I’m moving house and I just came across a sheet of paper where I’d apparently planned out the entirety of Sub Rosa. Don’t worry about spoilers as my writing is hard to read. What it does show is a whole puzzle chain I planned but decided against involving petrifying a giraffe and dragging it around to use as a pivot.
Does anyone else have any fun physical notes lying around?
I remember having this conversation before! I love seeing other people’s design notes.
That is cool! I’m a little jealous of people with sufficiently legible handwriting and clear workspaces that they can do design work like this; I just have unformatted Notepad documents…
I don’t think I have any of the notes left, but I do have a photo of my cat sitting on the map I made for Lady Thalia 3. (No spoilers, there’s too much cat in the way)
When I was making Escape From Hell, I decided on the general shape first (a 7 by 7 grid) and printed out a couple blank maps. I knew the Cocytus had to be in the center so I wrote that down but after that I was unable to write anything else until I realized I needed to use a pencil for my weird brain to allow me to continue. Mind you, I’d printed two blanks on purpose in a bid to avoid that problem but… 
Haha instead of “physical notes lying around” you have a cat “lying around physical notes”
I have plenty from when I was a teen, when it was necessary (if you were rolling your own everything) to lay out the game data legibly on paper before committing to the computer. All 64kb of the Apple II+'s RAM were devoted to the task at hand – entering that data, which apart from the messages, was represented by symbolic numbers corresponding to items in written lists.
My notes from today are usually just scrawl that only I can read.
I have a few sets of my teen text adventure notes scanned on my site-Wade Memoir:
-Wade
Of course, as Historian I appreciate your site…
… I warmly suggest you to extract from the .dsk the listing of the five “Usborne” IF and put their source, together with the already-extracted Demon Killer source in your site, and safely preserve together into the IF archive 
Compliments for your preserving (and admitting youth mistakes… 
) your past and
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
Lately I’ve been starting a specific notebook for each new project, but previously I’d just scribble ideas on printer paper or in a general notebook or diary.
On the printer paper front, this is my second attempt to map out Superluminal Vagrant Twin, before I decided to do it in Twine (a decision I seemed to reach in the bottom right):
More recently, this is my notebook for Killing Machine Loves Slime Prince and a couple of the neater pages from inside:
My current project has actually almost filled a thicker notebook… But most of it is to-do lists, ideas and writing that comes to me when I’m away from a keyboard, problems from testers’ transcripts, comparing different solutions to issues etc. All of my projects also get a grid in Excel that I use to track everything that needs doing in every location and whether it’s done yet, so again for SVT:
And a lot of them get some kind of Twine project to track something that’s too hard to track on paper (although my current project got a Trizbort map instead).
So basically, this is (slightly outdated but still spoilered) timeline thing for the Twine project I’m working on on the side, Passerine Hills. I do it for fun and to get back to interactive fiction writing, and while I almost never properly plan or outline on paper/in documents, I decided to at least try and write it all down for once. It’s just a part of the plan (the whole thing is 14 points long), but that’s also about all I’ve written so far.
I’ve got binders full of puzzle ideas & notes, rough maps, concept drawings, and game outlines. The folders also include some old database printouts (on lovely continuous form paper) and printed playtest reports. I also have complete handwritten copies of entire games… every location description, object description, vocabulary list, and response written out in advance by hand… That’s how I started off writing games thirty-odd years ago as a teenager.
I typically work entirely digitally, but for my current project i’ve been trying to do some of the planning, writing, & translating physically. it would probably be more informative to photograph the books i’ve been carrying around and working from, but they’re all over the house…
Ok I see “transept” there, this is going to be a 10/10 for me.
Thanks Piergiorgio.
My games are already archived at CASA, but adding them to IFARchive too is a good idea.
The sources are easy to get from the disks because they are BASIC programs. A person only has to LOAD the program then type LIST. So I feel they’re already preserved. For Demon-Killer, I had to make it so people could instantly read the source because it was for the source code amnesty day. But adding the listings for the other programs to their pages is an improvement I will make when I have time.
-Wade
Oh gods, only now I read that it’s meant to be physical notes. My bad! Too sleepy to think yesterday, I suppose.
This is how the page of me figuring out some of the themes and vibes of Convergence looked like! I also have looks of the characters with detailed explanations somewhere, as I use them to communicate with sprite artists and/or figure out the vibes I want to go with. Maybe I’ll share those later.
I admire your consistent handwriting. I can’t even keep my notes straight even when the paper is lined.
I found this for Moondrop Isle when I was clearing behind my armchair yesterday:
I think my self-directed notes are particularly poorly legible because the important thing is getting the ideas into shape as quickly as possible. Notions swimming around in your mind are nebulous but putting them down on paper makes them more concrete, allows more ideas to built off of them.
I do this as well. I can tell when I’m getting serious about a game idea when I’ve made a spreadsheet.
I swear, it’s the first time ever that I see “political position” as a char sheet stat…
Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.
Even better is that it’s a cheetah with a political position.
If I understand the chart correctly of course lol
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