Fantasy Dare #1: Colonial Questions

I unsealed the theme for my first Fantasy Dare yesterday right before dinner time, and thus entered the first phase of my creative game making process: the Brainstorming. The randomly chosen theme was colonize. My first reaction: huh?

My second reaction was a bit more fruitful. It had to be. I'm only giving myself about six hours of pure brainstorming before I have to roll up my sleeves and start building myself a game here, so I started thinking of all the possible things we could make a game about colonizing. Planets. Ant farms. A fish tank. And that was about it, for while.

Planets sounded cool enough, but the ant farm idea sounded offbeat and fun. It's the thing people wouldn't expect. Everybody expects you to colonize planets, right? So I spent my dinner considering all options carefully and then trying to put together a sort of ants vs. ants (red vs. black, maybe) kind of game in my head. I just knew there was a fun game in that tangle of nonsense, wanting to be created.

I went back out on the shop floor (I was at work) still thinking about ants. A few minutes back on the job and I hit upon a game idea that made me forget about the little critters. It took just a little over an hour after revealing the theme to decide to make a game about colonizing planets after all.

Why didn't I want to colonize planets to begin with? The idea sounded boring to me, like the thing everyone else would have picked. The ant colony idea might have sounded similarly boring to you. The truth is, any one of these ideas can be made into a fun little game with a bit of imagination and a lot of ingenuity. We just have to look at it a bit differently to see it. From a different point of view, perhaps. Or in a different context.

Quite a while after I'd already settled on my new game idea, I discovered that I probably would have converted the ant farm idea into an alien farm game anyway. I've got a pretty vivid imagination.

Why Make Your Own?

Games are awesome. There are so many of them out there, I can't reasonably expect to have played them all. It is this very thing, in fact, that has largely inhibited my ability to get any of my own projects done. So why in the world am I so determined to build them myself?

Here's the thing. My reaction to any given game falls roughly into one of three categories. See if this tracks:

A. "This game sucks. The control scheme is terrible, I have to kill half a gazillion monsters to level up even once, and none of the good weapons are even available until I've beaten the game twice and been inducted into the Guild of Regents. WHAT WERE THEY THINKING? I could build a better game than this in my sleep."

B. "I have a lot of fun playing this, but if the overland map was just a little bit more functional and if they'd tweak three things in the combat system, this would be the best game. EVAR!"

C. "This game is perfect. The developers really nailed it! I wouldn't change a thing that significantly affects the gameplay. Either this is exactly the way I would have written it, or I couldn't possibly have done this myself."

Unfortunately, about 97.5% of the games I ever play fall into the first two categories, so I generally walk away from a particular game with the knowledge that I could design a better game myself. Maybe that's a lucky thing after all, since most of the resources required to produce a good game are now publicly available.

If I don't like the way something is done, I'll try to do it better. It's what I am. It's what I do.


How about you?



:)