Transcript
Speaker: On Chris Deals With It, I talk about the frameworks and methods I use to clear personal, creative, and professional roadblocks. My goal is to help others bridge the gap between where they're at now and what they want to achieve.
Speaker: If you're new to the show, I'm an engineer, writer, parent, game designer, leader, and reader who leverages that experience to develop creative solutions to problems. First, an AI statement that all elements of this episode are products of the author, Chris Kreuter, and made without the use of any AI tools.
Speaker: Welcome to Episode 76 of Chris Deals With It, A Creative Process, Scaffolding. This is part two of a multi-part series about the creative process. We'll cover my thoughts on how this process applies to creating and publishing works and how it applies to games, fiction writing, other creative endeavors, and our professional careers.
Speaker: As always, the views expressed in this podcast are mine. What works for me isn't likely to work for you exactly the same way. The usefulness of these various pieces of advice will depend on your project, experience, tools, and more as I'll get into.
Speaker: The goal of this series is to share my frameworks, mindsets, strategies, and experiences that have led me to this point of my creative journey. This is an ever-evolving process as it should be for everyone.
Speaker: So scaffolding all about flushing out the ideas that stick. It's making preparations for a project, creating structures and preparing tools to aid the production process. And it's understanding the context that your creative work may be received both mentally and physically.
Speaker: So once you've got a general sense of your idea, it's time to start fleshing it out. By building a scaffold around the project, you're making preparations for putting in the work to bring it into reality. For me, scaffolding has three main goals.
Speaker: One, exploring the idea further, finding flaws, and making additional connections to strengthen it. Identifying the tools, processes, and or people that will aid the production process.
Speaker: And 3. Getting a better understanding of the time frame and resources, financial or otherwise, that all need. Scaffolding should be low stakes. It's best done before any major commitments are made.
Speaker: You're asking yourself, is this a project I want to commit to? Or in the words of Derek Sivers, hell yeah or no. And I'll have link to that book in the show notes. The scaffolding process helps you overcome internal resistance to turning your idea into reality.
Speaker: You're fighting against the fear, uncertainty, the imposter syndrome. It can help break complex, larger projects into smaller, manageable chunks, whether that be scenes, chapters, components, mechanics, processes,
Speaker: Scaffolding can take many forms. It's compiling notes, it's listing options, sketching, outlining, flow charting, character and scene studies, crafting an inspiration board, creating and utilizing templates, researching prior art.
Speaker: You want to ask yourself, has this been done before? Setting up collaboration processes and tools, prototyping, researching legal requirements like product safety testing, and doing a basic cost analysis.
Speaker: Is this project feasible? This phase looks very different depending on the type of project you're working on. When writing novels, I spend far more time on this step than I would for crafting in one of these podcast episodes.
Speaker: For games, carefully consider when, how, and where to layer world building and storytelling on top of the rules and tools of the game. In the scaffolding step, it's more about understanding where those balance points lie, the overall experience you're hoping to achieve, not every aspect of applying a story.
Speaker: Too much focus on the story early may hamstring your ability to get the game mechanics dialed in first. But a total focus on mechanics may result in a game that doesn't leave enough room for the world building you want to have.
Speaker: Overall, the greater complexity in your project, the longer the time frame it will take to execute, so the more time you should spend on building out a wireframe or a scaffold for it. This is maybe specific to games, but realize that your idea, your product, doesn't always have to be the center of attention.
Speaker: They can be applied to many mediums. And it's important to understand the medium your idea fits so that you can right-size the time and resources you are going to put into it. So I'll use games as an example here. They can be theming devices and fictional storytelling.
Speaker: I always reference the Star Trek Next Generation episode, The Game. They can be art. There are temporary installations or social messages. They can be cultural anthropology, like the Egyptian game Senet.
Speaker: They can provide breakpoints or diversions within a larger story or a game. An example i like to use here is ah the triple triad card game in Final Fantasy VII when I was a kid. They can be educational devices, like the old mech menu games, that's like Number Munchers, Oregon Trail.
Speaker: They can be community building tools, Dungeons & Dragons, World of Warcraft, where you're creating a framework for other people to tell their own stories. They could be therapeutic tools for the evaluation or treatment of emotional and development issues.
Speaker: And I have a link to an example in the show notes. They could be immersive experiences like an escape room or virtual reality. They could just be a promotional branding tool. This is actually really popular in 1990s shareware games. Companies would fund them and they's put them out there as as ads. I think Domino's, Chupa Chips, Lollipops had one.
Speaker: Anyway, in this scaffolding stage, you want to try to address as many lingering questions and define your needs before the real work starts. What are the financial and time budgets for the project?
Speaker: Is there a deadline? Do you have the right tools and skill sets to complete all parts of the project? Are you going to go out and learn what you don't know how to use? Is this project an opportunity to develop specific skills that can help you in the future?
Speaker: Do you have the funding and connections to outsource the parts of the project that you can't learn or don't have time to learn? Two quick examples here. Board game prototyping and producing Epigo and Simpletons pushed me to learn Photoshop and Illustrator, skills that have paid countless dividends over the last 20 years, both professionally and creatively.
Speaker: Despite the games being a critical success, they weren't a financial one. I view EpiGo as a relatively cheap and fun way to have learned a ton about graphic design, as well as many other skills including sales, distribution, printing nuances, publishing, running a convention booth, and more that I'm going to get into throughout this series.
Speaker: The other example is the Rainy River Bees novel series. I wanted a very specific look for the covers. Middle grade books benefit from high quality illustrations. My ability to draw and create that kind of art was not going to do the book justice, so I decided to hire Jack Parra, who I actually met through board game projects many years earlier, to illustrate the entire series.
Speaker: And this is a PSA. Please pay your artists. We're going to end today's episode with one of my all-time favorite quotes, and it's from a book by Charles Wagner in 1904 called The Simple Life.
Speaker: What is a good lamp? It is not the most elaborate, the finest wrought, that of the most precious metal. A good lamp is a lamp that gives good light. And with that, have a great day.
Speaker: If you feel that Chris dealt with it, I'd appreciate your support of the show by sharing it with someone who might benefit. Ratings on your favorite podcast player are also helpful in growing the audience. Visit chriscreuter.com for free downloadable PDFs with notes and resources from today's episode.
Speaker: Sign up for the CDWI mailing list or to send in your problems or requests for future shows. That's chriscreuter.com or use the link in the show notes.
