Thursday, August 14, 2008

Progress?

Yesterday I sat down for a quantity-over-quality design session, a bit more detailed than outright brainstorming, but just trying to get some ideas flowing. It ended up going on, on and off, for about 2 hours, and resulted in 21 preliminary game designs over about 5 pages in a notebook. Its got me thinking in a lot of directions, working on my intuitions about what works, noticing my tendencies, noticing mental traps and ruts that I go into again and again. I also found that just having the TV on quietly in the background was helpful to give me some stimulus, some inspiration to get ideas flowing. Writing down words that kept kicking around in my head also helped to spark new directions when I was in a mental loop/trap/rut. So useful in a few ways, pretty satisfying. I will try to do more of these in the future.

For reference, here's a 1 line description of each. Some of these werent' developed much more than this, some got a half page of side ideas to themselves:
1. A party/parlor/word card game about rapping/poetry/rhyming words
2. A game based on google searches, each person gets a laptop? Guesses about searches?
3. Minigame Social Game sub-idea: Numbered hats as rank, determines matchups
4. Minigame Social Game sub-idea: What room you're in determines challenge types availible
5. Climbing game based on reveals of vertical tiles
6. A traditional-deck game about rigging and betting on sporting events
7. Each player makes a dungeon and explores others' dungeons - an improved design of an idea I saw in another game
8. Moving furniture into a room
9. Simple sports game with a cheating/steroids element
10. Alchemy still hasn't been done right - some notes.
11. Game of Games - this is an involved one.
12. Marching band field show game
13. Play at the plate - a 2 player game of the subtle sub-second moments and movements of a single opposed action
14. Totem Pole Building
15. Fight/chase in an abandoned suburb
16. Chili Cookoff - expansion of a DnD minigame I had in the day
17. Game of being dungeon masters and keeping players happy
18. Zen Game - trying not to adhere to any of several false "victory conditions"
19. Poker/combinations with "squared" deck
20. Guiding a teammate through the maze/situation/obstaclt course you can see that they can't
21. Minigame Social Game sub-idea: 2 on 2 team approach

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