Once I’d recovered from pulling the event together, I found myself really inspired by the people at Freeplay who were pulling together their own projects – and it made me want to do the same.
So, I’ve started two things.
The first is an attempt over at the freeplay forums to run monthly experimental gameplay projects in Melbourne, producing one highly experimental game every month within 7 days and fitting a theme. The first will run in October and we’re still deciding on the theme. Head on over and sign up if you’re interested in taking part.
The second is I’ve started putting together what I think will actually be a bigger game now that I’ve started it. It’s called ‘Fabric’ and I’m going to try and document its progress here.
The original idea for Fabric came from thinking about expressing connections mechanically, and also about creating a game where you had to destroy part of the environment in order to protect it.
The fabric of the game world is essentially a cloth simulation – particles connected by springs – with charged elements that travel along the grid-lines, seeking out their nearest neighbour. When those charges connect, they destroy a large area of the grid around them. The only way to stop them moving is to destroy the grid-line they’re travelling along. The overall aim of the game is to stop the fabric unravelling completely as you can see it doing towards the end of the movie.
It’s still early days, but even at this early stage, the nature of the technology has brought up restrictions in what I originally thought I could do gameplay wise, but it’s also opened up other possibilities too, which was the whole point of the experiment.