PAX Updates and Reworking an Old Design

My badge for PAX East arrived today! This really hammered home that I’ll be getting on a train in about a week to head to Boston, and I’m very excited. I’ve started planning out what panels I want to attend while I’m there. Since my last post, MatPat, of Game Theory fame, announced he would be attending PAX East for the first time and is going to be hosting a story time panel where he talks about his life. I hope I manage to get into that panel specifically, and perhaps get to meet the man, as I grew up watching his videos.

In the meantime, I’ve been working on rewriting a design document for an old game idea I had a while back. A group of my friends all became spontaneously interested in game development and asked me if we could make something, so I happily obliged. However, in an effort to include everyone, I tried to let everyone contribute ideas to the design, which led to it becoming a hodgepodge of half-baked ideas that didn’t exactly play well together. This time around, I’m really focusing in on the core ideas of the game and really analyzing similar games for inspiration. The core of the game is a spaceship building system that you’d be interacting with and upgrading over the course of a game, sort of similar to an engine building game. Because of this, I’ve been specifically focusing on how other game handle ship building, such as Stellaris and LANCER. Outside of the ship building, I’m not totally sure where the game will go (the original design had a big hole in the “how you win” section), but I’m hoping a more focused approach will lead to something fun and interesting.