Game Design Challenge

It’s been a little bit longer than I wanted between posts here; things are finally starting to pick up at work. We are at that phase in a small project when the programmer is done enough with the engine for the designer to finally be able to start putting stuff into the game to see it work. Up to this point, I’ve been doing a lot of research and paper design, its nice to be able to finally stick the designs into the game to see how they play out.

Anyway, enough talk about stuff that I can’t really talk about, on to the title of this blog.

My wife works as a freelance writer/artist, (shameless plug to her latest published work), and she always seems to be talking about various contests and challenges that she’s entered in. This got me thinking; its pretty rare to see contests or challenges that stick strictly to the paper design of video games. I’ve seen a few here and there (and there is of course the game design challenge for game design celebrities put on at GDC each year); but the landscape is still pretty sparse.

So I decided to go ahead and organize one myself.

I’m putting it on over at ScoreHero because I carry a little clout over there and we have over 180k members, which is a bit more than my blog pulls in, so go ahead and check it out here. Its been quite its own little challenge trying to pull this thing together, my overall goal is that participants come away from the challenge with some fresh, new, ideas that they like, as well as a higher understanding of the game design process. To help cultivate new and interesting ideas; I decided to adopt a ‘game a week’ approach similar to what Patrick Curry did in 2006. In addition; I decided to introduce the idea of twists to each week, that way there will be something that will force participants to think in a direction that they may not be accustomed to.

I hope that a lot of people stick it out for this challenge, I know that it won’t be easy, but hopefully they find it rewarding. A lot of people have already expressed interest in the challenge; so we’ll see how it goes. I’ll be sure to go ahead and post recaps of the progress here, the challenge officially starts tomorrow! Good luck to all who attempt it!