thread: 2006-02-16 : Throwing It Open: Pulling the Plug
On 2006-02-17, Mendel Schmiedekamp wrote:
I carry around a binder of designs I'm currently working on, at the moment the list on the back puts the total at 15, although a few of them ought to be retired. I also know I have a design or two that needs to be migrated into the folder. They range from completed draft to basic inspiration far removed from anything playable.
I usually retire a game when it becomes clear that direction has been lost, and then just give it up as fodder for future designs. I've pretty much done that with Good Fight, Five Stat, and up until recently Engima. Although now that I go back to it, Engima has it's grains of good stuff, so I intend to pull those out and start rebuilding the game around them. It helps when I follow holistic design that by changeing the start point I can fairly easily redesign a game essentially fresh. One example of that is my RPG Drift, which shares a fundamental root with an incomplete design named Technobabble, but grew very differently due to the influence of the "how people drift apart" theme.
I'm not certain how well holistic design works for marketable games, but it serves me well for designing experimental and proof-of-concept games.
This makes SDL go "Cool idea!"
I use a virtual version of your folder, but it suffers from inflexibility. And i can't sketch!
