Welcome to the first entry in my blog series about how I design my games. Starting from coming up with an idea, there will be an article outlining the process I use at every stage of the game design journey.
Today we're taking a look at the first step in designing a game: coming up with an idea and capturing the initial essence of the idea. I'll use an example of my msot recent idea, a card drafting game tentatively called Sea Life.
Some of you may have seen my recent review article for the game Draftosaurus, which I have been playing a lot recently. I've been having a lot of fun with that game, along with perennial favourite 7 Wonders. Like most designers I know, I am often inspired by other designs and eventually want to contribute my own design into that genre. For Sea Life, I realised that in over 8 years of designing games, I had never tackled card drafting. Now is the time.
While I love the dinosaur park aspect of Draftosaurus, my only gripe with the game was how the dice roll affects your placement. I wanted to keep the parts of the game I liked, while removing/changing the bits I didn't like. I've also wanted to make a game about underwater animals for a long time now, since I have a fascination with sharks and giant squid in particular!
With those simple goals in mind, I thought about how to combine a simple card drafting structure with a marine theme, with enough twists to differentiate the game. The game didn't have to be revolutionary, as I am designing a light, casual drafting game.
I knew I wanted to keep the restriction of only being able to place certain animals in certain areas, but wanted to remove the randomness of the dice roll and instead build this into the cards and the player boards.
I let those design goals simmer in mind, and found that inspiration struck while I was in the shower (as it usually does). I had the idea for a system where you put animals into areas trying to complete food chains, with sharks at the top, and a series of smaller animals below (leading to a natural relationship to numbered cards, from 1-5). I did a quick Google search for marine food chains for inspiration.
The last part of this initial idea phase is to scribble down some notes, come up with a silly name (like Shark Park), and make some sketches in my notebook, which end up looking like this:
That is generally all the detail I need, and the important thing here is to get the idea out of your head and onto the page somewhere.
In Cup of T #2 I'll talk about fleshing out the initial idea into the bare bones of a game.
What is the first step in your game design process? How do you capture it?
