Game Design Journal: Mapemounde 2020 - Day 01

Today marks Day One of my attempt to create an entry in 6 days for this game jam.

Mapemounde is an analogue (non-electronic) map-game design jam. Participants are given a theme, a design goal, and 10 days to create a playable draft of an original map-game.

After reading the game rules with more focus than my initial run through I distilled the project objectives into these requirements, which I need to keep in mind:

• Submissions can be alone or in teams
• < 4,000 words total
• Original & Free (CC BY SA.40)

Theme: a game in which the same space is represented by 2 or more maps (different in scope & shape) reflecting its different facets.

• 2 or more Maps
• Covering the same space
• Different in scope and shape
• Different facets are important

So I went back to considering the two games I already have in development. One specifically uses a single shared map, so it's immediately not on the list. The second game could use multiple maps, but that approach wouldn't serve the design in any fair way.

So, rather than dropping out of the contest, I chose, instead, to spend the morning asking myself if I had any ideas I could execute in 6 days.

Here's what I've come up with.

Recallers

Once upon a neighborhood, many years ago, a handful of children shared a kingdom of their own. This magical place reflected elements of their surroundings, their community, and their beliefs of the world at the time.

Now, some decades into adulthood, the grown ups that left that neighborhood long ago are back together again, spending a long night talking about that lost childhood place, and what they can recall of their time there.

Recallers is a game where you pretend to be a group of adults gathering in their hometown after having moved away many years ago. In that old neighborhood you all shared adventures in a shared imagined place, a Paracosm. This magical place had a name, locations, and various make-believe characters.

The game is played by looking over a map that one of the characters found in a local restaurant. In the fiction of the game, it's a chamber of commerce style layout of the surrounding area, which happens to include all the old landmarks of the character's childhood neighborhood. This sparks a conversation between them about that imagined place, and the core of play is discussing the various memories of the imagined world.

Symbols on the map instruct the players to draw a card that prompts them with questions about their imagined realm. They answer these questions in a group, or individually, or in pairs, depending on the nature of the card drawn. As the imagined world is recalled from dusty memories, the players then sketch new details on their own sheet of paper, echoing the real world and the tourist map they're pouring over to help jog their memory.

This pitch seemed good enough. So, where do we start?

I always begin by asking myself The Big Three: What is this game about? What do the Characters do? and What do the Players do?

The game is pitched above. Now to focus on what the characters do: The characters should be caught up in the magic of remembering this special place, while also being moved by the newfound camaraderie of their childhood friends. So while the core mechanic of the game (looking at a location on the map, drawing a card to prompt memories about it) there should be some goals for the fiction being unwrapped.

• Recalling can be neat, painful, exhilarating, or any number of things.
• The friends do not have a life together, and none of them remained in the neighborhood.
• They are not extraordinary people in this world. Nor are they comically or noticeably miserable or lost. They are comfortably average people in the first world.

These elements may or may not demand being called out by the game, implemented as a rule, or just kept in mind as I design the play. It will be figured out as I go, but remembered as I make my choices.

What do the players do? Here's where we need a solid sketch. If this is going to work, I'll need to know exactly how much design work is involved, how much revision time is involved, and what the essence of the design should be. The first two are for time management purposes, the last item is to keep me from letting this idea explode into another years-long project instigated by a fun game jam.

At the simplest: The players...

• look over a map
• draw cards that prompt authoring childhood memories for their character
• draw the details of those memories on a new map

So immediately I need a map design, and a 3-categoried card layout. The map will be heavier on the graphic layout, but the cards will mostly be revising and shortening prompts.

The word count limit is a factor here. I can easily shrink the number of starting cards to get under that limit, if I just can't leave the idea be as it is. I can also argue for a map that has unnecessary terms and such on the map as 'words that shouldn't count.' But we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.

Analyzing the Concept

So let's focus on how we're going to capture some of the themes of play.

I started out knowing that I wanted you to be able to 'plug-in' to the game by choosing two starting cards: your Childhood Card and your Adulthood Card. This dichotomy really focuses you on thinking about the game in terms of "back then" vs. "right now." The Childhood Card inspires your influence on the paracosm. The Adulthood card, however, tricked me into almost making a different game...

I'll be honest here: the bulk of my day was spent going down a thought rabbit hole about how to design a game about a group of interesting adults that reconnect over this conversation about their paracosm, while also 'fixing' each other with this renewed connection between them.

Each Adult Card could feature a list of issues that the player could choose from, with one issue being omitted from each card depending on the Archetype of adult they'd grown into. So the adult that became a small-time celebrity (local newscaster, local politician, YouTuber, etc) doesn't have "Direction" on their list, because they already have direction. And the adult that became a wealthy or influential patron (tech entrepreneur, lawyer, real estate investor) wouldn't have "stability" on their list because they're doing alright financially and career wise.

After a lot of thought work toward the concept of 'adults mending through reminiscing" I crossed off all the notes and said, "Nope, that's not what this game is about." While it's a fantastic game idea, this game isn't about grown ups reconnecting and helping each other with the parts of their life that still have holes. It's about our connection to childhood. It's about the wonder of a shared imagined world. It's about learning from make-believe, and recalling that make-believe place with a sketch of an alternate world.

Some of these themes I worked on might still come out in play, but they won't be the focus. You really do, sometimes, have to design a game and scrap it to get on with designing a game.

So back to the core concept: look over a map, draw a card, say as your character, "Hey, do you remember when..."

Now here's one place where I can see an immediate fix. If the magic of this childhood realm is that the characters don't perfectly or harmoniously recall what happened there, why make it up one card at a time, together? Instead, new plan. The cards reference the map, but you draw three and play one on your turn, refreshing your hand when you're done. This will guide the players to reading their cards, thinking about their own interpretation of the events and places, and then, when the cards are played, perhaps introduce some confusion and conflicting recollections. Just like when we authentically reach back to remember what happened on the playground at 8 years old.

So, just to make sure this concept works well enough, I needed to see how hard it would be to make the deck of prompts. My last chore: I wrote the name of 5 cards for each type (Individual, Group, Connection) and topic (Locations, Events, Characters). If I could think of at least an impression of what to write a prompt about, I would name it. I'm glad to say it was pretty easy to lay down 45 potential oracles in a short amount of time.

So it looks like I'm all in! Tomorrow I'll put some initial thought into how to lay out the map (I've already sketched out how it looks on a letter sized page) and revisit how to connect the cards to the map and how to connect the map provided to the one the players will draw. I'll nail down how I want the turns to go, and what I think playing the game will "look like." I'll report back here how that all goes!