What's in the Pipeline (Part 2) & Game Design Contests

Continuing the review of my current game design projects from the last post:

(3) Utopolis: Policing the Retrofuture - The Pitch: It's the future as imagined by those in the 1950s - jetcars, automats, huge stylized skyscrapers, slidewalks connecting the buildings together, robots with vacuum tube heads, etc. It's a paradise of well-ordered prosperity. You're a police detective tasked with solving the crimes and finding the criminals that still emerge in the dark corners of Utopolis society. The catch is you once were one of these criminals, but you've been reeducated to forget your prior life and crime. If you do well in your new job, you'll eventually be released back into general society with a generous pension. But your inner demons and slowly accumulating memories of your life before may drive you over the edge into new crimes or madness before that happens.

The game came about as part of the Reversed Engineer Challenge and can be found here. The game is inspired by the evocative character sheet of Thom Foster found here. I decided to stretch myself a bit and go with a card-based system and a very explicit IIEE progression. I'm pleased with how the design came out and I'm going to continue its development.

(4) Today - My first complete design and a product of the second round of the Ronnies. The Pitch: You're a person a pain, real deep soul-crushing stuff, that has driven you to self-destructive behaviors and kept you from really living. Today is the day that you confront (or are confronted by) the people associated with your pain and try to overcome it for good, putting yourself on a path out of the darkness. You have supportive people in your life that will try to help, but ultimately it's up to you if you sink or swim.

Ron was quite right to critique the game as parlor narration that allowed no room for meaningful decisions by the players. I took that advice to heart and spent a lot of time revising the system. The result was a game that fell into another trap - setting stakes that essentially limited the results and narrated consequences before the dice were even rolled (another pitfall discussed by Ron at Gen Con). So this design would need a total retooling in order to be effective, and I'm not sure I'm in a place to that work right now. So this one is being put on the shelf, ugly and incomplete, for now. Maybe when I've got a couple of my other designs completed I'll have learned enough and recovered the passion to return to Today and really do it justice.

So three of my four current game design projects have come about as a result of game design contests - The Ronnies, Game Chef, and Kevin Allen, Jr.'s Reversed Engineer Challenge. Looking around at other game designers, I see that my experience is not unique, and many of the most successful indie games to date have come about as a result of contest entries. A contest is a great way to get initial exposure for your design and get a couple of people to read it (the judges). Even if they have a less than stellar view of your design on the first read, your later development can find them coming back for a second look and offering you additional feedback and maybe even playtesting. Speaking of playtesting, The Committee has entered the outside playtesting phase, which wil be the subject of my next post.