Quest Accepted! A Visual Guide for Flow and Simplicity (featured by Gamasutra)

(A New Idea, A New Paper, and Featured By Gamasutra)

I was stumped. The educators in the room were all staring up at me, waiting for me to finish my sentence. Unfortunately, my mind had blanked. I could not recall the ingredients of Flow. In that moment, it didn’t matter that I had taught game design dozens of times, to hundreds of learners all across the country. All that mattered was that flow was just a list of four ingredients – raw text. With neither an acronym, nor a visual aid to guide me, I could not bring them to mind.

Quest Accepted! That's how my quest began. I needed a better way to think about Flow. So, I spent more than two years researching, tinkering, and getting feedback on some new ideas. And then finally ...

Link to Gamasutra Article

Link to Paper

...

Sneak Peak



Two years in the making - I hope it helps!
Gigi

 

Pretty much exactly how I visualized it from GDZ, except this version has fancy rounded corners.

Years from now, trendy indie devs will have stylized versions of this (celtic, tribal, etc) tattooed on their forearms and shaved into their back hair.

 

I laughed so hard I spit out my Raisin Bran. *Wipes Chin*
Gigi

 

You know... this actually fits the game dev process itself perfectly. This is exactly what I am after to be able to get back "into the flow" state. Without all of the fluff (distractions).

 

**Mind Blown**

You're right, of course. Unfortunately, reading/posting on the forums is often one of those arrows on the outside that makes its way into the triangle...

 

I think you have misallocated things...

• Clear goals: There is a like leader board
• Feedback: There is the alerts pop up
• Balanced difficulty: The mods close down anything too wacky
• Free from distractions: You just have to make sure you never click that box looking icon on your desktop. You can waste hours of time there.