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Creator Academy · Lesson 2
How to tell if Scotty understood you
The difference between fixing a game with one sentence and rebuilding it.
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The sketchpad holds five rows. A dash means Scotty hasn't decided yet, and "Scotty's asking…" marks the row it's working out right now. Read it beside the reply, not instead of it — the reply is where an assumption shows up first.
The five rows
Shaping it with Scotty — nothing builds until you say so.
- Idea
- You aim a lighthouse beam to guide ships past rocks…
- Title
- Lighthouse Keeper
- What you do
- Rotate the beam · aim at ships · manage fuel
- Vibe
- Moonlit sea, soft pixels, calm but tense
- Twist
- —
Somewhere a cat is judging this design. Ignore the cat.
- What you do
This row is the game. The others dress it. It comes back as a short list of verbs — if those aren't what you want to spend your time doing, fix it here and nothing downstream has to be undone.
- Twist
A dash means nothing has been decided. Leave it and it gets filled in for you. While a row is being worked out it reads “Scotty's asking…” instead, and that marker moves down the list as rows get answered.
How a wrong assumption gets caught
From a real session. Watch where the mistake actually lives.
I describe the game
"A stray cat knocking things off shelves in a house while the owner tries to catch her." No camera angle in that sentence.
Scotty replies with one extra idea
"I'm picturing a side-scrolling house where you leap between shelves…" I never said side-scrolling.
The sketchpad doesn't say it
The verbs row read "leap between shelves, knock things down, dodge the owner" — no angle at all. The assumption was in the reply, not the committed shape.
One sentence fixes it
"Not side-scrolling — top-down, like looking down into the room." The Idea row rewrote itself. Ten seconds, before anything was built.
The reply runs one step ahead of the sketchpad. That is where Scotty tries an idea on before committing it — so read both, and read them differently. The sketchpad tells you what has been decided. The reply tells you what is about to be.
Ten seconds before you build
Is any row still on a dash that I care about?
Say it now, or it gets chosen for you.
Does the verbs row describe what I want to spend my time doing?
That row is the game. If it's wrong, nothing downstream saves it.
Did the last reply mention anything the sketchpad doesn't?
That's an assumption in flight. It costs a sentence now and a rebuild later.
If it doesn't make you grin now, that's information — and it's much cheaper now than later.
The one thing worth doing next
Next lesson: developing your idea — the affordances that push a thin premise somewhere better. Or go and make something and watch the panel fill in as you type.
Frequently asked questions
A panel beside your conversation that fills in as you talk, holding five rows: Idea, Title, What you do, Vibe and Twist. It shows what Scotty has settled on about your game so far.
That nothing has been decided for that row yet. If it's still a dash when you build, Scotty fills it in for you.
That it's the row the current question is about. The marker moves down the list as rows get answered, so it doubles as a progress indicator with names.
Not yet. Scotty's replies often run a step ahead of the sketchpad, trying an idea before committing it. If you don't want it, say so in the same message — it costs a sentence at that stage.
Yes, you keep talking to Scotty and asking for changes. Catching something in the sketchpad first is simply cheaper: undoing a removal means restoring an earlier version from Version History, which rewinds the rest of your work with it.
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