Lately, I've been thinking on an article posted this Monday by Magic: The Gathering head designer, Mark Rosewater.
He talked about how he wound up with his dream job without even realising it was his dream job, defined a dream job with a Venn diagram ("Stuff You Love to Do", "Stuff You're Good At", "Stuff Someone Will Pay You to Do".).
Basically, his point seemed to be, find something you like doing that someone could eventually pay you to do, and start doing it. Eventually you can get good at it.
Seeing as game design is something I've always been fascinated by, and board/card games seem a lot simpler and easier to make than videogames (why learn programming when you can just type stuff and print onto cardboard, eh?), I figure I'll give that a try.
I sent him a question via Tumblr, asking for affordable ways to print boards, custom dice and identical-backed cards. If anyone else has ideas on this though, I would appreciate.
Another pipedream I could potentially pursue is writing. I don't think I'm all too good at that (yet) but I've got ideas floating around in my head for things that would make for cool stories and settings. I'm not sure I'd enjoy an over-abundance of that for too long but it's something I don't MIND doing.
Now, there might be a way to combine the two.
I'm now trying to work out how some kind of story-driven boardgame could work. One that has a self-contained story that's somehow different each time you play it. I suppose a sort of multiplayer Choose Your Own Adventure book, but not a D&D-esque RPG that demands that kind of commitment.
Ideas are coming to me. We'll see.
Either way, I'm going to try and create interesting things and share them with people. Maybe, eventually, someone will hire me to do more of that. Or something. If that happens, I'll have an amazing job. If it doesn't, I'll have an enjoyable hobby. Either way I win, really.
I like the title
ReplyDelete