I’m a little late this week because of Thanksgiving… I thought about not sharing this until next week, but I really couldn’t wait to tell you about it! 🙂
Last Friday I wrote a bit about inspiration. You could say I was inspired to write about what inspires me. I was in a slump for a while. A long while actually. I don’t like those times because I feel like I should be accomplishing something… and generally, what I fail to realize is that taking care of myself is accomplishing something… just not the something that I’d like.
That all changed that Saturday.
It was amazing.
A New Design Emerges
To say this design emerged is actually an understatement. It was more like a punch in the face of awesomeness. You see, I was brainstorming with fellow designer Grant Rodiek (of Farmageddon fame) on Google Talk about various game ideas that he’s working on. It was a really fun session. I enjoy helping others with ideas. At some point, I decided to take a shower. I’ve heard many people say that the shower is a place of inspiration for them. I cannot remember ever having epiphanies in the shower… so this was a first. It was a simple start:
Why not have a dice game, where the players roll like Yhatzee!, then use the results of the dice to buy cards? So, each die face represents a specific resource. The cards would have a cost made up of these various resources and would be in a limited central supply… so each player would be trying to score the same cards. If you couldn’t completely pay for a card on your turn, you could place resource markers for the things that you did roll and on your next turn, if that item was still available, you could try to finish paying for it.
That was essentially it at first. My initial theme idea was steampunk… or just some sort of building game where you were rolling for pieces of machines and using those pieces to build machines. I thought maybe you’d try and collect sets and score your hand at the end. I opened up my Google Doc which stores my game mechanic ideas and took some quick notes. I told Grant about it and pushed the idea out of my head for the night.
I was unable to do the same on Sunday. I just couldn’t get the idea out of my head. I tried to work on some art for Sock Monster, but every time I’d start, I think