Something I’ve been into this last month has been writing in notebooks for game design and notes for myself while playing games. There’s a couple of things that happened at the same time that kicked this off for me. At the beginning of this month the Adventure Game Club started playing the text adventure Colossal Cave Adventure, a game that requires note taking to understand the layout of the caves. While I’ve made notes plenty of times for adventure games, they were always on scrap pieces of paper that got thrown out after I was done playing. After coming across some notes I took for Dark Fall a while back and enjoying looking through them, I decided to get something that I can actually write notes in and not lose a week after I finish the game.

The other thing that motivated me to pick up a couple notebooks has been #Dungeon23. This is a project where you create a mega dungeon, one room at a time, over a year. I just do tabletop rpg design as a hobby so it’s been a lot of fun for me to do something as big as a mega dungeon but in a very manageable way. I’ll eventually post some of the rooms on social media after doing this for a month or two. They’re kinda sloppy since it’s my first time really doing something on this scale but it’s been a fun project and I encourage people to try it.

It’s just been a nice way to process my thoughts and have something that feels a little more personal than going on Backloggd or wherever, saying I completed a game, assigning a star rating, and then moving on. Doing little doodles for each game is fun too. I’m not abandoning Google Docs for game dev note taking either but I think occasionally going to a notebook for slower note taking is useful too and allows me to think about game design in a different way.

Plus it’s just fun to cover your notebooks in stickers! If you sell stickers for your game or whatever, please leave a link in the comments. I would like more!