DO NOT WANT

The experience of writing five games in the past 5 years has led me to one really powerful conclusion.

The most important thing about writing a game is what you DON'T do.

It is really easy to get sucked into doing a lot of things. With Synapse, I wrote a ton of copy on Skills that I ended up trashing. Why? Because I didn't need it. In Statecraft, I built out a complex system of making war that also ended up in the garbage heap. Again, unnecessary. Over time, I have gotten better at recognizing what I am NOT going to do.

Sketching out how I am going to do Pieces of Eight has been along these lines. It is NOT going to be a naval combat simulation, nor pretend to be. It is NOT going to be about keeping track of how much food units you have left. It is NOT going to be about round-by-round sword-fighting combat. It is NOT going to be a pen-and-paper version of Sid Meier.

A lot of advice from game designers I have read about in the past talk about focusing on what your game is. The problem I see with that is that it can lead you to create un-fun elements of the game.Your game is about a cyberpunk dystopian future, so you design a really complex hacking subsystem because it fits what you are trying to do. Then when it goes out into the world, that marvelous hacking subsystem breaks up the continuity of the game and sucks one player into a long complex interaction with the GM and leaves everyone else sitting around twiddling their thumbs.

But by focusing on what you are not, you build boundaries. You start building a subsystem out and say "eh... this is going further than I said I would go" and you turn back. You avoid that cliff.

Just something to think about here as another weekend fades into dust....