Gamedev Diary: Picking an Idea
Of course, once you decide “I want to make something,” you should probably have some idea of what you want to make. Since I talk myself into tasks by telling myself I’m not doing them, it would be easy to wander all over, building things that never become something cohesive. How do you corral yourself into having a coherent direction, then?
I do this by playing it like a thought exercise. “I’m not making a game, nosirree. But if I were to make a game… this is what I’d shoot for.”
You’ll note that this gives me the freedom to dream as big as I want… to imagine the fabulously successful me who’s doing exactly what she wants. That gets around another of my weaknesses, which is to limit myself too much; “I could do this, but these are all the reasons I can’t” is an exercise needed by people who err on the side of reckless confidence. I tend to err on the side of doomful pragmatism with a side of ‘easily crushed’, so again, understanding how I work, I need to compensate in a way that sounds insane to people who don’t know me well.
Those then are the conditions I start from: “I am wildly successful, doing exactly what I want. It’s a game, a real live game! What kind of game and what’s it about?”
That’s when the thought exercise kicks in. Here are the three decision points I identified.
First: what platform do I want it on? I tried to picture my ideal game. Am I playing an MMO on a desktop? Battling my way through a platformer on a console? Checking into a web game every day, the way I used to in my cubicle days? Or am I bringing up a phone app and tapping through a quick round of something while waiting somewhere?
Second: what kind of game do I want to play? The obvious first principle here is “I want to make a game I will enjoy playing.” This doesn’t narrow it down, though. I love many kinds of games! MMOs. Sims. Pet collection. City-building. Resource-management. Card battles. But it at least narrows the field somewhat. I know I’m not going to be building Call of Duty or a visual novel.
Third: which of my books do I want to use as the setting? One of the most exciting parts to contemplate is which of my worlds I want to base a game on, because as someone who loves worldbuilding I have a lot of wonderful choices. The Peltedverse, as my most popular setting, is an obvious one, and would make a splendid MMORPG or Trade Wars-like “build a ship and sail around the galaxy” style multiplayer game. Kherishdar would make for contemplative stories, maybe revolving around language acquisition. Spots the Space Marine, a first person shooter!
I messed around with several ideas: the Pelted MMO was honestly pretty exciting, and I loved the idea of a game that teaches Ai-Naidari manners. That was how I knew it was time to start narrowing things down, pretending a more capable version of me was at the helm.
For the platform question: “what will be the easiest to deploy” became my foremost consideration, not because I didn’t think I could conquer the challenges of shipping a console or desktop game, but because I thought it would drain the fun out of the process. I no longer have a modern console, so I wouldn’t be able to play my own game prototype. I have a Mac, and the most common gaming desktop platform is Windows, so I’d have to pick between developing for myself or developing for most gamers, or juggling both (wasting valuable time and enthusiasm on multi-pronged development paths… no thanks!). And while I liked the idea of an app game, I did not like the idea of jumping through the hoops to get into both major app stores. What, I thought, is the one platform everyone has access to, regardless of what device they’re using? That I could deploy instantly and without permission from anyone? A web browser. Are there games I like that I play on a browser. Plenty!
First gate passed.
Once I decided I wanted to build a web game, that turned my attention toward web-based games I’ve liked. I’ve played some fairly complex games via browser (Elvenar comes to mind), but probably the stickiest for me were pet collection games like Flight Rising and sites like DollDivine. Breeding-sim seemed a good intersection of the technology and some of my other talents (drawing people/character design, drawing clothing and accessories).
Which brought me to the IP question. I had considered and discarded a Pelted paperdoll site some time ago because the number of art assets I’d have to make to cover even one of the Pelted species was nontrivial. Considering there are something like 24 species in that universe, it was just too much work. And that’s the problem with the Pelted IP in general… it’s just too big! It’s hard to narrow the scope into something that would both play well in a specific game genre and satisfy readers, who would come into it expecting a game to reflect the expansiveness of the setting. And while I wasn’t expecting only readers (or even mostly readers) to play the game, I knew a lot of my first players would come from my audience, and satisfying them is important.
But that was the point where I really thought about my game’s audience, as separate from the IP’s audience. I expect that the overlap between scifi/fantasy readers and scifi/fantasy gamers is a lot larger than it is for other genres, but the audience for a game is going to necessarily include people who aren’t reading the books. Or maybe even readers at all. And while the latter group doesn’t represent an opportunity, the former does.
Who, I thought, do I want to introduce to my worlds? And which world? It would be great if I could use my largest setting, but if the Peltedverse is just too big, doesn’t this offer me a chance to take some my other universes that are less well known and give them new life?
And don’t I have an IP that has been attracting people with the art long before there were stories for people to read?
The answer to that, when I put it that way, was clear. I have been selling artwork of the Jokka for years before I sold a story about them (the first professional story I ever sold). And the Jokka novels and short stories are an emotional roller coaster, one not all readers are up for—they’re less entertainment and more art. But if I made a game about them, then I could make use of the design work I put into them, and the worldbuilding I poured into the world... maybe some of the game’s players might look into the stories, and maybe they wouldn’t, but the Jokka would live again in a new medium. Maybe it might even be the medium they’ll be best suited for!
Would the Jokka work for the game genre I'd chosen, though? I went down a mental checklist:
the setting is deep enough, in terms of how much work went into it… but also narrow in scope: all the stories take place within the same bronze-to-iron age of their world, in one very small area on their world, within one single society
the breeding mechanic makes sense since building and populating their clans and world was a big issue for them
…but they’re not human, so it won’t seem too weird to be trading people back and forth and breeding for stats and looks
there’s lots of background material, visually, for me to work from
there’s lots of material I can use for bonus material, special events, and quests, using the stories as reference
Which is how I landed on the idea: a breeding/clan management simulator where you take your bronze age Jokka clan from founding to success, whatever success means for you! Collect pretty Jokka! Dress them! Give them roles! Manage your clan resources! Conquer! (Okay, no fighting mechanics, so… Thrive!)
“That,” I told myself, “is the kind of game I would build. IF I were building a game, and you know that’s a big if, because I’m just messing around with toys online. No pressure!”
Next week, I’ll talk about my tools and set-up, and then we’ll dig into the journey. Wow, was there a lot going on. Every single day. Did I even sleep, I wonder… no wait, all that’s in the changelogs…!
