How to EXPLODE Your Game Design Talent

[leunas]

How often do you exercise your game development muscles? Are you a game design heavyweight, or just a scrawny wannabe?

Every few days I challenge myself: I choose a random word and charge myself to come up with 3 scales of design centered around that abstraction - a web-game, a casual game, and an medium-scale indie game. The only requirement: the designs have to be compelling. The words are usually verbal (as in “verb.”) I try to shy away from nouns, but might occasionally accept an adjective.

For example, here’s what I came up with for “radial” a few months ago:

Web Game

Setup: Two players (or 1 human player and 1 computer player) placed equidistant from a central point.
Verbs: Players rotate around a central point “circle-strafing” one another. Players fire at will, each shot aimed at the center of the circle.
Objective: Player wins when he strikes the opponent with his shot.



Casual Game

Setup: Various dots are placed on the playfield. Various circles are placed on the playfield, each is attached to at least one other circle and form a jointed body.
Verbs: Any circle can be dragged around its parent’s rotational constraint; the child circles move with it.
Objective: The player must encircle all dots with the provided circles, adhering to the rotational constraints.



Indie Game

Setup: Planets and star (or stars) on playfield in traditional solar system formation. One planet is the start point, another is the end point. Rocket begins at start point at a fixed angle.
Verbs: Planets can be rotated along their orbits around the star(s). Planets emit gravity.
Objective: Player adjusts orbital location of planets around the star(s) to create a gravity “path” for which to guide the rocket to its destination.



At first, it took quite a while to think up any attractive game designs, but after over a year of doing this regularly, I find it to be a lot easier. By the same token, this thinking has also found its way into my own productions by the way of meta-games.

Looking back, some of the ideas are rather silly, but most are truly golden - I’ll never have a shortage of designs to develop. And its value to my ongoing development simply can’t be measured.

If you aren’t already, I recommend you try to adopt a similar mental exercise you employ at least once a week. You won’t be sorry.

If you already do this, or are starting now, what have you come up with?


sonicron.solaristudios.com/2006/12/01/how-to-explode-your-game-design-talent/