Ideas

After cancelling meeting Paul due to feeling rough the previous week, we met up last Wednesday.

It was an opportunity to exchange 20 more Gamefound orders for me to ship from Newcastle.

And a chance to catch up.

I also brought two prototypes.

Troll and Wizard.

Both codenames pending real names.

Troll was an idea I had several months ago.

It has been slowly taking shape in note form.

But I knew Paul was interested in the idea when I pitched it to him.

Wizard was 5 days old at this point and I’d already played it twice.

We played both games.

Paul had great ideas for both.

I’ve made a new prototype for Troll incorporating the changes.

Subtle changes!

I might not need to change the components for Wizard.

Both games are still Sharpie on blank cards.

Makes it really quick to iterate the design.

I will hopefully test the new Troll today at lunchtime games.

Reborn

I’m constantly amazed at the changes I’ve experienced since the worst of COVID.

Over two years I did almost no games design.

I struggled to think of changes for the one or two ideas I had.

No new ideas.

Since November I’ve been completely transformed.

New ideas. Rapid progress on existing ones.

Lots of spinning plates and progress being made on all of them.

Friday I was supposed to meet Paul to collect more stock to help him ship.

I’d felt rubbish all day and cancelled so I could get an early night instead.

A game mechanism came to me while feeling awful, sat in bed at 8pm.

By 9 I’d designed a game. And written enough notes to make a first prototype.

I slept really badly. Body aches and a blocked nose keeping me awake a large chunk of the night.

The next morning I felt awful.

This idea didn’t exist 24 hours before I finished the prototype!

But I managed to make a prototype that day.

Filthy cold and I still managed to get from first idea to prototype in 24 hours.

The next day I started soloing it in public, a bunch of kids came to watch. One joined in and played it to the end.

Despite it begin an early, broken version, they wanted to make their own copy. 

They were fighting over who got to play a second 4-player game (before their parents, sat nearby, whisked them off for lunch).

It has potential.

In the last few months I’ve committed to doing four things daily: meditate, walk outside, some basic bodyweight exercises, and games design.

Is the transformation down to one of those? Two of them? All of them together?

I daren’t stop any of them. This feels awesome. So productive.

I’m a game designer reborn.