Idea
This week, between Game City, a cold, and spending the first half of the week making a different game (which you can read about at the bottom of this post), I knew that I would have to work with a tiny idea if I wanted to have any hope of finishing something.
I struggled with creating an idea (as I’m still suffering from what feels like a brain completely devoid of any ideas), so I spent a lot of time trying to just think of something that even just SOUNDED like an idea. Ultimately, after discussing different ideas with a bunch of people, I landed on a simple two player game where you could shoot one bullet at each other and then had to dodge and deflect the two bullets back to one another until someone got hit.
What went right
I wasn’t really trying to emulate another game when I thought of this idea (though Samurai Gunn was definitely an inspiration), however, I went into exploring this idea knowing that it wasn’t really anything new or exciting (also, it hit me a few days into this idea that I basically came up with Lethal League, but with two projectiles). I think that this would have demotivated me in previous weeks, but I knew that working on an idea that I thought of in my own head (no matter how unoriginal it really was), would be better than nothing.
As I tend to do, I went to Lisa for advice when I was struggling through accepting this notion, and she reminded me that much like anything else, your design brain is a muscle that needs to be exercised. If I were to just give up and rely on someone else’s idea (as I was very close to doing), that’s not really exercising your brain muscle. I needed to come up with an idea, not immediately dismiss it, and allow my brain the satisfaction of working on something that I thought of.
So, the biggest thing that went right this week is that I allowed my silly little brain to think of a dumb idea and then not tell it that it was dumb right away (good job, brain!).
What went wrong
As I mentioned before, this week was busy and I came down with a cold that knocked me on my butt for most of the middle of the week. I didn’t want to push myself too much, so I left a lot of this week’s game off to little moments of work when I could/felt good enough. Because of this, I didn’t really spend too much time exploring some fun stuff that I could have done with this game.
What I learned
It’s okay to make unoriginal ideas.
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I spent the first few days this week working on a birthday game for Rami. There’s not a lot of “real” gameplay to it (you just dig through the earth and battle your way to Australia to deliver a birthday cake), but whatever – I just wanted to make something fun for someone I love.
(In case you want to, you can play last year’s Rami birthday game here)