24-Hour Games (split)

[BlU_sKrEEm]

     Howdy My name is Caleb Jensen, and I just submitted my first game. It's called Spazz
When I started I wanted to make a system where people ate marshmallows to complete challenges. I've always wanted a game that included marshmallows, and I decided that the game would be about Gluttony. Unfortunately I decided that choking may be an issue. The next best option would have been bidding or counting Marshmallows, but that seemed kind of boring. I eventually tossed the marshmallow idea all together, and started over. the bidding gave me an idea however. From bidding my mind went to auctions, and from auctions to rambling, and from rambling to word association. So i decided tasks would be resolved by a quick word association game, and that the player would have a number of seconds equal to their skill number.

      Next i started on the setting. Gluttony really isn't represented well by word association games so I had to start over. Then I envisioned playing the game and it came to me. This game would be a game about panic, stress and spazzing out. The setting would be the real world. Players would have some mundane task to achieve but no time to do it, to compound the matter the GM would throw obstacles in the players way.

     I then realized the goal of this project. a twenty four hour game puts a lot of stress on the writer, but what would a one hour game do? Well my setting was simple, and I already had the mechanics and it was only a few minutes after i started so I decided to give it a try.

    To be honest the hardest thing was coming up with terminology. I decided if I wanted to convey a panic, the standard terms wouldn't do. Terms that convey helplessness and pressure were needed. It took me about half an hour to come up with terms.

     After the terms  were decided I had to type it up. While typing I came up with some additional ideas: first the whole game would have a time limit. I figured ten minutes was short enough to cause stress, but long enough to actually play.Second the character creation should be stressful to. There would be no list of skills, the player had to come up with that, and I figured they should have to do some math so they had to distribute 32 skill points amongst All of the players, and then for the coupe degrace the players would only have 45 seconds to make their characters.  OK stressful. I decided that the charecter creation shouldn't be part of the total time, because it would take to long, so I put it in a seoperate catagory. I finally added the character advancement, this was fast and simple. the actual description of advancing the character took longer then the idea itself. So now things were getting pretty much done. I then typed up the rules, and some ideas on how to set the atmosphere.

     Unfortunately after this was done I was one minute over my one hour limit, and I still needed to spell check! to make matters worse my spell check took FOREVER. I had a virus scan scheduled and forgot about it, I'm guessing something else was running in the background to. So all and all the whole project took me from 12:56 to 2:12. I failed but I figured it was still a 24 hour RPG, and the whole thing was kind of interesting project and submitted it.
I hope everyone will enjoy Spazz when it is posted.

[Ron Edwards]

Hi Caleb,

I've split your post from New 24-Hour Games, which is over a year old. Check out the site guidelines in the Site Discussion forum. No big deal as you just start up, though.

Anyway, we can just pick right up and discuss! I'm interested in what seemed easier or harder than you expected, when writing a game in only 24 hours.

Best,
Ron

[Kynn]

I'm sorta disappointed that there's still not a marshmallow eating game out there.

Come on, people! Let's see S'MORE of these kinds of games!