Something I’ve been doing lately with games is looking at other games and trying to come up with framing devices or changes to the rules that make them more interesting. I think part of this was ‘combat scrabble,’ a game where you were always trying to make words that relate to fighting somehow, and the words that were hardest or scariest won – so you could wind up with arguments of ‘Batman vs UFO.’
Duelists Club started based on trying to find the simplest game I could make a card game out of. Cards could give me room to expand the game, but you can play Duelists Club without any cards. It’s called Paper-Rock-Scissors. I’ve been musing tonight on the concept currently called Suit Up, which is basically a mangled version of poker. What it’s got me thinking on, mostly, though is that Talent Borrows, but Genius Steals.
I’m not a genius, but I do notice a lot of my work is deliberately iterative. A lot of what I’m doing, what I’m trying to do comes from finding something else, and trying to imagine it in a different space, in a different way.
Don’t be afraid to build on something. Don’t be afraid to fanfic things. Don’t be afraid to try to do a thing you’ve seen done before. Originality is nice, yes, but you learn a lot from how things work by recreating them.