Making a Gorillaz Game

This was a tough week for me. I've been trying to change a lot of things about my lifestyle at once, and inevitably things have been tough because of it. Trying to consciously change requires an alertness that is all too easy to allow to slip.

However, thats got me thinking about a few things. The first of these things is how I create games and why I create games. I've been wanting to expand and create things that were a little less mechanically strict, but that has me a little terrified because I don't know what I want to make. I've started to try to tell stories, but I don't yet know how to translate stories into a mechanic or it hasn't worked out for me that way yet.

One of my problems is that because I'm so heavily invested in programming to hold up my work that I tend to think of games programmatically first. How things will work tends to skew the way I think about things instead of coming up with something random and figuring it out after the fact. I really want to break out of this so I think I'll try doing some morning jams (one or two hours at most) to force myself out of my shell

I started on another music video game, this one is for the new Gorillaz album. I really want to make something interesting out of this one because the Gorillaz have shaped a lot of who I am and my tastes as a creative in general. They are part of the reason I want to stretch myself so much, to learn and do new things, to never stagnate. Therefore, I'm hoping I can pull through on this one and make something special.

The plan is to do an interconnected game system. Multiple game types using this sort of free movement tile system, strung together to tell a story. The story being something I've been thinking about in relation to our situation on this planet right now and where it might end up going one day. So It's fairly interesting to me.

Lastly, I've played Hyper Light Drifter and I've fallen for that game. It was very well made and executed. It's executed perfectly on the minimalist action. There's a few systems at play that are all interconnected so beautifully that I was taken aback a few times while playing it.