News from the front

So there's this basic concept in game design that many designers follow, and for that matter it's the same basic concept for any artist of one stripe or another: make a product that you would enjoy using.  Directors like to make movies that they would watch, novelists like to write novels that they would read, and game developers like to make games that they would play.

When it comes to games, however, there's a bit of a tougher problem: you also have to have the resources available to you to make the game.  So if you like playing God of War, you're not going to just go making something like God of War on your own.

For me, I had to carefully strike a balance between the type of game I'd like to play and the resources available to me (and my current skill with those resources).  Being that I'm at least moderately skilled in Flash ActionScript, when it comes to making videogames that's my first choice.  Next came the problem of choosing a game to make.  Latchkey bubbled up in my mind, and while I enjoy Adventure games, a problem arises: I've never played a text-based Adventure game that I liked.  So I thought I could make a text-based Adventure game my way, and enjoy the result.  Latchkey also contained themes which I would carry over to later projects, so I could learn how to program those concepts on Latchkey first.

New problem: since I don't enjoy even the genre of what I'm making, when I hit snags or long periods of recoding, I lose all motivation.  This has been the case for some time now, and it's also why I've been working in spurts on it.

When it comes to tabletop games, however, I've got a lot more free reign.  So I could make almost anything I wanted, and the idea I came up with was, of course, FissureVerse (then called The Vortex).  FissureVerse is working well, but slow going because I'm tired of looking at bad placeholder art and want to look at good placeholder art, and get permission from the artists to do so.  So the holdup here isn't that I've lost the drive to work on it, but rather that it's simply long work with little to show--I don't bother posting all of the artists that haven't given me permission, for instance.

So on thinking hard about this, I've come to the conclusion that FissureVerse is to stay, but Latchkey is to go--at least on indefinite hiatus, or come sporadically when the mood strikes.  It's difficult to make that decision, because it's difficult to murder your darlings, and also because of the sunk cost fallacy, which I find I am particularly prone to (how many books have I finished reading that completely sucked and I knew they would from halfway through?).

I do, however, want to continue making videogames, and it's a question of finding the project that I can see myself working on.

One of the ideas I had in the running (back when I was deciding on doing Latchkey) was a graphical adventure/exploration game called Knotwood.  Some concepts in Knotwood got parsed out and subsumed in the initial creation of FissureVerse (pieces which ultimately got removed), and other aspects, particularly the setting, began to be turned into a work of fiction.

As a videogame, however, Knotwood would take one of the main characteristics of Latchkey:  it would be a massively single-player game, where the player would explore a randomly generated world, but there would be common areas where players could meet.  This concept I also want to apply to more game ideas, as well, and it's a pretty big central theme I'd like to see expanded on.

The reason I chose Latchkey over Knotwood initially, however, is because Latchkey is entirely text-based, and Knotwood is graphical.  My aversion to creating my own graphics kept me from starting Knotwood, and opting for the less graphically intimidating (but ultimately less intriguing) game first, to be a test run of the massively single-player concept before trying it in Knotwood.  Well, so far It's been over a year with Latchkey and I haven't even started that aspect, because I've been too busy with dictionaries and verbs and locked doors and directional words and a whole host of other things that would not be carried over into Knotwood (or any other game).

Latchkey still has potential to me, and I think I might go back to it when I've got a better handle on programming such things, but for now, I want to try my hand at Knotwood, which I hope will be a far more interesting exercise in game design than Latchkey--at least for the moment.  I think once I have more fully understood some of the programming principles I haven't mastered yet, I could bring back Latchkey, possibly even to restart from scratch, and make it right.  Or I'll just diddle with it when motivation strikes.  (Perhaps if I can't bear to kill it outright, I'll let it bleed to death.)

But in the meantime, Knotwood will begin, and rejuvenate my lagging creativity and blog posts.