’t get in the way of progress, but help you achieve it faster. Hopefully this post has shown you that documentation and note taking can be one of these tools. To make your notes as useful as possible, you’ll need to experiment with different note-taking styles and systems to see what works best for you. And with that, I wish you luck in your note-taking journey! 📔