It is one thing – often enough a difficult thing – to get an idea for a new game. And then you might get an idea, that sounds simply fabolous to you. Before you know it, you go on and create the game in your mind, how to control it, how to play it – although it happened quite a lot to me that these ideas on how to control the game are changed completely before the game is even shown to the very first people. In fact, sometimes whole game concepts get changed, and only some very small parts are kept. I plan to write more on gameconcepts that failed later, so keep an eye on this blog.
When I create these prototypes, I always try to keep the games simple to play. It would be easy for me to simply make each possible command a button on the screen, but that would create a learning curve, and that’s my biggest enemy by far. These are only minigames!, they say, I don’t want to learn how to play, I want to jump in and have fun!. It’s a good idea to listen to them (even though that is very, very hard sometimes). You are forced to structure the interface much better and make the whole game more accessible.
