Tuesday, August 27, 2013

Day Eleven : Jump Lola, Jump!

(As part of the Hackforge Summer Games Challenge, I'm trying to design a game with the theme of light and darkness by August 31st. This day 11 of the fourteen day challenge).

 I'm guilty of being a person who has read more books on game design than you know, actually designing games. And every book on game design has told me that the first step in designing games is .. to design games.

I think game design is something everyone can do. It's just like singing, drawing, and writing. Everyone can do it . But to do it well requires a lot of work and sustained concentrated effort to do it well. 

Mind you, I have no aspirations of becoming a professional game designer.  I'm designing games because I enjoy learning more about games and there's nothing like trying a craft yourself to really appreciate the art and the science that goes into it all.

I was telling a friend that I see my particular role in the Hackforge Summer Games Challenge as the person that lowers the bar and in doing so, hopefully lowers the threshold of what others might think is the minimum amount of effort and time in order to participate in game design.

What I am unable to commit to quality, I have endeavored to make up in quantity. I've already created a street game.  I've started on a Twine game - but I might not finish it because, oddly enough, I find that in order to be an entirely text based narrative game, there is a considerable amount of work that must go into the story in order to make the decisions presented to the player, as meaningful choices.

It was much easier to create my first video game, using MIT's Scratch:

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