Make Something Playable ASAP (Open to All)

[mjbauer]

I think I'll reissue the challenge soon after the GenCon madness is over. Maybe I'll make it a little more formal this time and give a little more warning for anyone who wants to be involved.

I'd certainly like to give it another shot.

By the way, I'm playtesting my combat system this Thurs with my gaming group. It's not a full game, but it's more than I've ever had before, so I'm excited about that.

[Ayyavazi]

This is something I would have loved to have been in on, especially since unbeknownst to me, I have already done it. Around the exact timeframe you started this I was designing a game at a frenzied pace. Now I am just polishing the rules so the play-testers (whom I have zero of at the moment) will have it easy. But either way, I think this shouldn't be so much a contest as a two week monthly challenge. What if the first two weeks of every month were This Challenge, and the remaining days were spent reviewing the created systems by those who participated, creating a community within the forge dedicated to creating working systems and playtesting them all within a month. From there, the knowledge gained could be polished and the game worked on or tossed out depending on how much the community liked or enjoyed it. From there, either a new challenge could be started, or a continuation, with two weeks of polishing followed by another two weeks of testing. This kind of structure to game design would really promote useful and timely feedback. Plus, if it got big enough, you could have two groups working at different times. So, one group would be making games in the first two weeks and playing/reviewing in the second while another group was designing games in the second two weeks and playing the games in the first. Perhaps even group crossover could occur. But those are just ideas. I think this has a lot of potential.

Cheers,
--Norm

[Bret Gillan]

This is a great idea for an endeavor or contest or organized group effort or however it turns out.