In other words, what is the narrative theme of the game? This is very important to choose early on since this will help with forming the mechanics and helps to immerse the players into the world you’re designing and it’s the first thing people will use to describe your game!
- Descent: It’s a dungeon crawler where you play as a traditional fantasy character (wizard, warrior etc).
- Ticket to ride: You build tracks to grow your Railroad empire.
- Monopoly: You buy properties and destroy friendships.
So how do you create a theme? Same as when writing a story, ask yourself: What/Who | Where | Why?
So first things first, who or what is the game about?
Art by Norimatsukeiichi
I like Robots. <3
Mechs to be more precise. The difference being the latter require a pilot usually and are huge! They come in any shape and colour and are so so cool! Yeah it’s going to have Mechs!
Where? The game will be competitive, so we’ll have an arena. Where will the arena be? At first I thought about having it in a post-apocalyptic world (something like Mad Max) but I feel that theme has been seriously overdone. It could be in space or under the sea! (or a combination of these things!)
Why are the mechs in an arena like space in space/under the sea? Saving the world of course! Well at least that’s what they usually do in anime. Fighting off criminals that want to abuse from the World’s resources and what not!
Awesome, we now have a rough idea of what the game is going to be about. This will help in the long run when penning event and ability cards.
Another very important point, make sure you like the theme! You are going to be looking at it for a very long time!
On a side note, I know that in my last post I promised I will discuss the mechanics I had in mind and I am sorry to disappoint the millions of fans reading this post (#sarcasm, barely 10 views and I think that’s all my mum xxx) I will get into that in my next post 🙂