Every game designer that I know, myself included, has wanted at some point, in some form, to get a job at a big important studio as the “idea guy”. It’s one of the first dreams (of many) that break down upon one’s foray into game design as an actual discipline, but goddamn if it still isn’t my favorite part of the process. There’s something so freeing about that point in a project where anything still seems possible. Ironically, it’s what makes this stage so dangerous too.

We’ve been holed up in the basement of Valcour Hall for hours on end, scribbling on the whiteboard, arguing loudly, and generally just tossing any idea worth the breath to say it into the “idea bin”, then dumping the bin out and starting over. It’s one of the most exhilarating times in a game designers life, the time to float that weird idea about sideways crab racing, or a survival RPG where you collect body parts and sew them onto yourself. Everyone gets to toss all their garbage in a pile, and then sift through the pile for the pieces that might actually be feasible or interesting if you put them together. These are some of the amalgamations that mined from this weeks garbage pile.

Mixmasters: A music/rhythm game where the player fights giant cyber-punk DJs by shooting, moving and using abilities to the beat of loud techno music. This came together from Duncan and Kai’s love of Cyberpunk, and my affinity for sound and music. We patched in pieces from a musical racing game, where different pickups affect the song differently, as well as pieces of a game that restricted all entities to actions queued up to play on certain on predetermined beats.

Dire Management: A game where the player has to manage an economy and grow their influence/abilities. The one we liked the most was a police station game, which quickly turned into a private security force game, where the player responds to calls, takes on jobs as hired muscle, and completes the missions that are assigned to them. The latter option would let us add a morality path, which keeps track of the good/bad things the player has done, and potentially changes available jobs, i.e. doing jobs for bad people means more bad people come to you and vice versa. This seems like a game that’s very in scope, but would need to be very complete for us to showcase effectively at the end of the semester.

Minishock: We’re all super into games like Bioshock, Deus Ex, Prey, and Dishonored that let you explore an ability tree while exploring a unique narrative in the world that gave it to you. We spent a good deal of time trying to figure out how it might be possible to strip this formula down to its bare essentials, and make something interesting and meaningful with just the resources we had. We’d likely limit it down to three unique abilities, and let the player explore the environment (an abandoned hotel? an underground lab? a quaint 50s town?) and play through a pretty tight narrative. This came from a whole bunch of ideas that we tossed around for power ideas in other games, like absorbing bullets and reapplying the energy, stopping time, or reversing gravity. The limited amount of powers that we’ll be able to implement means that the powers themselves have to feel really good, and likely be very powerful.

This gave me a narrative idea that I’m extremely proud of, and while it might not ever see any kind of implementation, this is sorta the perfect place to share it. In a game where we give the player godlike power, it might give the opportunity for unique narrative twists. What if the entire world as it exists is a simulation created by the player’s character to keep the world safe from them, and to let the player’s character repeat the mind-blowing process of discovering their powers as many times and in as many ways as possible? It works perfectly as a game narrative, because replaying the game to discover how to best use the powers is literally what the player will be doing. This is the sort of idea that gets me hyped about making games, and it’s also where I get sucked into dangerous pitfalls.

As I said, our biggest challenge this week has been avoiding getting too excited, as counter-intuitive as that sounds. We’d probably all love to make that Minishock game, but it (probably) might turn out that it’s not at all in scope, and we’ll have to set aside all the hype we had for it, and be able to spin it into something that’s still going to hold our investment. If we over commit to a game that we simply don’t have the resources to do, we might not be able to switch gears fast enough to catch up. This applies to attitude as well as time; reapplying time and work to an unfamiliar concept is often as difficult as reapplying hype and commitment. As Kai keeps saying, buy-in is key to keeping a project alive, and I think we’ve done a pretty good job of maintaining the balance of investment without commitment. I could probably be pretty happy working on most of our current ideas with minimal persuasion, even that crab racing one.