For those of you who I speak to regularly you have probably already seen this but for everyone else (yeah I’m talking to you mom woo woo, go audience of one!) I have been participating in an experimental blog/class. The teacher, Ian Schreiber, happens to be a co-author on a recent text book for starting out game design students as well as a former video game programmer and game designer and is now moving into the education world. Long story short, Ian is helping introduce many people into the world and process of game design.
Admittedly, I have to say the class has been really fun, though largely non-digital in essence you can apply the same rules to ditigal games as well. The “homeplays” (aka homework) are challenging and fun, and the feedback on the forums has been excellent (sorry they are private unless you registered for the class otherwise i would post the link). I really feel like I am learning something useful! Another interesting thing, at least personally, is that so far a lot of the concepts behind game design have already been fairly obvious to me as a gamer. What is new to me is the organization behind the process. Normally if I have ever had an idea for a game the process is very cluttered and I tend to mix themes into mechanics and objectives. Ian has helped me essentially to organize my thought process. In fact recently we had to make a board game version of one of our favorite video games, and I feel I had a fairly successful idea with Super Smash Brothers. When I think about making a game now its not “oooo lets have an MMO world, but with Sims like character customization” instead the games are becoming more precisely defined such as: “oooooo let’s make an MMO world where players have the goal of X, Y, and Z. Then build some core concepts of mechanics that allow players to achieve those goals, and lets put it to this kind of theme”.
For anyone who is interested in following along in the blog definitely feel free to do so and even if you are not registered if you feel like participating in the challenges at all feel free to send me an email and I would be more than happy to work with you on them. I am sure that in the future more of my homeplays will appear here as well.