Game concepts to players, users or developers are what draw us in and hook us. It is how players are enticed into playing the games that they do and the great thing about concepts is that they can be as vague or as broad as they want to be. It comes down to a personal taste. The concept of a game could draw in a player without them seeing any visuals of the game. Therefore, concepts can be viewed as the identity of the game. However, the formal game concept process is different from this. Within production standards, game concepts have a few fundamentals such as rules, systems, conflicts, and goals, along with some additional key factors, known as secondaries, which are theme, genre, aesthetics and target market (AIE 2020 lecture notes). It is important to note that it is advised the fundamentals are ironed out first before the secondaries are engaged.
Currently, for our projects at university, we have begun the road to major production. The initial idea for proof of concept is to brainstorm a series of ideas and turn them into a pitch for major production. Laying out games to define an interactive experience is the key to building the pitch. As stated above, players will look at the pitch of a game and determine if it something that they will play based on what the game will offer.
After failing to win a pitch, I was put on another project for the foreseeable future called: Malfunction! On the Orion Express. The concept for this game is as follows:
A Mashup of the Text Adventure and Hidden Object Genres, Malfunction! On the Orion Express, challenges the Player’s perceptions and intuitions to make them feel like a master detective. Players will collect words from their conversations with NPCs and associate what is said with objects in the environment.
This game, while not something that I would initially play, is something I am very interested in developing as a game due to some very fun mechanics that are inside the technical document. Being able to use every word within the sentence will mean that alternative story ideas could come about.