I got back from my small trip, and got this pretty strange incident. I tested a golf game in my cell phone. The game is pretty simple, pretty easy to learn and quite fun too. While easy to learn, it’s not so tempting for new users…

Let me explain. The first time I tried the golf game, I was hitting the ball badly and sometimes it went far, and sometimes not so far. Eventually I got the ball in the hole, with a result like +9 over the par.

Before I let you know what the game did, I’d like you to ponder a bit: how would you reward a first-time player who uses 13 swings (instead of 4) to finish the first hole?

Think about it a moment. I suppose you might think that the game would like throw some victory particles and congratulate or something, but not this game. The moment I hit the ball in the hole, the game displayed word:

“Bad”

I was like… what? Okay, I knew it wasn’t perhaps my greatest game ever, but when I eventually managed to get the ball in the hole, the game says to me “bad”. How many times a 4-year old kid would play the game? (the controls were such that a 4-year old could handle it, at least with little help).

Game was a pretty fun, but I think you might want to think twice to blame players when they complete something. If you think of it: how many times a 4-year old would play the game that says “bad” when they complete something?

(I dunno, maybe they rely on the fact that most 4-year old kids can’t read…)

I did four prototypes in the past weeks (have missed couple now) and yesterday I wrote about prototypes versus ideas. After these thoughts and protos, I kind of feel that spending couple of hours for protos is kind of like too little. There are some guys who hack code together in 4 hours or so, but programming a proto in 2 hours gets little too much.

I started to feel that I could not fully think about different ideas, since I knew that it’s pretty tough call to program the idea in just 2 hours. I liked the Nudgers prototype a lot. It sparked some more ideas to me (one was similar type of storytelling game where people would control a planet, and then collectively vote what they would do when their race is encountering challenges. It would be something like a mix of “play by email multiplayer game” and “strategy game”.

Right now I’m going to stop doing the weekly prototype (well, stopped it couple of weeks ago – let’s say that I’m mentioning this now), and think of something else. I guess I was prototyping “prototyping” to see how it feels. To me, 2 hours seems too low to get more decent things done.

But, since I always want to experiment stuff… I started pondering that some sort of collaborative weekly (or bi-weekly) challenge with you guys could be interesting.

I’m not sure yet what could it be, but it sure would be interesting to do this “prototyping/idea brainstorming” with you guys (that’s one thing Nudgers got me thinking by the way – it’s much more fun when there’s people involved).

My first idea was some sort of “game design challenge”, but instead of that… I wonder if we could do something bit different – like write a “(really basic) design document / concept” for a game in 1-2 weeks. Or, perhaps think of new ways to do some game design issues (like “how to reward players”).

What could be useful way to “design games” together so that it could help and inspire people – and perhaps even help you solve some dilemmas in your own game’s design?

Thoughts?