There is nothing, nothing, like driving down the highway at 70mph in the pitch dark while bopping along to one of your favorite bands. Except when those things collide with the lightning strike of inspiration.
There is where I found myself at 5:45 this morning while driving to work. Spotify served up the song "We Live in a Strange World” by Spiritbox, and my brain said, “What if we wrote a game about using a spirit box? How would that work?” It was all downhill from there, both physically and metaphorically speaking, as I thought about using song lyrics and how to extract specific words.
And just like that: Spirit Box was in motion.
This is, sometimes, how game design works for me. It doesn’t always happen so quickly, like a flood all at once, but when it does the game’s creation takes over everything else until I’ve finished getting it out of my head and down onto paper. A lot of other designers I know work like this, as well. It’s an interesting experience, especially considering that the majority of my games takes weeks and weeks to refine and finalize.
As I’ve discussed in the previous installations of the How to Write an Indie TTRPG blog series, after this comes all the important parts: Mechanical design, safety tools, editing, playtesting, and graphic design. While these steps might normally take days or weeks to complete, with a simple one-page style game it’s much faster than that.
Usually mechanical design for a one-page game is stripped down and minimized, making it easier to fit all the rules onto a single sheet of paper. This, in turn, tends to make the inclusion of safety tools almost unnecessary (depending on your subject matter, of course) and minimizes the need for extensive editing. Likewise, this all cuts down on the time required for playtesting: It’s easier to rebalance a game with fewer mechanics and a basic play style.
The part that always takes me the longest is graphic design. While Spirit Box came together pretty quickly (literally less than 12 hours), I also had a fairly solid idea what I wanted this game to be and how it should look. A simple game about blackout poetry needed to be done in black and white, in a brochure style. Simple and clean.
Other games, especially longer games, tend to take longer for me to design, as I think through every aspect. Color schemes, font families, cover images, where the text blocks lay on each page, if there’s a need for accent art in the interior… It goes on.
All of this to say: Sometimes games take a long time to write. Sometimes, they come quick and easy. Both are completely legitimate ways to design your game. Neither one is better than the other. At the end of the day, as long as your game gets out there… Who cares how long it took?
You can find digital copies of Spirit Box on my itch.io page. If you prefer a physical copy, you can find those in the shop. More my ramblings about game design can be found here on the blog, if that’s your jam. And remember to scroll down and subscribe to our newsletter for biweekly updates and behind the scenes sneak peeks at upcoming games.