Nothing scares the creator, especially one that needs to write something, than an empty page, pure white screen or an untillted document. That is why I am creating everything in Dark Mode. It has dark grey pages, less intimidating, with less bagage connected to it.
It helps with the weight of creation.
When it comes to my creative process, it isn’t very well structured. I hope that this way of making the Design Document can help with that – put some bones in this meat sack of a design process.
First of all, I would like to say that for the most part I keep to the same genres and topics. It is a wheel in a sense, that keeps spinning in my head, resulting in a very circular inspiration in my every work. There is a line, going from Ancient Egypt, Slavic history, through medieval France and then jumping to science fiction and cyberpunk. The line wraps around itself and ends back in the Ancient Egypt. Those are the topics I feel comfortable in, topics in which I can show my range and most of all, topics I enjoy learning more about. And as research is undoubtedly one of the foundations of a good game design, all of my good ideas come from those topics. It’s my “comfort wheel”.
But there is a problem concerning this way of creating. It does not promote growth. It does not promote diversity. If everything you create is secluded in a certain cycle, it keeps you restraint and therfore boring.
Novelty is required to keep you on your toes as a designer. It is when dealing with novelty, we actually start to understand who we are as designers. We might not like the topic we are dealing with, we might feel uncormfortable, but it is a kind of test of how we can perservere in such circumstances.
- What do we do, when we do not know what to do?
- What is the thing we go back to when faced with failure?
- Is there anything we tend to squeeze in, even if it does not make sense?
- Can we kill our darlings?
It is just a handful of questions that we can answer when working on something we do not feel comfortable in. It is similar in how when studying you fall into a sense of false understanding. If you will not pick up courses you don’t know if you fail, you will never learn anything that can possibly change your view. Not eating dishes from other cultures will never reveal new flavours and combinations. Shouldn’t designer know all of them, to know what will work and what won’t?
It is good to have your own niche, the part of culture that you understand and can teach people about it. But is it good to precieve yourself as a teacher of culture in an age as mature as 22? Of course not. You would be delusional to think so (it is a jab at the author of this blog btw)! Right now I should be an explorer, not a critic, nor a teacher.
So does this meandering has a point?
Yes.
What I mean to say in this convoluted way, is that for this project, that I will be persuing for the next semster, I will go outside of my comfort wheel of inspiration. I will find something entirely different from types of themes I wrote in but also types of games that I designed and codesigned. I suspect it will include heavey liftin and not be very straighfroward but I hope that by doing so I can grow as a designer that much more.
I will treat this blog as a way of understanding what I “actually” mean. I feel that by writing out my thoughts I can grasp the common line, the thread of my desinging and thinking alike. It will be a tough journey, for me especially because producing an interesting entry in a blog once a week is ridiculously difficult, but also beacuse of challenges that await me in an unfamiliar grounds, beyond my “comfort wheel”.
So let’s go back to Ancient Egypt… No!
Let’s delve into making a postapocaliptic, wasteland managemenet game with exploration of worth, choice and consequences of social dependencies.