I'm sure that all game design is like this, as well as many other creative endeavours. Start, stop, start, go back to the beginning....
We played through the latest iteration of Sky Pirates on the weekend, and while what is there is fairly solid now, the game feels too meandering and pointless. There are just too many things that the player can't control, and therefore too few meaningful decisions.
So I spend much of the weekend pondering what was wrong and how I could fix it, when I stumbled upon this google talk by Matt Leacock, the creator of Pandemic, on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdTVcFo2EQw
Wow. What timing. Although I felt initially discouraged (Pandemic is brilliant and makes my fledgling game look worse than bad), there was some really solid advice in the video which I can now work on using to improve my game.
Key things that I need to do include: do a better job of defining what the game is actually about and improve the victory conditions, increase players sense of having meaningful choices, and bring the game back within my original goals for it, especially as regards playing time and levels of interaction. Just a few minor tweaks, really. Heh.
Comments
A caution.
The video didn't work when I tried to watch it.
I would caution you against doing too much "from the ground up" re-designing, just in general. Make sure you go through all of this thread: http://www.bgdf.com/node/1779
re: a caution
Thanks- I've been watching that thread, and there are some good thoughts. I don't want to change the core idea of my game, but there is a lot that needs work, and there were some great guidelines in the video.
As to it not working for you, I'm not sure why it didn't. The link works for me. However, if you search for "Cooperation and Engagement: What can board games teach us?" on YouTube, you should find it. (It's a Google Talk- about 50 minutes long).
I'm all for redesigning from
I'm all for redesigning from the ground up for some games. I know that one of mine just never felt like it worked well enough and I could never really figure out how to make it work, despite many revision. When I took the core ideas and scrapped all of the design so far, I was able to rebuild a game that was much more fun. Some of the original design came back in, but a fair chunk of it did not. The current result is significantly better than any of the previous revisions.
I watched the video a time
I watched the video a time ago and It's just amazing to see such stuffs, may be the video isn't working now but If you could give any alter video that might give a perfect solution. There is something always new in drawing and just fun to learn it.