Well, the first year (or 4 or 5 months, anyway) of the Game Design Workshop have come and gone, and it's time to review how things have gone and decide whether anything should change!
First, thanks to all who've put their games up for public scrutiny. It's our nature as designers to be secretive, so I appreciate all of our willingness to go a little outside the comfort zone here. I also appreciate people being willing to "take the heat" -- this isn't supposed to be a happy-happy process, but I think it's been enjoyable and useful to all who participated!
The one major format change we made was going to one week sessions. I think this was a good change, and since we're already booked through March, I think that my one concern, that we'd run out of games too quickly, will prove to be unfounded.
All of the games we've had have been great, and it's been really fun to see the wide variety of games that people are working on. It would be great to see some of these in print someday! I think, though, that some have been more "appropriate" than others for the GDW, and that perhaps we can use these as "lessons" that will guide future submissions.
It's always been my opinion that the games that can benefit the most from this process are games in their early stages of development, with only light playtesting having happened so far, and with a fairly straightforward gameplay. I continue to feel this way. I think that some of the "best" examples of what my personal GDW criteria are were games by, for example, Scurra, hpox, and FastLearner. And this leads to a new criterion that I hadn't thought of before -- it's worth spending some time making your rulebook understandable! In some cases (my own included, I think), failure to adequately communicate the rules of the game necessitated preliminary discussion about how the game was actually played before the analysis could begin. That's fine, but in one week sessions, there simply isn't much time for us to edit each others' grammar. So, let's all do our best work on those rulebooks!
I have always felt that "really complex" games would probably be difficult to evaluate in a useful way in the short time period of the workshop, and thus, I'd be interested to hear what Brykovian and IngredientX thought of their sessions. Their games sounded great, but were very involved, and thus, I for one wasn't able to invest the time in really understanding the gameplay. I think, as a guideline, having a rulebook that goes much beyond 8 pages or so is probably pushing it. On the flip side, what I didn't anticipate is that games like zaiga's or super's, which have fairly simple and clean rules, are also difficult to workshop, because there's not much to comment on.
I'd be very interested to hear comments from those who put up games in the workshop this year. Was it worth your time? Did you get the kind of feedback you wanted? Would you put the same game up again?
None of this should be construed as in any way critical of the games themselves, so much as to try to identify, for future reference, what kinds of games really work well as GDW entries, in terms of maximizing the useful feedback that "you" get, and the interest level that "we" get out of looking at and critiquing your game. I know that for myself, seeing other people's designs and design process has taught me a lot about game design, and so again, my thanks to all who've participated and made this a success!
And finally, just an administrative note -- if you've signed up for a slot, PLEASE check the schedule in the GDW forum and find out when your game is up and have it ready to go on that date.
Thanks!
-Jeff
