Refining with Index Cards

March 2, 2018

Another week – another month for that matter – time to discuss another of the techniques I’ve been using to design Sleuthhounds: Cruise. Last time I discussed a digital design tool with puzzle dependency charts. This time I go back to something a bit simpler: pencil and paper. Or more accurately a pencil and index cards.

Index cards are extremely versatile when it comes to design. You can use them to capture ideas about the plot of a game, the characters, the locations, items, puzzles, everything really. You can also draw little sketches on them in case you have visual ideas that would be cumbersome to express in words. Once you have a good collection of cards, you can then easily shuffle them about the table to group them together in different ways and to start to see how the different disparate ideas might fit together.

Index cards showing the breakdown of the full game.

Looking at the organization of these ideas as notes written in squares (or rectangles), they may seem somewhat similar to the puzzle dependency charts I discussed last time. However, there are several key differences between the two.

Puzzle dependency chart for one act from the game.

With puzzle dependency charts you are trying to sort out the step-by-step actions a player must take to overcome specific puzzles. This puts you at a very granular level of design. With the index cards, I tend to keep the ideas higher level. I might use one index card to represent a puzzle that would require numerous nodes on a puzzle dependency chart.

Puzzle dependency charts are also very much about structure. First this happens, then this happens, then there might be a choice before this next step happens. They tend to follow a rigid sequence of events. Index cards, I find, are more freeform. They’re great when you don’t quite know how things should fit together. Again, you keep things very high level and you can shuffle cards about to see the rough shape they give the game.

For example, this being a Sleuthhounds game there are specific puzzle types for the two lead characters. Things like Homes’s deduction boards or Ampson’s timelines from the previous games will also be included in this game. However, those specialty puzzle types need to be distributed relatively evenly throughout the game. Otherwise, if a bunch of deduction boards, for instance, ended up one right after the other, the final game would feel very lopsided.

Index cards are also useful in that they let you record random ideas that you feel should fit somewhere but that you don’t know exactly where that somewhere is. For example, I’ve had a puzzle idea involving a bottle of ketchup in mind since the original Sleuthhounds: The Unlocked Room game. For a while it was even going to appear in Sleuthhounds: The Halloween Deception. I really like the puzzle and I really hope it will fit in Sleuthhounds: Cruise but I don’t 100% know if it will or not. However, it’s easy to write it down on an index card and set that card next to the groups of cards that already fit together. Will the ketchup puzzle get in? I don’t know. But with a card sitting there as a constant reminder it’s something that I can continue to think about as I refine the design.

Sleuthhounds: Cruise is going to be divided into four acts. Here again the cards are useful because they provide a rough way of measuring the game. If one of the acts is accumulating more cards than the other acts it becomes apparent that there’s a certain lopsidedness there. Perhaps that act is trying to do too much stuff. Perhaps the other acts aren’t doing enough. The cards, and how they’re grouped together, make it immediately apparent where the pacing of the game may be off without having to create a single asset for the game or write a single line of code.

Index cards aren’t the be all and end all as game design tools. They’re simply another tool that can be used to help design certain aspects of the game. The key take away with all the different methods I’ve been describing is that each one provides certain advantages for designing a game. By using an appropriate combination of all these techniques, it’s really been helping me to flesh out the overall design. Sleuthhounds: Cruise is going to be a big game compared to the earlier entries in the series. The one thing that all the different design methods have in common as that they take that bigness and break it down into smaller and smaller chunks that are easier to understand and deal with. Structuring a game, especially one with a narrative, is a tricky prospect. Anything that makes it easier is definitely welcome.

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