By: Joe Gaylord
Since 2018, I’ve been regularly publishing TTRPG content, supplements, adventures, games, settings, and so on. I can imagine a lot of people in the hobby want to be involved in this side of TTRPGs, but don’t have a clear sense of how to get started. This is part of a series of articles on my process for developing games and other TTRPG content. I highly encourage you to also pick up guides from people like Storytelling Collective and others who have covered elements of this in more detail and who can offer other perspectives on the topic.
In the first article, I took you through the process of developing Patches, a journal game I developed for a Free RPG Day Jam. You can read that article HERE. Having gone through an overview of my process, I want to unpack each of the steps I mentioned over my next few articles.
In this piece, I’ll take you through the initial steps I take when I am defining a new project, what I call the kick, and the pitch. I’ll also outline some of the prep work I do before I start writing, scoping documents, audience, team, and community.
In the Beginning, The Kick
Everything has to start somewhere, and I see games as starting with the kick. The kick is my term for the motivation that starts you on the process of creating a game.
The kick is the reason you want to make a game, the inspiration that gets you thinking about the design, or the event or call to which you’re responding. They often shape the parameters and constraints of a game. They can introduce things like timelines, genres, mechanics, length, price points, or publishing platforms. More importantly, they describe the community, ethos, and motivation behind creating the game, which not only shapes the final product but also your own workflow.
There can be a number of different kicks which I describe as being generic or specific, and intrinsic or extrinsic. Here are some examples of kicks I’ve had this year:
- D&D Winter Olympiad began from “I want a D&D supplement based around the Olympics”, which is intrinsic and specific.
- BUMP! (full game coming, I promise) started with “Rowan Rook and Deckard are running a jam for games that use the Havoc Engine”, extrinsic and specific.
- Patches began from “Beth & Angel are running a jam for Free RPG Day”, extrinsic and generic.
- Mythopoesis began from “I want to branch out into building games instead of 5e content,” intrinsic and generic.
Generic kicks provide few constraints, often just “make a game within this timeframe”, while specific kicks give you a system, genre, or other elements to work with. On one hand, generic kick lets you create whatever you’d like, which is great creative freedom. However, specific kicks give you a starting point and the kinds of creative constraints that inspire creativity.
Whether a kick is intrinsic or extrinsic depends on who provides the motivation. Intrinsic kicks are those you decide on yourself. On the other hand, extrinsic kicks come from other people, whether a call for a team or submissions, a game jam, or something similar. Intrinsic motivation gives you passion; you’re working on the exact thing you want. On the other hand, extrinsic motivation keeps you going, since others are relying on you.
Call and Response, The Pitch
The answer to the kick for me is the pitch. This is the initial concept for a project.
I try to keep my pitch to one or two sentences that express the following key ideas: the big idea, a clear description, the aesthetic, the system, the setting, and any proof of concepts (like similar projects, trendy elements, or a built-in audience).
It doesn’t need to be finalized or complete yet, but it needs to be an idea that’s clear enough to start writing. You can and should revise it, especially if you are more of a “gardening” writer (a concept I’ll explain later).
As examples:
“Mythopoesis is a middle fantasy that uses symbols like coats of arms, iconography, and mystic sigils in place of dice in a way that smoothly blends aesthetics and mechanics.”
“The D&D Winter Olympiad is meant to tie in with the current Winter Olympics. It allows your 5e character to compete in winter sports, including all of the games from the Olympics.”
This sounds like an obvious step, but it’s an essential one. Especially if your kick was generic, you need to define your intention and the overall shape you expect the game to take before you start writing.
For Whom the Die Rolls, Audience
At the start of a project, remember you’re never just making a game; you’re making a game for someone. That “someone” is key. As you work, you need to think about your audience.
Examples of audiences might be new players or veterans, fans of a specific game or set of games, fans of other media, fans of a style of play, age categories, and more. Often it will be a mix of two or three categories.
Patches had a very clear audience to me: millennials or young Gen-Z, interested in a mix of cozy games and TTRPGs, with a focus on crafting and sustainability. An early discussion pointed out that the focus on becoming something new might be attractive to the trans and nonbinary community.
Winter Olympiad was less specific. 5e players looking for sidequests or one-shots in an agnostic or “standard” setting (ex. Forgotten Realms. Theros would also work, but Ravenloft wouldn’t fit), with an interest in winter sports and the Olympics.
Big audiences are good because there is a lot of potential for sales; however, it can be hard to get visibility with them because there will be a lot of competition. Smaller audiences are the opposite: fewer potential buyers, but less competition. Absolutely avoid making a game for “everyone.” That’s a good way to ensure that you’re not really making it for anyone and losing any kind of creative direction.
Whatever the size, write for an audience you know well. Also, avoid making a game for a community that you’re not familiar with. It means you’re basically just guessing about them. If you’re not in the audience, think of people in your life who are part of your audience. As long as you’re honest about it, making a game just for you is totally reasonable, as long as you recognize the game may be more niche because of it.
As you write, keep your audience in mind every step of the way. With each decision about narrative or mechanics, “what will the audience find fun?” should always be a primary consideration. If you can, check in with someone in the audience as you work, getting their thoughts and feedback, and including them in your playtest groups (which I’ll talk about later).
Getting the Band Back Together, The Team and Community
As you have the overall concept and the audience pinned down, you’ll need to think about who you need to complete the project. The following are key roles within a team: Art, editing, layout, project management, testing, and writing.
Some teams will include additional people, like marketing or sensitivity reading. Most teams will have overlap, like writers doing testing or editors also doing layout. A small team will move faster and be easier to coordinate, but a larger team will have more specialized people who can do more and deliver better results. Solo projects are totally feasible. You can get things done very fast that way, but you will be taking on all of the roles, which can be a heavy lift.
In addition to a fixed team, some roles, especially art and editing, can be covered by external people whom you hire.
I usually recruit teams by putting out a call on some of my Discord Servers. It’s important not to just take anyone; you need a team that will work together, both in terms of vision and personality.
Beyond your team, you’ll want a community. These are people who aren’t part of the project but who are working in a similar space. My favorite places are Discord and Reddit for this, but there are many physical and online spaces to find them.
You can turn to your community to validate ideas, provide some inspiration, keep yourself motivated, and eventually hype up your project. To make a community really work, though, remember to give before you get. Be an active member of the community and stay engaged. Don’t just drop in when you need something, then vanish.
What are We Doing?!? Scoping Documents
With the concept, audience, and team hammered out, scoping documents are the last step before writing. These are part of good project management and help to keep everything running smoothly throughout the process.
The core scoping document is a simple list of information about the project. It needs to include all of what I’ve mentioned so far: the current pitch, the team, the audience, and the kick if it’s specific and relevant. It also needs the timeline, game system, publishing platform, marketing channels, expected length, expected price, and budget. It also should have one or more lists of ideas that you need to include, want to include, and must not include in the project.
If you’re working alone or with one or two others, you can probably get away with this being very simple or even unwritten, as long as you’re aware of the answers to these questions. You can also get far more formal and complex with things like Gantt Charts, team responsibilities, initial backlogs, marketing plans, and more, but those are often for larger and more complex projects.
The key with these documents is to ensure you know what you’re doing, and maybe more importantly, what you’re not doing. It’s easy to keep adding elements to a project, and scoping documents help you to say “no” when an idea hits. They also keep you honest about things like budget and timelines, which will help you get over the finish line.
Ready to Write
It seems incredible that there is so much work to be done before you put a single word on a page, but every one of these steps and considerations saves enormous time and energy later on.
As noted, a clear pitch keeps your ideas coherent, a clear audience keeps them relevant, starting with a team and community prevents you from scrambling later on, and the scoping documents help ensure your process runs smoothly.
Now that all the preparation is ready, we can wade into the actual writing and design in the next article. As with everything, it’s more complex than it looks, but with everything we’ve done so far, we can handle it together.
About the Author
Joe Gaylord is a TTRPG creator based in Northern Italy, publishing as Lazarus Game Lab. He has been playing TTRPGs for over 25 years and has worked on over 50 titles as an author, contributor, and designer. You can access his work, including Patches, and connect with him here: https://lablazarus.carrd.co/
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