Simple Design in Games is Critical.

This is a game blog, and I don't really feel like it has to be exclusively about the games that I make in the EAE program.

That being said, I really want to talk about a side-project that I'm working on: a co-op card game/dungeon crawler. For lack of a better name, we're calling it "Adventurers".

I say "we" because myself and Mikael Fehlberg--an extremely avid competitive game enthusiast--are going to start working on the game on Mondays from here to completion. I made the mistake of staying up until 4AM last night discussing the fundamentals of the game, and now I'm forced to blog during the last 3 hours of my 12-hour-Tuesdays just to make sure that I don't sleep through Game Engineering II.

However, it was totally worth it. We're starting by borrowing from several of the games that we already know that we love (eg Sentinels of the Multiverse, Dungeons and Dragons, Magic the Gathering, Diablo) while adding some new things that make it unique as well. Even though everyone wants to make a game that's completely new and unique, thats silly for two reasons:

Reason 1: Making a new game has no audience. Completely new formats will have trouble attracting people, because they cant relate to it at all.

Reason 2: While its entirely possible that a totally new idea could be fun and polished, its very improbable. There are literally hundreds of games that just aren't any fun at all because they try too many new ideas at once. Games are like science experiments, you should only change one variable to determine if the new idea you have is fun or not.

That being said, don't think that we're squashing creativity to make sure that our game can be easily understood. On the contrary--we're spending most of our design time simplifying our unique mechanics in such a way that the game can be learned quickly and still be rewarding for experienced players. There's way more time than an uninitiated game-designer might first guess that goes into making sure that the game design is simple and understandable. Making games is really fun, but anybody can make a game stupidly complicated and fun. It takes real effort to make a game that is simple and fun.