thread: 2012-03-27 : Indie POV pt 3: A Small Pep Talk
On 2012-04-16, Vincent wrote:
Design for three people. Choose any three people you actually know, and design a game for that group. Or one person, or up to maybe six people. You can't design games for people you don't know, so don't bother trying.
You know they'll play it once, just to humor you, so all your content and concept have to do is not prevent that from happening. "Religious Western? Satanist pirates? Weird post-apocalypse? Okay, Vincent, you're a weird dude, but because you asked nicely I'll play. I'm not promising I'll like it."
Your object then is to design a game that those same three people will play again, spontaneously, without your having to ask them to. Where one of them will say to the others, outside of your hearing and in fact without even considering you, "hey let's play ___ again, yeah?" and the others will say, "you know it!"
It doesn't matter how good your concept and content are, if your game design doesn't win people over to actually playing it. It doesn't matter how fringy and odd your concept and content are, if your game design does.
