This is damn fine advice, though I've always struggled with putting it into practice. Recently, I've realized that the same is true for making games. It makes sense; game-making is a creative endeavor, just like writing. However, it's a more mechanical one than creative writing, and I'm finding that getting started on a game is giving me more trouble than getting a story started. I did not think that things could be more difficult than starting a story, mind you, unless said things involved space travel in some capacity.
After some thought, I think the difficulty in starting a game rather than a story is that a game (as I use the term) is a group of systems interacting. A good story is, similarly, a group of elements interacting: characters, events, settings, etc. Despite their similar components, however, I approach game-making and writing very differently.
Stories, at least those I'm remotely capable of writing, are linear. They have a beginning, middle, and end, and are not Choose Your Own Adventure books. People will react to them differently, of course, but they'll experience things in the same order, because that's how I wrote them. To write the beginning, I didn't need to know precisely what was going to happen at the end unless I wanted to be a total foreshadowing badass.
To make a game, however, I'm finding it very difficult to start creation without already knowing how all the little bits fits together. In a well-designed game, the systems will interact with and enhance each other. In an example game, resource gathering ties into construction, construction gives you your fighting units, and how combat works will determine territory is controlled, which in turn tells you how you'll gather resources. At my current level of game design experience, picking any one of these systems and starting there is paralyzing me, because I don't know how to design one gear without knowing the shape of the overall mechanism first.
This is ridiculous, of course, and I realize that's it's a matter of getting something on paper and working with it. Laying out a game's entire ruleset at once is as absurd as writing a perfect story from start to finish without any revising or editing. But, that's the stage I'm at right now. I need to work through that, and of course the only solution is good old-fashioned self-discipline. Crud.
After some thought, I think the difficulty in starting a game rather than a story is that a game (as I use the term) is a group of systems interacting. A good story is, similarly, a group of elements interacting: characters, events, settings, etc. Despite their similar components, however, I approach game-making and writing very differently.
Stories, at least those I'm remotely capable of writing, are linear. They have a beginning, middle, and end, and are not Choose Your Own Adventure books. People will react to them differently, of course, but they'll experience things in the same order, because that's how I wrote them. To write the beginning, I didn't need to know precisely what was going to happen at the end unless I wanted to be a total foreshadowing badass.
To make a game, however, I'm finding it very difficult to start creation without already knowing how all the little bits fits together. In a well-designed game, the systems will interact with and enhance each other. In an example game, resource gathering ties into construction, construction gives you your fighting units, and how combat works will determine territory is controlled, which in turn tells you how you'll gather resources. At my current level of game design experience, picking any one of these systems and starting there is paralyzing me, because I don't know how to design one gear without knowing the shape of the overall mechanism first.
This is ridiculous, of course, and I realize that's it's a matter of getting something on paper and working with it. Laying out a game's entire ruleset at once is as absurd as writing a perfect story from start to finish without any revising or editing. But, that's the stage I'm at right now. I need to work through that, and of course the only solution is good old-fashioned self-discipline. Crud.
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