The best way to find a great game idea is to brainstorm with

your teammates and focus on an idea that everyone seems to gravitate toward.

When brainstorming ideas, try to imagine what type of users you'd like to attract.

For this course, we wanna attract those casual gamers who are waiting

around for a bus or killing time on the train into work.

So we need something simple and easy to pick up for a quick fix.

We came up with an idea for a casual defender

type game about a cat in space over a group chat.

Coming up with the idea is the easy part.

We usually start with the type of game we want to create or an idea for a

game mechanic, and then think of ways to

differentiate ourselves from games that are already out there.

The hard part is communicating the idea to your team.

Gather feedback and iterating on that concept

until everyone is on the same page.

So with just a few simple tools, pencil, markers,

and dotted grid paper, a compelling sketch can be created

to share our idea with teammates or simply better understand

it ourselves if we're working alone like a crazy person.

I like using dotted grid paper because it helps me

think about the sizes of different elements while I'm sketching.

I use the light blue pencil to make a messy first sketch and then go back over

it with a black marker to define my lines and a grey marker to add some shading.

The first thing I usually do when setting up a sketch to share with others is to

draw a rectangle that is roughly the scale and

the screen size the game will be played on.

This helps our team visualize our idea better.

Since we're designing an iPhone game, I'll base my rectangle size

on the smallest iPhone resolution, which is 480 by 320 pixels.

If we view each square on our dotted grid paper as equaling 16 pixels, we can

draw out a 30 by 20 rectangle, and that will be perfect for setting up our sketch.

After I have my rectangle drawn, I usually list out the elements I'll

need to draw in order to get my point across to my teammates.

The game we're creating is a casual defender type game,

which means we want our hero, we'll call him Space Cat,

at the bottom center of our screen with enemies falling from

above and some way for the cat to shoot them down.

We're guessing that we'll need a view of the

cat's life at the top-left of the screen and also

a way to keep track of the score the

user is being awarded for each enemy they shoot down.

So our screen size is all set up.

Second step after the set up is quickly

sketching out the scene with our blue pencil.

Let's quickly sketch Space Cat at the

bottom center of our screen on some ground.

[BLANK_AUDIO].

Maybe put a little crater next to him to show that he's on some sort of planet.

Let's draw some sort of gun in Space Cat's hand with a projectile demonstrating

the main game play mechanic which is shooting at enemies to defend your planet.

The actual character design doesn't matter a whole lot right now.

We could draw stick people if we wanted to and still

be able to explain the idea, but I found it so

much easier to get teammates on board when they can see

something that looks similar to what the end product might look like.

We'll go deeper into character design later.

All you need to understand right now is why I'm approaching the sketch this way.

Let's sketch out a couple enemies now.

Again, these don't have to be what the enemies will ultimately look like.

You don't wanna invest a whole lot of time in this early stage.

The goal here is to get a quick sketch to share with your team.

Now let's sketch out what our HUD elements will be, and for those of

you who aren't familiar with the term HUD, it stands for Heads Up Display.

Elements in the HUD include what the user needs to know while playing the game.

We'll need a life meter in the top-left and we'll also put Space Cat's head up

there next to it to help the user

understand the meter represents the life they have left.

In the right-hand corner, we'll just put some random numbers for a score.

Now that we have a basic blueprint of our sketch, I like to go

back over it with a black marker to flesh out the sketch a bit.

Like I said before, it doesn't have to be perfect by any means, but the

better it looks, the better the reaction and

feedback from the people you share it with.

So when we're done tracing the entire scene with our marker,

we'll finish it off by adding some shading with a gray marker.

This helps add depth to the sketch without

a lot of effort, create a stronger resemblance

to what a finished game might look like, and help sell your idea to your team