Game Designs coming together; also paranoia.

Currently I’m in a group with 3 other members to which we must make a board game. Following some MDA approaches, we decided to go with paranoia as our aesthetic. Over the last week we’ve been hashing out games back and forth on ways for the player to feel paranoia; whether through the concealment of information from other players, hidden objectives, etc. It’s fascinating, when you step back, how often the best ideas also have little that can be applied. Often one of us would suggest an idea, there would be a moment of silence, and then the follow up of “Yes, but how do we apply that to our Core?”

After finally being with a group of people to develop a game, I’m finally realizing how often digital games are being made backwards. The aesthetic is often the aftermath of sessions containing, “Wouldn’t it be awesome if we let the player do this!?” To which then, the player has a complete detachment from the game as they perform some random task through a level because somewhere, someone thought it would be cool. Perhaps that works well for multiplayer first person shooters, where often there is not an aim to make the player “feel” anything, so much as to give them challenging goals to complete, whether that be in co-operative play or eliminating a stronger team in a ladder tournament.

So, after a week of our group having trouble keeping consistent dynamics with our aesthetic; everything clicked. We dropped the ideas that did not fit with vigorous backhands and embraced dynamics we knew were the purest route to paranoia. After we hashed out some mechanics to make these dynamics functional we drew out a dirty prototype. It has MUCH more fun than our planned play testing earlier. We were all laughing, making jokes, and generally confident in our design. We packed up for the day all patting ourselves on the back. One team member noted how this was probably the hardest design he had ever worked on; this coming from someone I view as a very intelligent, read person to which I respect their opinion greatly. So, knowing that I was not the only person having difficulty coming up with systems that worked AND were enjoyable for a player to go through was a spectacular feeling when all was resolved.

If this is the buzz that comes with everything clicking in a game design; I’m hooked.