My old game designs, let me show you them.

I just did something I was meaning to do for a while, but hadn't gotten around to doing (until now). That is, put some old game designs of mine up on the site for people to read and enjoy.

I enjoyed coming up with these, but I never had the chance to actually take them from paper and make them into computer game reality. In fact, neither of the game design documents I posted today are even really complete. But they both have the kernel of the game design in place, and could still serve an educational purpose.

I've seen a lot of game design templates, and in fact some time ago I actually built actual templates based on layouts from two articles by Tim Ryan back in 1999. (The articles were from '99, I believe I did the templates somewhere between 2001 and 2003.) But simple intuition has lead me to believe that such formalization is only useful for pitching games to publishers and other funding sources; what gets worked on is the game, not the design doc, and so the latter should fit with the former. That doesn't mean no doc, just that a template might not cut it.

Check out what I wrote. I might add more later on. Not every game design I have gets committed to paper, and even those that do get lost. My game idea Asylum, its design document has been lost to the sands of time, and my current idea is still too nebulous to warrant typing out.