Philosophy/Guiding Principles doc

[lorennorman]

Capturing something I wrote up for an excellent question on Discord:

For the longest time, I would carry around game designs in my head that felt straightforward to make. I told myself I was working on them just by thinking about them incessantly. Invariably, when I'd finally try to pitch it to someone, or actually sit down and start prototyping, I found that it was in fact NOT straightforward. I couldn't put that "straightforward feeling" into actual words. I couldn't Just Get Started prototyping, because where the heck do you start with a massive idea? And also "Wow, are the tabletop prototyping tools really this bad?" So, I'd start the familiar cycle of procrastination-by-crafting-better-tools. If something actually got all the way to playtesting, I was in for a whole new world of pain. (Forget blind playtesting!)

What I came to realize from attending tabletop conferences and meetups, and running dozens of game design workshops was that I was absolutely not alone. So many people are doing this same activity, and I came to view it as a fundamental mistake if someone's goal is to ever actually ship something with their name on the box. I also realized my procrastineering had created tabletop tooling that was worth sharing, so Paperize proper got started from that.

Paperize's first principle is to reduce the distance between the designer's head and the tabletop (...or perhaps even the playtester's head.) Right now, it's all about making things fast, and there are lots of features on the roadmap that have value for that. I want the game designer to flip their perspective: just "thinking about" a design idea should start to feel painful and onerous, while getting the thing onto the tabletop should feel effortless, almost like there's pressure to do so.

I (and anyone who has learned it) can now make things very fast, now. I just can't make very many things (because of the important missing features and shifting tabletop landscape.) I have an intermediate goal of being able to rapidly recreate any game on the shelf with all of its cards, tiles, tokens, game/player/etc boards. (I entertain a fantasy of doing a weekly livestream where I take challenges like that. Anything but Gloomhaven.)

Here's the flow of priorities, as I see it:

1. go very fast (we are here)
2. go very fast, and create any kind of component (we're getting here)
3. go very fast, any component, and look really good (totally possible in the modern web landscape + ongoing AI/ML explosion)
4. "production" features, as driven by real users