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Lately it seems like there is a lot of confusion over the term "game design" and what it means.  I wanted to quickly (headed out the door at the mo, so very quickly!!) explain why I don't include brainstorming or marketing under the game design umbrella.  I may update this in the future based on feedback and further reflection, but in the meantime...

Brainstorming

Brainstorming is the process of coming up with an elaborating on ideas for projects on paper, in digital word documents, or in digital graphics files.  This is the part of a project where we are writing down ideas about rules or doing concept art for what the game might look like.  Brainstorming is not game design.  Brainstorming is fun, but it is wholly speculative and the results are ultimately worthless.  Brainstorming is not game design.

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Between training for the Austin Distance Challenge, being a dad, helping build a secret new iOS game (hopefully out in January!), helping to finish FEZ, working on an unannounced game design book, continuing to explore my own game ideas, both digital and otherwise, contributing to the GDC Advisory Board, and prepping for Fantastic Arcade and Indiecade, I haven't had a whole lot of time for playing video games.  So last night, as a sort of self-reward for getting half my GDC talks reviewed and half the new book chapter written, I downloaded and played a dozen Playstation Network demos, including:

• Echochrome - great puzzle design, boring presentation, muddy camera control
• Ace Combat 7 - awesome airplane controls & flow, awful helicopter controls, repetitive music and gameplay
• Beyond Good & Evil HD - still an unrivaled classic
• Outland - good controls, great variety in gameplay, lovely art direction
• Bloodrayne: Betrayal - good controls, repetitive gameplay
• Pac-Man Championship Edition DX - good controls, great system, good sound
• inFamous 2 - inFamous 1 at night
• El Shaddai - insane presentation, but very repetitive
• Castlevania: Lords of Shadow - mediocre controls, repetitive fights, great presentation
• Hoard - awful presentation, neat gameplay system
• Age of Booty - soul-less, unengaging
• From Dust - fascinating, beautiful, repetitive, handicapped
• Motorstorm: Apocalypse - ugly track, lame cars, removed default d-pad steering??

...and played through them all in one sitting.  It was gluttonous and satisfying, but I started noticing some trends that were turning me off of a lot of the games.  I wanted to record them here if only to help me remember them better, in hopes that I might be as strict and critical of my own work as I was being of others.

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Finally, I won a round against Alexander Bruce (AntiChamber).  Then we figured out how.

First, the good news: enterprising game & software maker Michal J. Wallace created an online, real-time, Google App Engine-based version of Terratri!  It's super cool!  I whipped up some new artwork for it last night and it's looking really cool I think.  There's a minor bug with commands being input twice occasionally, but we're working on that part!  It's a good fun way to learn the basics and play with strangers.

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(pronounced like "territory", only with a Texas touch)

I have the worst time naming my tabletop games, and an even worse time naming the blog posts, especially since the title is what Posterous will syndicate out to twitter.  Anwyays, while I was walking the dogs this morning a simple game idea popped into my head.  I've been playing a lot of Quarrel lately, which is usually aptly summed up as "Risk meets Scrabble".  It's really good.  Around the same time that Quarrel came out, this weird new version of Risk came out too: Risk Legacy.  Risk Legacy is a new version of Risk that includes the capacity for permanent changes to the world map and game rules each time the game is played.

Thus, I've had Risk on the brain.  But I've also been thinking about AirMech, a new game that is revisiting a lot of the concepts from RTS pioneer Herzog Zwei, in which you have an army and territory but you only directly control a single unit.  Defense of the Ancients and its successors (League of Legends, DotA2) are a return to form in some ways, retaining a lot of the interesting aspects of real-time strategy games but giving the player a specific avatar as a focal point for the experience.

Anyways, the idea that popped into my head whilst picking up dog craps this morning was a simple territory capture game (not unlike Risk) but where you only control a single unit or army or whatever (not unlike Herzog Zwei).  Initially I was imagining a real-time game, almost like the brilliant Galcon (a fantastic Risk compression), but I had a couple of weird constraints.  First, we were planning on spending the afternoon with our friends, eating hot dogs and hanging out.  This had important consequences: I won't be on the computer all day, but I will be hanging out with a friend (Josh) who is a really talented strategy gamer and board game fan.  Second, my schedule for the next few months doesn't leave a lot of room for working out a good digital prototype and arranging digital playtests anyways.  So, with a couple small tweaks, the idea started looking like a pretty good candidate for some tabletop action.

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