Ventures into Game Design

Game design and development has been a bit of a hobby of mine for some years now, but I've only ever made and completed one small game, and that was as a birthday gift for someone close. To be fair, my programming skills are limited, but to be equally fair, I enjoy the design aspects of game development much more than the programming aspects, so I don't see it being a big weakness. 

Over the past few months, I've quite enjoyed focusing my efforts more on game design. I've been trying to merge it with my passion for teaching and education, as well as instructional design, so I've been designing a game where the game objectives directly correlate with learning objectives, and while it's been a challenge, it's coming along nicely. 

To help me out with this, I've been working on my pixel art as well. I'm working on creating the game as an RPG adventure in the style of previous Legend of Zelda games, but the design has been tricky, I'll admit. It's a good mental challenge to tackle.

My first try at creating a pixel art map.

That's not the only game I've been designing, of course. I'm also working on a game which fuses cards with chess as a core mechanic, with some alterations, and I'm particularly enjoying that, though I'm sure it already exists somewhere in some form. I created a rapid prototype out of index cards and a chess board, and while the numbers need some tweaking, it's definitely getting there. I try not to let myself get too carried away with the story or the game, or the look of the game - all of that stuff can come after I've made sure the core element of the game - the actually chess/card gameplay - works well. Everything else can be built around that.

I think one of the interesting elements of this game is that it could be played as a tabletop cardboard game as well as a digital game played on PC or consoles. Given that I've thought long and hard about a couch coop option in the video game and how it's not really possible, it's nice to think that a tabletop cardboard game is a viable alternative. 

When I first did a rapid prototype of this game using index cards and playtested the core gameplay mechanics with a friend, I realized right off the bat that there were a lot of elements I had overlooked. Obviously, given that this was my first prototype ever, I guess that's par for the course for a newbie like myself. But it certainly did reveal those issues to me earlier than I otherwise would have noticed, so I'm seeing first-hand the importance of prototyping and playtesting.

All in all, there are things that I'm learning that I didn't think I'd be learning just a handful of months ago. And it turns out, I really, really like game design. It's a huge learning curve for me, and even game writing has some distinct differences compared to the fiction writing I'm used to, but there's enough overlap and passion that I don't think that's too much of an obstacle.

Maybe one day soon I'll share a demo or a short game that I've made, all on my own!