How to map and select ideas

This week I decided to prototype a new narrative system for Lily’s Garden using Twine. After deciding the right problem statement, which is:

How can we engage more the Players more interested in the story, rewarding every effort they make to reach better outcomes during the puzzle part?

I passed to generate a lot of ideas on my notebook. Then I filtered out the best of them.

Ideas classification

Now it’s time to map the ideas in a proper chart. The X axis will represent the engagement, the metric to improve. Engagement is measured with session length and average sessions per day. Those are the KPIs.

On the Y axis consider the motivation to stay longer and open the game more during the day. This article by The Games Refinery will help us.

The two main motivational drivers for this genre are Mastery and Expression. So that we have two possible charts to map out the outcome of our brainstorming.

I classify the ideas in both those maps and see if we spot something in common. Usually this process is a team process and takes time and discussion. Again, in my case is just a quick exercise.

Against mastery we can see that we have 3 possible ideas to build:

1. Choose your Story: creating and using special tiles/power-ups during the puzzle match, you get points to invest in story branches.
2. Day Perks: Once a Day ends according to what you used you can get extra rewards (boosters, power-ups, infinite lives, ingots)
3. Rewards Missions: playing the game and performing positive actions such as buy lives, get extra movements, return every day, you unlock a special currency which can be converted in boosters and power-ups.

Mapping ideas with expression in mind, a single idea is in the hot spot.

We have then selected our main idea: Choose your Story. Secondary ideas: Day Perks and Rewards Missions. On this base we can build our prototype!