Conceptualization: It's a game, isn't it?

So, Senior Team! The ultimate endgame for Champlain's game development program. A semester (and if you do it right, a full year) to work on whatever you want, free from the concerns of the market, beholden only to the quality of the result. Truly an exciting prospect.

But freedom can be quite paralyzing. When you have the ability to do anything, you have the responsibility not to squander your opportunity, meaning you can't simply pursue an idea that's "good" or "interesting". You need to make the best game possible given your resources.

The result of all of this is that our team spent 2 months of the summer trying to come up with strong game ideas and drawing blanks. Ideas were pitched that were either basically jokes and or novelties, more thought experiment than viable game, or that felt too derivative to be worth our opportunity. We went through about 30 ideas with basically nothing to show for it. Clearly, this could not continue.

It turns out, there was a common thread linking the ideas we weren't happy with; namely, they were almost all high-concept narratives or settings. They started with a vision of emotion, or atmosphere, which are unarguably very important aspects of game design. However, it is one thing to say "I want the player to feel this" and quite another to lay out how you plan on doing that. For game design, the most important aspect is what the player will be doing; after all, interactivity is the heart of the medium.

So that's exactly where we looked. We stopped thinking about themes and settings, and started thinking about fun mechanics, devoid of context. The first part of our production process focuses on rapidly testing concepts and prototypes in order to find and refine a strong idea; you can't really test a setting or story with a week of work, but you can absolutely mock up a mechanic and start getting valuable early feedback.

We now have several mechanics worth prototyping. Once we've got something that clicks, we can start seeing what sort of emotional state it lends itself to, and begin crafting our context from there. By rooting our design in mechanics rather than setting we should have a sound foundation for our game. The year is full of promise; let's see where it leads.