Wednesday, November 9, 2016

Day 7: FotLC through the 113 lenses from The Art of Game Design

Day 7 - Lens 107: The Lens of the Client
If you are making a game for someone else, you should probably know what they want. Ask yourself these questions:

What does the client say they want?
Since this is an indie passion product there is in one sense no client. At the same time I am clearly the client and should have to articulate my wants. So: I wanted the game to prove that real time dynamic placement of bases and guards. Once that was done I wanted to have a game that people liked. That people thought was innovative and smart. Then that was challenging and eventually that was fun.


Once I had that I wanted my game to be about something, doing things in that order makes it hard to have a game about something... unless the mechanics that are the game are intrinsically about something. Since I think that is necessarily true I guess it's better to say that what you are doing is discovering what your game is about, and deciding if you like that and then figuring out how to make it more clear... or obscure it!What does the client think they want?
I guess I kind of answered that above, everything there. But maybe what I wanted in the beginning was to make a game about something and it was all a process of discovering that. Next time I should start there and work backwards. Maybe.What does the client want, deep down in their heart?

As stated above, which is I suppose to make art. But also to be liked by my players and respected by my peers...

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