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.
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