Taking part in the Tabletop Mentorship Program!
A few days ago, I was just playing with some fruit seeds lying down on my table, and a new game mechanic came into being. I made a quick paper prototype of it and played with my mom, which obviously failed right after a few moves. It was just a mechnica no goal, defined rules or any interaction pattern. It was just a seed for a potential game, at least I thought so :P. But game design is hard and everytime I sit with a prototype, my mind goes blind, and I struggle to find a way to make it work. It is one of those blank canvas feeling, where you are just staring at it for hours with no idea of what movement, and you wonder what you are doing with your life and why the canvas is not talking to you. To avoid this feeling, I left the idea and put it in my to do list along with all other babies waiting to see a light of the day. I have not been working fulltime on any other thing, so I though of utilizing the time to learn new things and slowly make progress on at least one game so that I could have something playable by the end of this year which would mean now or later I will have to go through that feeling. I had a few ideas for a twine game, and a couple of ideas for video and board game out of which I wanted to focus on one or two to work on. Later a few months later, I saw a tweet about Tabletop Mentorship Program, which is a three month long one-on-one engagement platform where the experts in the industry share their knowledge, resources, experience, and guidance with another member of the community. I thought this could be a good push for me to be desciplined and work on one game at a time progressively and also probably will make it little easy to handle the blank canvas feeling if I’m working with someone more expereinced in this field, otherwise it gets really dificult to move things all by yourself, especially game design. So, I applied as a mentee, and was selected by Jeffrey Allers who is my now mentor for the course of this program. In our first meeting, I’d suggested four ideas out of which we had to take one or two to develop further. Jeff provided me his feedback on all the four ideas, and he chose the same idea which I’d kept aside after a failed test with my mom. It was also because this idea was comparitively clear and easy to prototype in this short time, other ideas were theme based and would require a subject research, and were also very vague at this point. The program started in mid September and in last three weeks I’ve been working on and off on my game. We meet twice a month for a discussion and I regularly update Jeff over mail on the game progress. Jeff is a wonderful person with many years of expereince designing board and card games, he is helping me in the design and playtest my games. I hope to get a playable game by the end of these three months and perhaps some confidance to be able to make and publish my own games. In the next few posts, I will be writing about the game design process and my struggles along the way. @banbutterjam