Art of Gaming Volume #12

Diese AoG wird ja schon langsam zur Institution. Jedenfalls haben sie diesmal Pandemic vor den Altar gezert. Pandemic hat übrigens Spiele wie Dark Reign oder BattleZone verbrochen. Unde wen das jetzt noch nicht abgeschreckt hat, der zieht sich den Artikel (engl) besser rein!

GameSpy: What do you do for inspiration? How do you deal with mental block?

Carey Chico: I play games. Well, that's not all I do. I try not to think about the problem for a little while. More often than not, you can try to force yourself to focus on the problem and it's too close. You can't see the forest for the trees. So I take a break, think randomly for a while, do some research for inspiration and play a game or two. Then, I pay my bills, deliver mail, compose some music, anything that will enable me to break out of the concept and think from a different angle. When I come back to the problem, my neurons have been taking different pathways and all of a sudden I see something I had not conceptualized before.

More often than not, a theme or a concept is a puzzle piece. I try to run with certain elements to see how they fair with everything else in the game. It has to do three things at this point. It can't hit an insurmountable wall, it can't be too subtle that no one notices, and it has to have a workable opposing element. Once it meets these criteria, it works. Until the director tells me he doesn't like it of course :)

28.01.2001, 17:16 [Joe]