Why I Keep a Notebook

Every idea I've finished started on paper first. Every idea I started on the computer is still in a folder called unfinished.

Paper is slower on purpose

When I open an editor, I start solving the problem immediately, before I know what the problem is. In a notebook I can't run anything, so the only thing left to do is describe what the thing should be. That description is usually the part I skipped.

For Lantern Jump I drew the jump arcs at three different wind strengths across two pages. It took maybe twenty minutes. Tuning those numbers by trial and error in code had already taken me two afternoons and I still didn't know what I was aiming for.

What goes in it

1. A sketch of the screen, roughly to scale.
2. A list of the things the player can do.
3. The one sentence version: what is this, in plain words?
4. Whatever I got stuck on, written as a question.

The fourth one matters most. Writing "why does the collision only fail going left?" turns a bad afternoon into something I can come back to.

Six months later

I flipped back through the first half of the notebook while writing this. Most of the pages are ideas I never built, and that's fine — they were cheap. The few that turned into finished projects all have the same shape: a drawing, a short list, and a question I eventually crossed out.