So I joked about my New Year’s resolution being a new game idea (or entry in my game ideas journal) every day. I was, for the record, TOTALLY joking at the time. But now I’m serious. DEADLY serious.
And I’ve got an entry for the first 7 days of the year. Eight entries, actually. I’m going to try and summarize them here like someone posting their weight every morning on twitter.
1/1 – I had an idea for turning Action Go into a board game. Basically a go variant at this point. I actually wrote up some rules and stuff (even though that’s not necessarily part of my resolution).
1/2 – I expanded on the previous idea, bringing some of the mechanics out of the realm of Go, and using them in more of a euro game with resources and player boards. (Still themeless, though I have some ideas. I stopped just short of prototyping this.)
1/3 – Came up with a pen and paper game idea I’m calling Order and Chaos. I’d love to get feedback about it, (like does it even work?) so maybe I’ll write a separate blog post at some point with the full rules.
1/4 – Came up with a new idea for an LED-based gameboard and pieces. Essentially each game piece is an LED with battery, and the board tells it what color to make. I had a couple of game ideas for that set of components. I’d love to build a prototype, but pricing out the component it seemed like it was going to get too expensive.
1/5 – I spent some time thinking about logic puzzles in the vein of Nurikabe or Sudoku, and came up with one that I’ve never seen before. I’m going to do some research, and if this is original, I might actually turn it into a real project.
1/6 – Came up with a simple 2-player abstract strategy game played on a circle. (Yes, another one.) I’ll probably write this up sometime too, since the rules are complete and I playtested it by myself a few times.
1/7 – Another general game system idea (this one with some interesting hexagon components). I actually came up with a list of possible (sort of generic) objectives, but no solid game ideas.
1/7 – Later in the day I got thinking about local multiplayer games and gave some thought to a team game about hatching ostrich eggs inspired by Killer Queen.
I haven’t written anything concrete yet today, but I spent a good hour or two this morning coming up with puzzles for my idea from 1/5, and thinking about how to make it into an mobile app. I’d like to do some more brainstorming yet today, but I should also get some actual work done on one of the various games I’m ostensibly supposed to be working on.
As for the rest of the year, we’ll see how long I can keep this up. It’s starting to feel like a real project, like a game a week (which I’ve never tried) or #1GameAMonth (which I have). I’d really like these to only take me 10 or 15 minutes, and some of them did, initially, but the problem with brainstorming is that it’s sorta self perpetuating. Once you come up with a good idea, you want to iterate on it, or if you really think it’s good, you start to imagine implementation details.
Ideally, I’d like my journal entries to be short and concise, like the best from @PeterMolydeux. That’s a sub-goal, I guess. For now, I’m really happy with my ideas from this week. Hope that doesn’t sound too much like I’m tooting my own horn. You always love your last idea the best, so I guess the true test will be to see how I feel about these in a month or two.