I decided I wanted to enter the contest because I’m often rather terrible at constraints. I have a tendency to sandbox the heck out of things and this contest means I HAVE to follow the rules. Now the good news, if you recall, is that I have a MASSIVE list of game ideas to draw from. So, I started working through my list. There were a few that seemed like they might work but nothing really stuck out to me. Obviously with a list of over 140 games I was bound to find something I could use, right? Yeah. Not so much. Sort of.
The good news was that I already had decided that there were some component/mechanic aspects that I really wanted to dig into. I decided that the box itself would sit at the center of the “board” with the board pieces being pulled out of the box and placed around the box, like a border. So, given that the outside of the box is exactly 4” x 6”, I decided that I would begin with the corners. So, on each corner, I designed a corner made up of 5 1” squares. This means that the 4” sides of the board were covered and then I could have 2 1” x 2” sections to fill in the 6” sides. I’ve attaches some pictures of the early prototypes to help you visualize.
So there you have it. I have a board. And nothing else.
As I mentioned in the design diary for Loot! I consider myself a sculptor when it comes to game design in that I like to start big and then strip away the things that suck until I’m left with something I love…or at least something I can live with. Now, an added bonus of this strategy is that you often take something out of a game but you don’t light it on fire and throw it off a cliff. You just take it out of that game.
When I looked at the board that I had built, I realized that it was 24 spaces. What else has 24 units? A day! One of the things I had taken out of Loot! that I really wanted to bring into another game was the concept of time travel. So I had a board that represented a day and I wanted to make a game about time travel so problem solved, right?
God, no.
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