Sunday 4 January 2009

Writing a Wanderer's Romance - Concept

I've at least partially written more games than I've played. Of the two I'm most happy with A Wanderer's Romance is the one I want to talk about first.

Now that I'm at a point where I'm happy with the game I wanted to look over how I got there. The truth is a lot of things fell into place without much planning, but how does that make me look?

No. For the purposes of this series of posts you should accept this twisted version of the truth where I'm terribly organised and draw charts while sipping coffee. This will be mutually beneficial in making me seem to be a more effective designer and hopefully helping you in designing your own games.

A Wanderer's Romance is a game drawing inspiration from a number of areas, notably the following:

  • Wuxia novels and films.
  • Legend of the Five Rings, Chambara films and general western romanticism of Samurai culture.
  • My own amusement, from afar, of Anime series where the strangest things can become epic battles.

These three combined with my dust-covered brainstorm for a system using Elements as character attributes and basic setting idea based around lots of tiny islands to eventually form the game. Frankly it's a miracle the game doesn't feel like a pile of ideas mashed together, but somehow coherence was formed.

No comments:

Post a Comment