A game design by @schas002 and contributors.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Licensing: CC-BY 4.0
Last update: 2017-04-05
Basically, you build a game using things you find in the open world, your imagination, a friend, a paper and a pen.
There are attributes to a game, that are called mechanics. These are the mechanics:
- Space - upon which Objects play.
- Objects - which are acted upon.
- Actions - a set of Transitions done after reaching conditions.
- Transitions - between game states.
- Interactions - between Objects.
- Knowledge - visible by one or more game players.
- Mystery - visible by none of the game players.
- Discovery - of Mystery that can become Knowledge, and vice versa.
- Terms - of finishing the game, with some or none of the players winning or losing.
You search for items in the open world - like a chess board, a colored pawn, a bubble with an 8-sided die inside - that will contribute to the Space and Objects mechanics.
Also, you can obtain items that are not really playable but represent knowledge, not to be confused with the Knowledge mechanic. Examples are a science paper, a computer program, an observation of some other game 😉. With the knowledge you collect you can make the other mechanics: Actions, Transitions, Interactions, Knowledge, Mystery, Discovery, and Terms.
Once you have obtained an idea and the items and knowledge to implement it with, you can devise the idea by writing it out on the paper and the pen in your house.
Once it's done, you can playtest it with the friend (teaching him the rules first is needed 😉), release it into the market and export it into some kind of template that is humans-first, machines-first.
Once a player obtains a game template from somewhere (the message boards, for example), they obtain the knowledge required to get it working. They just need the items to play it, and that's it. :)
- This idea is probably invented before. What new features should we introduce to make ours distinct from similar ones?