Ten Thousand Ideas
I started doing rough concepts for the game that would eventually become Branches of Power in late 2009. The big stumbling block was the "Issue Towers," one of the core concepts of the game. Our designer, Dan Norton, described them to me as "abstract ideas represented as buildings."
Well, that's great. How do you draw an abstract idea?
My first sketches looked more like junkpiles than coherent structures. There were buildings made of improbable materials: crates of live chickens, cactus plants, teacups, trees, busts of Plato. There were buildings derived from a function: leaning stacks of books with windows and doors cut into them for literacy, old turntables and speakers for media, sandwiches and tomatoes to represent school lunches. There were buildings that looked like they were grown out of trees. There were pyramids, pagodas, buildings that looked like someone had sawed six other buildings in half and cobbled them all back together randomly.
"Too literal," said Dan White.
"Too abstract," said Dan Norton.
You'd think this would get frustrating, but this is what concepting is all about: it's finding, as Thomas Edison once famously said, ten thousand ideas that don't work. I turned out reams of sketches. Schoolhouses made out of pencils. Banks made out of money. Pet stores on stilted bird-legs. Buildings made out of cheese, with swiss-like scatterments of round windows. Buildings with feet. Buildings with hats. Buildings that wobbled like jello. Beehive buildings. Buildings made out of giant A-B-C blocks.
"Wait", said one of the Dans. "Something like this. Modular, stacked, so we can interchange parts, let each one grow randomly."
"I like the hat idea", said the other Dan. "They should each have one unique part on top, like a....a hood ornament."
The wobbling stacks of sketches on my desk were reaching building-height themselves, it seemed. But with each new iteration, the Dans would pull out two or three sketches and say, "More like this," "This one, but more building-ey," or "I like this part. We gotta sneak that in there."
Eventually, a plan emerged. Instead of customizing the whole building, each tower would be distinguished from the others with a single part that denoted the Issue itself. The list of Issues was growing, too; when we first started, there were only five "Sample Issues" that iCivics had agreed on. Now, a few weeks later, there were twenty or so. With the Dans' approval, Rebecca and I began doing sketches of two specific sets of building parts: the generic, interchangeable "floors," and the far more detailed and specific "Hood ornaments."
We weren't done with the design; not by a long shot. We still had weeks of work to do. But we'd found our ten-thousand-and-first idea.