Welcome back to the video series where we’re talking about how to go from having no card game to your first sale. I want to title this video “Materials and Mindset” – what are the things that you need in the very beginning when you have nothing, and you maybe just have a small spark of an idea that you want to make a game and sell it? Where do you go from that very first spark?
I think it’s very important to have a clean and attractive workspace with the materials that you need to brainstorm, mind map, and draw. I highly recommend you have a large notebook full of plain white paper, just a large one, or even a whiteboard. The reason I recommend these materials is twofold: you need something to capture ideas so that you’re not constantly burning up memory space trying to remember all the different ideas that you’re thinking of that are coming up during the day. You don’t want to have that constantly in the background if you’re trying to be creative and produce something, so you need something to capture the ideas so you can put that aside while you’re working on today’s mission or today’s goal.
The second reason is if you have a physical space like a notebook or a big dry erase board – I have a large whiteboard over there – if you have one of those, you can see and you can make physical connections between different ideas. If you’re just allowing it to remain in your thoughts, those will stay linear, and it can be hard to draw connections. Also, if you write notes or ideas in a linear fashion, that can be hard, but if you have a wide, open space where you can have all your drawings, ideas, plans, questions, and prompts, sometimes you’re going to see a physical connection between those things, and those are the kind of novel ideas that you want to be capitalizing on. So I recommend absolutely that you have markers, pens, sharpies, a big white notebook, a dry erase board, or maybe large white paper hanging on the wall for those two reasons.
The second thing is your mindset. You need, first, to have a strong belief that you can do this, a belief that will not waver as the months and the years are passing by because it’s going to take you that amount of time. You also need to make your mindset – you need an ironclad defense against what I call death-by-the-lukewarms. I don’t think you’re going to have too many people who directly attack you, criticize you, and deride you. I think what was more common for me was that a lot of people around me just kind of gave me the, “Eh, yeah, that’s cool. Nice,” and then they go back to playing on their cell phone. And 10 or 15 lukewarm people can do the same thing as one direct criticism, and those people tend to add up. So you need to have a strong belief that you can do this, and you need to have an ironclad defense against the negative people who will bring you down, and you need to be able to protect the time on your schedule when you’re planning to work on this. So do you have those things? If you don’t, you need to do some internal work first and some external work of going out to the store and buying those materials.
If you want to talk more about materials and mindset, then we can do that in the comments section for now. I’m Matthew Boyle, and this is Language Card Games. We’re going to go to the second video.
