1st post, please be indulgent with me...
So I read a few weeks ago that there was a design contest going on in Italy for the Modena Cathedral.
Wow!, I said, that seems like a nice little challenge!
Yes it was.
1st off, the constraints of the game itself.
- Card game
- Maximum 110 cards.
- Only cards
- the theme as to be connected to the cathedral....
Okay, seems a bit limiting. Where do I go with this?
The 1st reaction to this type of situation is one of (constraint/limits = lack of freedom/lack of creativity).
This is a normal reaction at first because we tend to see game creation as a wide open space, limitless, with a myriad of possibilities.
We usually take our wildest ideas and fantasies and the start the distillation process (or filtering) to arrive at a feasible idea/project.
This is sort of the way I worked.
But not for this contest.
It's a bit backwards, it's a bit of "thinking outside the box".
Your constraints are already there and you got to figure a way to make a great game out of these restraints.
So the first thing to straighten out: they're not restraints.
They're your foundations.
They're your starting blocks from which you expand.
As for the theme, it's pretty well defined from the get go.
Wikipedia was my friend in this endeavour.
Localizing the history, characters and all the little minutae of the theme.
The basic mechanic of the game came to me while playing "Limits", by Uwe Rosengerg.
The cards have different values on them, defining the limit of cards of that type.
I'm not saying I copied the mechanic of the game; it got my mechanic from a design perspective first.
The design of the cards got me thinking and finally I had a wonderful idea of how the game should work.
Sort of like how Goa inspired the guys from Ystari to make Metropolys.
One tiny mechanic in the game gets you thinking and eventually, you flip it inside out and you get one big mechanic you can use in an other game....
I'm really glad of the game I've created.
I took me 3 weeks to invent, design and write the rules.
I sent out my copy this week and I'll hope for the best when it arrives in Modena.
