How Games Are Designed - The Multiplayer Classroom: Designing Coursework as a Game - page 224

Whether you use the water model or agile development, having enough lead
time (as we call it in television) is essential. You know how fast you usually can
work on a lesson plan or syllabus, but if game design is new to you, as it will be
to most who read this topic, allow extra time.

I work on my own. It took me approximately a month to put together a design I
thought was workable for the first multiplayer classroom. Even then, as you saw
on Level 4, I didn

t get everything right by a long shot. It should be clear on
Level 10 that I still don

'

' t have everything right!

To keep things simple, let s say your first class will be on September 1. Start as

early as you can in the summer. Do as much work as you think you need, then
providing you have the luxury of time, shove everything into a drawer for a
while and let it simmer. Useful editing can occur at three moments in the writing
process. The earliest is as you write for the first time. As I

'

' ve written elsewhere,

“ the moment I begin transferring thought to page I ' m already polishing it. �

Allow this instantaneous editing to happen, but don t wait for it. Best is finding

the right idea immediately. Better is finding it later. Worst is counting paper
clips, waiting for it to happen. Even if you know you haven

'

t figured out a design
issue, or even a correct way of expressing it, put something down as a
placeholder, even an explicit placeholder if necessary like [leaderboard con-
struction goes here!] . Otherwise, you run the risk of forgetting there was an
issue, and that could come back to haunt you. Even better, upon consideration.
you may decide you had it all along.
The second point of optimum editing happens after you

'

ve come to a natural
break. This may be a sentence, a paragraph, a section, or whatever. Your creative
mind pauses, reflects. A better idea, or a clearer way of expressing the original
idea, may occur. But again, don

'

' t wait. Write on.

A lot of people do a read-through the moment they ve finished a story or

dissertation or game design document. If you have the time, resist the impulse.
Put it down, walk away, and do something else, something not so cerebral
perhaps. Allow time to start to forget the minutiae of the work. Then, when
you

'

ve created. See it
anew. This reading will not only generate new ideas, but it will also magically
reveal typos you were blind to before.

' re ready and under no stress, go back and revisit what you '