by Wayne West
(Cloudcroft, NM)
I design card games (www.sparebrainsgames.com) for fun and hopefully some day for profit, professionally I've been a database developer and administrator for more years than I care to think about.
I have lots of ideas of new games that I'd like to develop, but I hit a wall. I may not have time, or I may have a theme and vague idea for mechanics but hit a wall there, things like that.
For example, I got an idea for a game based on a dream that my wife had which she described to me, I immediately came up with an idea which sat dormant for three years, now a few months ago I had an idea for a possible way to implement mechanics and turn it from an idea in to a game. But it's probably going to continue to sit as I have three other games that I'd like to develop and one that I'm selling (Zombie Cafe) that I'd like to get in to more stores.
I've considered trying a wiki as a collaborative tool, but the text emphasis I think would be a definite hinderance. (excuse me if I seem a bit scattered, it's rather late at night here and we just got back from the observatory)
I think, if I'm understanding Wave properly, that the ability to upload images, use bots to roll dice, etc., that game design in a distributed and collaborative manner could be quite effective.
An example of a game design that I have would be Lemmingrad. The Battle of Leningrad, only fought by armies of lemmings. Obviously a large suspension of disbelief is required, but that's inherent in my games. This would probably be a very simple war game, where cards representing units would fight. I'm not saying Lemmingrad would be the first thing that I would try, this is just an example of a concept without any real mechanics behind it that collaborators might be able to help refine. It would require statistical modeling to know how powerful certain units are in relation to one another, spreadsheets or database tables to accumulate this information, artwork for a map with terrain features for the battle to be fought upon, cards describing units and their strengths, etc.
Now, there's one basic problem with this approach. If I design a game, though I may take input from play-testers and make alterations to my game based on that input, the game is still mine. I sell it, I get the profit. If I'm doing something in a collaborative fashion via Wave, things become very complicated very quickly. I think the best thing to do would be to have all participants agree that the end product would be released under a Creative Commons license so that there is no money involved and anyone can download the end product in PDF form, print it, and play.
At this point a wiki might be viable for future changes as the game would already have been distilled down to a more constrained, less free form mode.
You could potentially do a collaborative design like this with a for-profit bearing, I think perhaps if "I" am the creator of the concept and mechanics, and a group were helping "me", we might come to an agreement in advance that I get 50% of the profit and the remaining 50% is divided amongst the support group. The next game might be someone else's idea, they get the 50% and I go in to the group and get a share of the remaining 50%.
So that's pretty much it for my proposal. I'd like to explore its collaborative properties to see if it could help me with game design.
