Game Design Battleblog

I’m going to take this post to explain our plans for Secret Wars at this point. We probably should have done this earlier.

Shreyas and I really like the idea of being motivated to work on game design every day, as practice and as a way of being productive at finishing up outstanding projects. So we set up Secret Wars with the following guidelines, which have developed over time:

1. Each participant posts once a day, no more, no less.
2. You can’t post two things in a row, so prod your comrades to post if they haven’t.
3. You don’t have to always be working on the same design project, but you always have to be working on something. If you finish one, move on to the next or post about playtesting.
4. Once you’ve gotten to the point where you have a working or playtest draft, keep it on a separate page and post updates to it.

Theoretically, I guess, we’re open to the idea of other game designers joining the blog, as long as they’re willing to commit to the steady, non-stop posting regimen we’ve set out here. But we haven’t approached anyone yet or had anyone express interest, so we’ll deal with making those decisions when and if it comes up.

Right now, we’re just having fun writing games back and forth, and it feels good to be this productive. Personally, I’ve been feeling really good about game design ever since I started working on my Afraid hack and hope that will carry me through finishing up that game, Avatar, The Good Ship Revenge, and maybe a few more things.