Introduction

Hello.

I'm Ben Cummings. I make games. I'm a game programmer, designer, and player. About 15 years ago, I decided I wanted to make videogames for a living, and today I've been doing that for a few years as a computer programmer at a big videogame company. In college, I dedicated my academic career to the pursuit of the deep game design truths as well as the refinement of my craft. I've always believed implementation and theory to only thrive symbiotically.

The point is, game design is important, and in order to get better as a game designer, it's important to make games. Unfortunately, due to the time and workload involved (not to mention your usual work-for-hire arrangements), it's simply impractical to make a large slew of videogames in rapid succession. While it's possible to make certain videogame prototypes in a matter of hours or days, I can work with board- and card-games much faster, including iterating on designs in the middle of test play sessions.

So, I'm going to be making 10 games in 10 months — one a month — and I'll be blogging about it. The blog is largely here so there's a public record of the committment, though hopefully it'll provide space for reflection and outside comments too. This is not a break-neck pace, and I know a lot of students who churn games out faster for classes, but this should fit in with the needs of my job and family, and the pace should allow for a slightly more slow and thoughtful path. The idea is that I'll work up a prototype early in the month, chew on it for a bit, make a mock up and have a play test, refine based on that, and finally have a reasonably finished game at the end. The production values will likely be non-existant, but we'll see how crafty I'm feeling.

In the next week or two, I'll be posting about my first prototype game for February, which I believe will be based on the theme of underground avant garde hotdog vendors (inspired by this ad website). I'll be using themes to the degree that they're helpful to get me working and working on varied games, so if next week the game is about the royal court in the Umayyad caliphate, so long as the initial theme got me there, it's been a success. Each month, I'll try to post at least one entry each on the initial design, the results of initial playtesting, and then at least one more entry after that. At the end, I'll post the instructions on how to play the game.

I look forward to making some games and sharing them with you, and I hope this will be of some interest to you.