MakeWebGames

When it comes to planning out a brand new browsergame, organizing your thoughts can be rather difficult. You might know that you want to design a game with a specific theme, but can’t decide what else you might need in that game to help it become successful. Mind maps are one great way to get your jumbled thoughts about your game organized.

What is a Mind Map ? A mind map (or the process of mind mapping) is when you create a diagram using specific words, ideas or tasks and arrange them around a central theme or idea. By doing this, you can visualize, structure and classify ideas based around your central theme.

For example a basic structure of your main page.



The centralized idea here is what opens a new page. You can see it holds a login, register and a screenshots link/page. To take it a step further, we could branch out even further with the login/register link/page, like so:



Now you see how organizing ideas in a mind map is helpful when it comes to organizing/developing your game? Much like a tree, you start at the trunk, and then break your web site into branches, and then those branches have branches, and then those branches have leaves.

What Tools and Software Can You Use for Mind Maps ? Ok, so you know what to do and how to do it, now you’re probably just needing a way to get it done. You really don’t need anything too fancy to get this accomplished. a notebook paper and pencil to sketch out your ideas into a mind map. There are some online solutions as well as software solutions you might want to check out to bring mind mapping into the digital age.

Bubbl.us is what we have been using for the screenshots above. It is an online tool that lets you drag and drop your ideas around on the mind map a very simple task. It might be a little confusing at first, but hover over anything you have a question about and you can get more information about it in the help pane in the browser. Wikipedia also has a long list of mind mapping software solutions worth checking into.