As I delve deeper into the design world, various questions bubble up. Is it fun? Is it original? Is it too complicated? Too simple? Is it cool? Is it boring? Is this something I want to play? You can quite quickly get stuck in your own head. Internal doubt and assuredness interchanging as often as I get up to prepare a fresh cup of tea (yes, tea. Too many years spent in England).
I’ve been brainstorming, and writing down ideas, and experimenting on paper, and trying to find the key gameplay for a couple weeks now. All my ideas so far have come from rigorous planning on paper. Well, last week, for the first time, a spontaneous game idea came to me from simply playing within the sandbox I’ve created and experimenting with a control scheme. I was taking a mental break and just messing around with the various physical objects, and something fun emerged out of nothing.
The idea itself is nothing revolutionary, perhaps nothing will come of it, but it was refreshing to feel things coming together in such an organic fashion (instead of trying to force out ideas on paper). It felt natural. It was a minor personal victory, and a cool experience. Most importantly, it gave me renewed energy and confidence that I will get to where I want to go. I will keep focusing on finding “the fun”.
Before I move on, I would like to point you to the site of another fellow indie developer I discovered last week: Streaming Colour Studios run by Owen Goss. Owen is an industry veteran based in Toronto, and he has also taken the plunge this year to go indie and develop the creative games that he wants to make.
Work Done Last Week
The week started off promising but petered out the last two days. I only tried out three of five ideas, and even then not as thoroughly as I wanted. I did implement a few architectural changes which allow me to have quicker turnaround on ideas. On Thursday, after having that feel good moment of creating something new (as discussed above), I “wasted” a bit of time doing some video capture.
I’ve also spent a little time working on some build scripts to allow me to simplify putting new builds together quickly to send out to people for design feedback. I ended up using nullsoft scriptable install system which made things easy as pie.
Work Planned This Week
I’ll be doing more designing and more experimenting. More, more, more, till I find “the fun”. My goal is to have multiple different gameplay ideas prototyped, and to iterate on them.
I may do some more renderer work, but that’s only if I really need a break from the designing and experimenting.
