View RSS Feed

Slothy

Humans vs. Aliens

Rate this Entry
Since March of this year I've been designing a turn based strategy game with my best friend. No code has hit the computer yet, and it doesn't even have a proper name, but we've been designing and playtesting on paper so far and it has undergone a lot of different stages and we've faced a lot of problems and triumphs getting this thing to be fun. So I figured why not use my blog here to talk about it a bit, particularly in regards to the development process so far, especially since I think a lot of gamers really have no idea what goes into making a fun playable game until they try and do it themselves. Plus writing and talking about the process has been tremendously helpful to me as far as coming up with new ideas and ironing out wrinkles in the design. So I guess for my first post about the game I'll talk a bit about the theme, the inspirations and how it started.

The theme is straight forward. Humans are battling invading aliens. Straight forward and simple, and really a result of me playing X-Com around the time I started designing it. In fact, we can thank X-Com for it being a turn based strategy game as well, although it also helped that a turn based game is easy to prototype on paper.

What really sparked the idea to make it though was more of a time issue. My best friend and I have been trying to find the time to make a game and try to get into the industry for years even if only as a hobby, but between work, school and other commitments (not to mention my current lack of programming skills and ideas that are a little ambitious to put it mildly) we hadn't gotten anything off the ground yet. But a simple turn based game designed on paper is easy to make and rework as needed to start designing something so while sitting in a hospital emergency room with a purple crayola marker from the waiting room and a piece of paper I found in my pocket I started designing. The ideas were just flowing out of me at around 1 in the morning as I came up with about 80% of the human units, many of the key gameplay concepts and took a first pass at all of the stats. Really I just wanted a project we could work on now and turn into a game later and finally I had something we could take and run with.

I had 6 major goals that I came up with. We'll consider them rules for designing the game that I intended to follow. They were:
1) Keep it easy to play.
2) Keep it easy to learn.
3) Keep the units simple in their design.
4) Aim for a broad range of effective strategies and enough depth to keep players interested.
5) Every unit should be useful.
6) Each unit should be fun and interesting.

And as far as design inspirations, despite X-Com providing the initial inspiration, I actually looked more to Starcraft, Team Fortress 2, and Heroclix when looking for ideas or trying to gain an understanding of how to make a game with a variety of different units and abilities work.

I'll go into more detail in later posts about everything from the first prototype, to playtesting, and even how I broke the rules I laid out for myself repeatedly and often paid for it until I smartened up. In the meantime though I have to go buy some chicken and have lunch.
Tags: game design Add / Edit Tags
Categories
Uncategorized

Comments

  1. Peegee's Avatar
    :D
    designing a fully functional game part time will be difficult! My brother works at ... my brother owns his own game studio (long story) and so I have an idea of how incredibly time consuming it is.

    Definitely post details! Nothing that we can't steal D: ^_^