It’s important to outline a project’s goals before getting too deep. Otherwise how will you know if you were successful? Even if you build a beautiful sculpture out of LEGO, if you were tasked with making a telephone you have failed.
For most games, the bottom line comes to making money, which is easy to measure. With Hats and Jems though, I would rather make an impact. Unfortunately this is more difficult to formalize.
After building these prototypes, I went to take a look at what other games have tackled this issue. I found Molleindustria’s To Build a Better Mousetrap, and enjoyed it thoroughly. It was artful, presented a concept, and was much simpler than what we had been planning.
Personally I’d like to pursue the original vision of the game; give each of these little boxes walking around in the prototype his own motives and personality; build a full simulated-society-sandbox under the hood. Certainly that would be able to convey the complexity and subtlety of the situation we find ourselves in now.
That said, maybe there is something to be said for being overt.
Last winter I was thoroughly enjoying Five Iron Frenzy’s “Zen and the Art of Xenophobia“. I thought it had important things to say, and said them well. My father remarked though, that probably the people who most needed to hear it were unlikely to pick up on the message.
Most likely people who enjoy deep societal simulation games are already aware of anything we want to convey. It’s the people spending hours a day clicking cookies that I would hope to speak to. Is that as pretentious as it sounds?
Maybe simplicity here is the key. Death to nuance and hundreds of calculations the target audience doesn’t care about. Just get them into the acceleration flow and then help to through play, help them to understand the situation we are in.
It may be less interesting for us, but a designer needs to design for his audience, which does not necessarily include himself.
That said, we’re still considering which way to take this thing. I wasn’t recently struck with some inspiration: Super Pac + Pac Man = idea.
Mysteriously enough, a new Game Jam has hit the scene and provides a great opportunity to test out this new idea with yet another Prototype.
