Just wanted to place a quick note up here chock full of excuses and rationalizations as to why we hadn't posted another scathing "big-picture" game design blog post lately.
Well, its because we've actually been designing a game! (Strange, I know.)
Jordan, from collapsecards.com, was awesome enough to host a 10-Day Design Contest and though it was WAAAAAAYYYYY outside our comfort zone, we decided to give it a shot. Jordan provided 10 teams (from out of 100 possible entrants) with identical sets of prototyping materials: gems, cubes, cards, dice, etc. Teams could only use what they were provided to create the components of a new game.
Whew. This is not our wheelhouse. Storytelling, paper & pencil, big ideas with sprawling implementation... all things this contest effectively cut out from under us.
But we conked our heads together repeatedly and brainstormed (and that whole "no bad ideas while brainstorming" mantra... I don't know anymore!) and finally got down to three ideas that we felt might make the cut. Honestly, we were already like 6 days into the contest at this point and mildly freaking out.
Our three ideas were:
1. A draft & bluff game. Drafting the items and placing them on top of face down cards. The rest of the group deduces and reads tells to call "Bluff" or not. It had some attraction and potential, but we lost the thread of it quickly and felt like that was a sign that it wasn't the right game for the artificial-deadline contest.
2. An alchemical sales game. Players were stall-owners at an alchemical bazaar or market. Using research to find new combinations/processes you could offer more and greater powered substances to customers... but with a slight co-op effort of maybe having to send a customer to a competing stall in order to get back a crucial item that you didn't have in stock. This one started to get way too big for the materials on hand and I think we got in "grand-big-scale design mode". Probably best we stepped aside.
This idea had loads of potential that we thought about re-visiting it and NO WONDER, because one of the other designers in the Contest made an alchemy game. (And, to be fair, narrowed the scope to the point that these materials needed, and put a second layer of alchemy in that we would have NEVER foreseen. He did it so much better than our entry would have ended up, for sure!)
3. This little throwaway idea that I had about tossing a bunch of the materials randomly on the table and then using THAT as your board to score points. Seriously. I brainstormed it as, "Okay, here's a horrible idea, but maybe it will get us going in a different direction!". And, voila. Two scrambling days later, a YouTube video, .pdfs of card art and rules, and you know... a game.
Judging is still on-going, but we wanted to make sure any of our readers here could follow along.
The Contest home page
Our Submission
Hopefully we don't finish in last (not that it will be announced as such or anything) and it would feel really great to finish as one of the winners. Especially with going so far outside of what we normally do. It was cool to see how the same batch of "stuff" could be turned into so many different types and genres of games!
Thanks to Jordan for putting on the Contest and congrats to all the other teams for participating!
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