Postmortem I: From theme to the idea

As the deadline for public rating is getting closer, I'd like to reflect on some aspects of the development. That's why I will write a few postmortem articles about how The Line was born, and learnings from these experiences that I'd like to take with me to future projects.

“Rethink the Ordinary”

That was the theme of the jam. Personally, I like to work with boundaries. I believe that helps me to focus my creativity, so I tried to get as closer as I could to the themes proposed. 

And how did I do that? With whiteboards, OF COURSE.

The “Ideas dumpster”

For the first brainstorming session, I did an exercise that I like to call the “Idea dumpster”.

That's how it works:

1. You set a timer (5 or 10 minutes are fine to start, but you can reset it any time you need it. It is just to help you focus your energy and keep you aware of having breaks)
2. During the time, you put as many ideas as you can think. Those “ideas” could be merely words. In this case, we have two words to start with: RETHINK and ORDINARY. Starting with those two words I look for related concepts (yes, I looked up at the dictionary and thesaurus searching for related words, in Spanish and English to cover all the possible nuances.)
3. Once the time is up, I check the board and see if there's anything that “sparks” my creativity.

In that case, step 3 took a few timers and time… but after a few rounds I could gather something like this:

I related the concepts that came from ORDINARY, and I distilled them into two: TIME and REPETITION. Why? Because I found out that “time” and “repetition” are not only the essence of the “ordinary”, but of the basic principles behind a game loop.

At that moment, I realized that the theme was going to become more meta than I thought at the first time. If I didn't have any idea from the topic, after that exercise I really was getting into something!

But I was not over — yet.

The Themes Brainstorming board

My following step was a mind mapping exercise. The goal: explore the topics from the theme into more “on the ground” elements to use in my game.

To develop a theme or topic, I use the following framework (see screenshot below). The idea is to answer the questions “What?”, “Who”, “When?”, “Where?, “How?, and “Why?”. (Blame my journalist background for this…)

There are a few things to unpack here.

Looking at what is “normal” I reach a particular rabbit hole… but from that mine I came up with a key idea: “WHAT IT: You play as a NPC”

If you have played the game, you can imagine where is this going.

I had a key idea following this train of thought:

1. Asking myself what is “ordinary” I explore what is “normal” and “regular”.
2. From “regular”, I started to explore what makes somebody “average”.
3. From “regular” and “average” I asked myself: Who is a regular or average person in a video game. The answer: The NPCs.
4. And, as a last step, I came with the question: How could I make a game around a NPC?

That last question is tricky. Doesn't put the player at the wheel of a Non-Playable Character make it a Playable Character? 

I thought I reached a dead end… but I remember another definition for mediocre and average: “pedestrian”. Exploring that word, three concepts came up with: “Boring”, “Every day”, and “Person travelling by foot”.

Then I tried to put things together from the immense soup that was my head at that moment: What could be a boring context where you find plenty of regular people (or NPCs), and you have to live (or suffer) it every day?

EXACTLY

My idea was related with queues, but later I changed it for “lines” because it sounded more catchy. Sorry, British English speakers…

3 final ideas. Only one will remain.

With all of that, I thought on three potential ideas for games with this context. That way, I could try to picture them in my head and see what could be the one.

Those were the three options I had on my table:

The idea of a Match-3 game but with just a few lanes and not at a regular structured grid could be interesting, but I was not 100% sure of it.

The goal of helping as much people as possible to get through the line sparked here. But in my head, I imagined it as a game closer to Chu-Chu Rocket.

Oh, boy! I love Chu-Chu Rocket.

And finally, I got this idea. Simply enough for a jam, but powerful enough to have a fun and an engaging game.

So… Which idea do you think I ended up with? 

That's a story for another time. (Yes, I need you to be hooked so you can read my next post. Sorry about that…)