Last night I hung out with the Cleveland Game Developers meetup group and had a good time just sitting around talking about what we want to get out of the group.
I love hanging out with people who have interests that I share, and who can talk about them at length. I really get a lot more creative ideas when I’m in an environment where I’m being stimulated by exposure to the ideas of others.
I had two really great ideas last night.
First, we were talking about the sort of games we want to make. I was 6 years old when we got an Atari 2600 for Christmas. It wasn’t long before I was “designing” my own game ideas. I’d take a big piece of paper and draw my concept for the game, and then I’d have my mom write down a description that I would dictate to her. So, ever since then, really, I’ve dreamed about being a videogame developer. There’s a box in a my parents attic somewhere that still has these papers.
So, for me, I think it would be very cool to dig those out and look at them and see if I can turn them into games. I coined a term, “Rosebud Games” to describe the concept. The term, of course, comes from Citizen Kane, and really, it’s the same concept: the thing I loved most as a child is what I want now as an adult more than anything. I think as far as motivating factors go, this has a lot of legs. Most of the ideas I had back the were very simple and shouldn’t be too hard to do as beginner/learner projects.
My other great idea was for a taxonomy project to classify videogames. I have a very clear idea of what I want this to be like, and it is going to be beyond awesome when you see everything that I plan to do with it. I don’t want to give away too much on it until I have something ready to show the world, but I think that this may end up being my big project for the summer.