Well, I can't call myself a game designer yet, as I haven't finished a design. As a kid, I created some derivative or really weird mish-mash games, then I got a computer and tried to create all kinds of computer games, but I just had too many ideas to finish anything. At least I learned programming, and that is still my day job.
A couple of years ago I got into board games again (having previously mainly played Munchkin and the kind of board games that are sold in bookstores), and discovered that there were some great games out there that I'd never even heard about.
And now I'm thinking whether I could go back to creating board games instead of computer games -- still as a hobby, though. The main game idea I'm working on came to me kind of suddenly: take Bomberman (aka Dyna Blaster) and turn it into a board game. It's so simple that it must work! I posted another thread about that: http://www.bgdf.com/node/6810 (the codename for the game is Bombarena)
I've just had some playtests with a prototype and the initial feedback was quite positive. I'm currently polishing the mechanics/rules and coming up with new board layouts. The other game ideas I have are still just ideas so far.
I want to create games that have simple rules and mechanics, but create a lot of strategic options so you'll always want to try to play again, but a bit differently, and I want other players to cause you to react often, instead of each player doing their own thing. I'm not sure if Bombarena will achieve all of that, and I haven't found out yet whether I'm even good at creating a balanced set of strategies. I think I need to test, test, test and learn from that. I already saw the first play tests provide very useful information.
I came to these forums mostly to get some help with prototyping. I've already found a lot of useful hints and information just browsing the different sections, and I'm sure there's tons of more good stuff here. So perhaps I won't be posting very much yet, as there are still a lot of existing discussions I want to read.
