Hello! I'm signing up on the forum here because I'm resolved to put some real effort into a couple of game ideas I have, and since I've never done any real game design, I figure having some place I can go for advice would be helpful.
I've been a gamer most of my life thanks to my dad (who still has a fair amount of SPI games from back in the day). My background is pretty varied, from classic American games like Monopoly and Clue, to war games like Ogre (and some other light hex and counter games I can't recall), and D&D back when I was growing up. In college I got exposed to Euro games and naval miniatures (a custom rule set for a WWII Mediterranean setting). And video games all along that time as well.
I've even designed a 'game' before. As a 6th grade project I created a 'Take That' card game called Immune where you'd draw disease cards and play them on your opponents to reduce their health points. You could draw cures to remove diseases from yourself as well as vitamins to regain health points. The different diseases had various properties. For instance Lockjaw would prevent you from taking vitamins. The most interesting a the time was probably AIDS, which only did 1 point of damage on it's own, but doubled the damage you'd take from all your other diseases. It was certainly a mess at the time, but years later a good friend of mine took it and reworked it into something playable (although still not without flaws).
Anyway, I currently have two design ideas. The first I'm calling 'King's Guard'. It's a co-op where the players take the role of the elite knights of the king's personal bodyguard. The city has fallen and the castle breached. The only option left is to escape and get the king to safety. The players will have to battle through incessant attack from all sides while trying to advance king along the escape route and to eventual safety. The key feature of the game will be a radial board with the king at the center. The players will have figures for the knights which will move around the board to fight the enemies. The enemies will be represented by cards and will approach from four sides of the board (front, back, left right). I have what I think is an interesting mechanism for resolving combat that could lend itself to a wide variety of enemy design. I've made a rough prototype of the board to test the basic gameplay and have tried it a couple of times.
My second idea I'm calling 'Code Monkey'. It's a competitive deck-builder (for now?) where each player is in charge of a software development company. Players will earn money by completing software projects. Each project will need a designer, and then programmers will write code for the projects. The key idea here is that when code is added to the project, it might be 'clean' or 'bugged', and the player won't know until they have a tester check the code. Bugged code can be rewritten by a programmer, although that code could again be buggy. Of course, the only requirement for releasing a project is that it has a certain amount of code cards attached to it whether they are buggy or not. But a project will have better returns the less bugs are in it. On the other hand, there will also be bonuses for being first to market with a given type of project (as well as active projects costing players money each turn), so hopefully players will have tough decisions on how much effort to put into testing and when to release a project that might have several bugs in it. This one is much more recent, so no prototypes here, just ideas.
Anyway, I'm resolved to keep pushing forward on these ideas, and I'll be back if I run into problems that I think the collective experience here might help with. Thanks!
Ray Greenley
Thanks! I got my degree in Computer Science and spent several years working on internal applications for a small company. So I generally know how software development works. Obviously, the card game would be heavily abstracted. ;^)
I wasn't too aware of Hnefatafl, which looks pretty interesting. I'm always a sucker for asymmetrical games! In King's Guard, the king will always be the center of the board. When you 'move' the king to try and advance through an area, it's presumed that all the players move with him and keep their same relative position. This is done completely for simplicity as a complicated procedure to reorient other pieces on the board when the king moves would probably be more than players would want to deal with! For now the only adjustment I have when the king moves is that the 'forward' enemy group advances representing the king moving closer to those enemies.
In my first mental images of the game I actually had cubes representing individual enemies (rather than cards representing groups). The enemies would enter from a side and filter down through several 'lanes' on a side before concentrating down next to the king. Then, when the king moved, all the cubes would shift relative to the kings movement. As neat of an image as that was in my head, I could quickly see how much of a pain that would be for players to try to do as a part of the game! Using cards rather than cubes also gives me the possibility of a much greater enemy variety, which I think is pretty key in a game like this.