Weekend Game Jam

Letting an idea sit on the back burner can feel like wasted effort. If it sits too long, it can run out of gas and become a dark corner of your mind you may never see again. But if you keep it lit just long enough, you might just get a slow-cooked, pulled-pork style BBQ.

This past couple of weeks I've been pulled back into a fantastic card game, Android: Netrunner. I haven't played seriously in about a year, but I got a glimpse of new cards and got sucked back in. The deck-building is an incredible puzzle to think about on your off-time, and once in the game it's always a brilliant challenge of prediction, planning, and execution.

Unfortunately, I quickly got deep enough that I remembered some of the reasons I pulled out in the first place. There's a few major problems, not really with the core design but with the competitive meta that makes the game less interactive and more of a combo race, which just isn't my style. So being the designer/tinkerer I am, I remember that I had set off to create my own version of netrunner at one point.

Luckily, this idea had been shoved way in the back. The first time I had designed it, it fell apart pretty quickly, and I couldn't get past some of the core issues. But with enough time past, I was able to shake away those pre-conceived ideas and come up with new solutions to old problems. Over the weekend, I was able to completely rip out and replace the problematic core mechanics of the game, redesign all new cards, and get that to the printer for my first play test!

Well, the printer is actually my good friend Gray and we'll hopefully get to test this upcoming Thursday, but regardless. This post is really just to remind designers that it's okay to put ideas away for a while - it'll often turn out better when you revisit it! Cheers!