I've always enjoyed making games, however I didn't typically have the time or energy for it between work and life getting in the way, however in December of 2023 I was feeling a creative itch to build something. But What?
It's been said that constraint breeds creativity, and I'm inclined to agree, so my method for sparking ideas was to open some game jam topic generators and mash a few together.
For example you might roll "Alternative Physics", "Summoning", "Underground", and "Construction". What could we do with that? We don't need to use all of them, the goal is just to get the gears turning different directions you could go. The first thing that comes to mind for me with those prompts is a multiplayer fighting game like Rounds, alternative physics could apply to gravity, what if you're repulsed from the ground and walls of the arena, underground could mean you're boxed in and the level layouts would be very cave-like, which could result in interesting movement with the gravity. Summoning and Construction overlap a bit, you might have the ability to construct terrain and alter the physics of the level in some way. It all sounds very chaotic but that's much of the point in this sort of genre. I'm sure you had a completely different idea when reading those 4 prompts than I did, but you had an idea. Maybe now you're interested in prototyping it to see if something is there, or you could reroll new topics and see what other ideas jump out at you.
Let's try another, "Survive", "Growing things", "Wait, are we the bad guys?", "Fortress". The first two make me think of Plants vs Zombies, so we could do something similar to that, the twist is we're the bad guys. What if we're playing from the perspective of a lich who just wants to be left alone to do their work but these pesky adventurers keep barging it trying to take your head and loot your fortress, what are we growing? Could be any number of things to defend your sanctum, be it bullish botanical bouncers or cankerous creeping creatures, it could be tower defense like PvZ or maybe it's more akin to Legend of Keepers.
This is much easier than looking at a blank canvas if you ask me.
In my case the topics were "Bottles with liquids", "Elements", "This is not linear" and "Escape".
Okay, bottles and elements are interesting, linear I can mostly drop but maybe pick up later. When I think of bottles with liquids I think of those pouring puzzle minigames, what if we built on that in some way. How about elements? well, maybe the things you're pouring are different substances that behave differently, resulting in the player needing to invoke different strategies to isolate different elements; could be fun. As for "This is not linear" and "Escape" we could interpret it in any number of ways, some of the elements might be worth more or more plentiful than others, it could also be in relation to how the world is traversed (more to come on this in a future blog).
Next, what do I know and what can I build. I have well over 2k hours in various roguelike deckbuilders, that genre doesn't require as much art as some others, and certainly not for prototyping or even playtesting (but still not a small amount in the end, which is going to do great damage to my pocket book in time). It also seemed like something I'd have the most fun making and playing over the coming years, and possibly even financially successful if I'm lucky. So I got to work on designing the game from there.
The core idea is that your cards are the "bottles" and your mana is the "liquids/elements", to play a card you need the right amount of mana allocated to it, additionally each card can have multiple effects based on how much you fill it. If that sounds interesting to you then I hope you stick with me on this development journey, we're in for the long haul.
Fundamentally a fun game will remain fun even if the graphics don't exist, assuming the game isn't wholly reliant on them. In my case graphics don't do anything mechanically which makes development easier. HOWEVER, that is not excuse to ignore them because regardless of their impact on gameplay they have a MASSIVE impact on your marketing. Like it or not people are far more likely to look at your game and subsequently buy it if they think it looks appealing. So with that in mind how to we choose?
For myself, I start again from systems. This is a roguelike so why are we looping? Do we know we're looping? Do NPCs? My answer to those questions is that the characters are trapped in some sort of dream realm. By whom? Buy the game when it comes out to find out.
Okay, so we have a location, that gives us things to work with. Dreams are strange, mailable, funny. We can use that in the rest of our theming; characters and locations in the game can be weird, wacky, and don't need to make realistic sense. Personally I think this guides our style to probably be a little more cartoony, rather than realistic and gritty, so we can keep that in mind in the future when looking for artists.
What else can we do? Well what if the entity trapping the characters here has a bad sense of humor and likes puns and portmanteaus It's me, I'm the pun loving monster. Well now we can do more fun things, since this is a dream there's no reason you couldn't find an elderly blacksmith who just so happens to be an apple (granny smith), or a flaming plant enemy might block your way (an inferno). This is great for inspiration, thinking of puns is fun and leads me to many possible NPC/Event/Enemy/Relic designs. I'm so sorry future localization team, you're gonna despise me.