thread: 2013-05-25 : Complete Games
On 2013-05-27, Vincent wrote:
Go back and read this clause again! "...if you were willing to sacrifice complication..."
Under what circumstances would you be willing to sacrifice the complexity of a game you were designing, and under what circumstances would you be unwilling? Ben L. wants his game to have a certain pacing and emotional impact. Ben H. might want to evoke a more specific genre, or handle genre more specifically.
Those are both perfectly legit reasons to want more complexity in the game you're designing, which means that the minimum size of your game is larger than if you were willing to let those go.
Don't take me to be advocating for smaller games than you want to create. Take me to be advocating for games exactly as small as you want to create.
I've just designed (most of) a game based on Aliens. I hoped to keep it to 750 words or so, but to do that, I would have had to treat alien parasites and alien predators as mechanically interchangeable, and fighting an alien threat and traversing alien terrain as mechanically interchangeable. I decided to write a longer game that served my more specific vision instead, right? You should make that decision yourself for your own games too.
But at the same time, it would have been mistaken to call the 750-word version incomplete.
