Filled in a lot of planning documents, sketches and trying to collect my thoughts on a number of items. After writing all that text and clearing my head a bit I started working on the Main Menu again. My previous idea was just bugging me and it was annoying me when I was trying to take it a bit further, so I sat down and started over to see if I could rough up something better. Something procedural and void of a giant logo that stares you in the face.
I like to stretch things a bit from what is the norm, what is becoming standard and basically giving you something to think about instead of just allowing you to forget about what you are looking at and just pressing start. I want to have the main menu also a central part in solving some puzzles, and I don’t care if you don’t find that intuitive. Intuitive puzzles games are not difficult and if you are just rolling through it on intuition, you are not learning anything new and you have not seen anything new.
There is an army of engineers out there that is comfortable with typing in commands into a console and don’t need mice for much of anything, and another large army of kids that is curious and sends more text through crippled non tactile devices than some programmers produce in a day. Ignoring the keyboard as a serious input device for gaming has left a large branch of interesting things to consider. Most things are touch based, mouse based, gestures and dancing in front of a new input device every year to create a new branch of mechanics. Trying to make the input devices so simple that even a monkey could enjoy playing it.
How about actually making people think and allowing them to use the keyboard to interact with the game in a lot more engrossing fashion. Where you can automate and program entities instead of just pointing and clicking at hot-spots and hoping for the best.
A lot of people think of game creation only as a business, and they could not be more wrong. If the design is business driven, you are most likely just sticking to patterns and practices to be able to hit a certain vain of secure revenue. There are two separate camps making games, those that want to make games around their ideas and creativity, others for the security of their income. The former is the one that breaks all the ground for the latter to proceduralize.
No matter what your hobby is, and what it is that makes you be creative and curious. Be it mountaineering, painting, mechanical engineering or creating software. Most of us, when we fall in love with these hobbies and romanticize about them, we are not blinded by the possibility of it being a gratuitous stream of money. We are most likely engulfed by its potential and possibilities of experiences that come with it and how we can improve it and hopefully become a part of it. If you are more calculated about the return of wealth, you have a lot more romantic visions embedded into a social hierarchy and some comfortable gab of wealth, that you attribute to winning. My terms of winning, would be to be able to make a living creating the games and other creative medias that echo what I think is interesting and could be interesting to others.
If mass distribution, market entry and ease of consumption is what defines quality, than you could just as well hand all the culinary awards to the chefs at McDonalds, because they feed a lot more people than any high priced restaurant in existence.
Be creative as you are ambitious and forget the pop culture assumptions.
Anyway, I need to keep working and doing something fun.
V 