Little Ideas

I’ve been playing DnD more with my friends lately, and the release of Moonlighter on the Switch had me inspired. I wanted to make a tabletop game. Of course with no experience at all I went at it with a blindfold and a hatchet. Or a notebook and a pen, whatever. I like the idea of a game where you played the character outfitting the adventurers. I also used to love choose your own adventure books. So, the plan was the mesh the two. You can see how maybe this got away from me immediately.

First, obviously. Designing a game is never as easy as “here’s my incredible idea, I’ll just. Make it.” It was so easy to let my grand idea get away from me. It was my first time really banging out an idea. On all of the podcasts I’ve heard and interviews I’ve read, developers always talk about starting with a prototype, something simple and easy to throw together that’s actionable and tangible.

I didn’t do that.

I just started writing down ideas. What would the gameplay loop be like? Are there monsters? I should start another page and write down stat blocks. If I’ve got monsters, shouldn’t I figure out what the weapons do? Do you have a hero? Are you building a shop? What’s it going to be like to create a character? My little brain storm outgrew its page every single time I opened up the notebook. It grew and grew and grew and grew. It was untenable.

Eventually, after a game of DnD, I sat down with my friend and I showed him the insane mess I had scrawled out. It was like leaving the house for the first time in a week. I realized none of it made sense; I didn’t really have a core idea. The weeks of random brainstorming had finally shown themselves for what they were. AJ and I talked about how to solidify the mush I had into something more reasonable. We talked about how this game would actually be played. I told him the vision I had, and realized it was sort of incompatible with the precious game I had laid out before me. Nothing I had was really scrapped, but since my child was growing into something I hadn’t expected I let him do that. The monsters and items and the shop lent themselves more to cards than a weird book thing, but that doesn’t mean all of the time was wasted.

I suddenly had  two different game ideas instead of the one. The choose your adventure idea became a different project that I’ll write about some other time, and the initial idea is lying dormant in my notebook right now. We’ll say it’s hibernating. The ideas from last winter have filled it up, and they’re digesting until it’s time to wake that bear back up. I learned a lot from my first little foray. I’m now more wary of my grand designs, maybe it’s best to focus down. Have a core idea and stick with it.