Restrictive Design
Designing Games with Minimal Components
Lately I’ve been intrigued by the idea of limited myself on the components of a design. Games such as Love Letter, and those over at Good Little Games, really caught my eye in the way the games have depth, yet not a lot of physical material.
Combine this with my love of creative writing, and I’ve come up with an experimental project I’m calling “ROADS.” ROADS will be a series of 5 mini games, all with a very limited set of components. Accompanying these games will be a series of drabbles to tie them together into a single narrative.
I’ve already started posted some of the initial stories for the first three games over on my blog at rck2.net. The series starts with LOSTBROOK, DEEPWOOD, and LITCHFIELD. After those I’ll start work on WYNGATE and SAGAMORE.
While I’ve started working on the story as a whole, I’m only at the prototype stage of LOSTBROOK. It’s gone through a few revisions, and still needs a good amount of work until it’s completed. Once it’s completed I’ll posted it up for print-and-play, and I’ll do with the rest of the series once each game is completed.
