Gathering Material

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"Once you are committed to designing your game you need to consider the details. To develop the idea you must start to gather material that will inspire your work. These pages suggest some valuable reference sources."


Ganasutra often has post-mortems of game production, written by game designers. Making further use of the internet is something I'm confident enough in already, I know many places to look in order to gathering information about games and gathering information that may help when designing my own.

Gathering first-hand material is an excellent practice to develop. Images, local surroundings, see things put into a different context, turned upside down, enlarged or reduced inside. Thinking of dimensions in this way is not something I do often although I do recall it being effective at manipulating ideas and information. I have used cameras to take pictures of poses, textures and architecture that I have made us of in later projects and intend to carry on doing so.

Mood boards are something I am very familiar with although in all honesty I do not refer back to them all that often, but the times I have I have found to be useful. I try to make the moodboard mean something and inspire small fragments of stories, tiny ideas, vague scenarios that will stay in my head that I can dwell on and think over however long I like, ask myself questions about the feasibility of such locations and what role it (whatever it might be) will play in my game, and why it plays this role, and how, and where and when.