Game Design: Kids These Days

You nerdly kids don’t know how good you have it. The moment I blew into my first NES cartridge I knew I wanted to be a game designer. But in the ’90s there were no suitable outlets for that specific kind of creativity for children, so every hobby I had turned into game creation. Whether or not I was playing with LEGOs, doodling on a note pad, or wiggling around action figures, I would invariably introduce health meters, attack power-ups, and levels to clear.

I channeled this raw energy into whatever I had around me at the time, walking up hill both ways just to imagine that my little worlds were real. But you kids these days have it easy these days. The world is ready to give you platforms to make your own games! Don’t believe me?

LEGO Heroica

I can connect 90% of my adult interests to two things: the Castle series of LEGOs from the ’90s and the NES game the Legend of Zelda. I would assemble my world, filled with bandits and knights, and then create “rules” for my “hero” minifig to explore. Little red bricks would make up a life meter, crystals and gems would power magic spells, and enemies would (arbitrarily) fall more quickly as I picked up better swords.

I’ll let you imagine the mini-Spengler making “doodley-doo” level up sounds and “pew pew” sounds to himself, all alone in the basement. Those little bricks contained pure creation for me. I couldn’t imagine a more perfect canvass for fantasy adventures and game design. UNTIL I SAW THIS SHIT:

[tabgroup][tab title=”LEGO Heroica Box”][/tab][tab title=”LEGO Heroica Board”][/tab][/tabgroup]

What the hell. I thought LEGO was only creating licensed Johnny Depp minifigs and sets born out of cartoons engineered to sell the most toys. But no, Heroica marries LEGO’s creativity and fantasy board games all in one product. The selection of Heroica play sets look solid, if simple, and more importantly they are completely modular like LEGOs should be. You build your own boards and play using rules that, let’s be honest, a 9 year old would fuck with any way. It’s the exact product that I would have gone nuts over.

You kids don’t know how good you have it.

Pixel Press

I spent many afternoons drawing out my own levels for video games on graph paper. Super Mario 3 had me drawing out side scrolling levels. The Game Boy Final Fantasy Legends titles inspired me to make my own dungeons, towns, and monsters to fight. (Complete with nonsense statistics!) Don’t get me started on what happened after Donkey Kong Country; it may have involved jumping into boxes and get blasted around jungles. Pretty original.

It seemed that every time I was touched by I game I was compelled to continue the experience in the only way I knew how: busting out the graph paper and drawing out my own knock-off levels. It wasn’t enough to simply play the game, I wanted to process it and creatively express it on my own. But of course, nothing could ever come from graph paper doodles, right? OH WAIT FOR KIDS THESE DAYS IT CAN:

[tabgroup][tab title=”Pixel Press”][/tab][tab title=”Level Sketch”][/tab][tab title=”Level Imported”][/tab][tab title=”Finished Level”][/tab][/tabgroup]

Christ. Pixel Press is an app for iOS that allows you to draw platforming levels on special graph paper (that you can print out yourself) and take a picture of it with your iPad or iPhone. The app will interpret what you drew and create a real life playable level for you to share with your friends. You can even import sounds, music, and your own sprite sets to make them really unique. Pixel Press certainly isn’t complete yet, there’s nothing as complicated as enemies or weapons or power ups yet, but it’s coming! If I would have had this as a kid, I would have died. And then come back to life because I was too excited to make more levels to stay dead.

You kids don’t appreciate anything.

RPG Maker VX Ace

When I was first discovering RPGs in the ’90s through the NES, SNES, and ’90s PC titles, creating an RPG seemed like an impossible task. My RPG creations would be limited to note books filled with lists of items, doodles of monsters, simple storylines, and hand drawn maps. I would occasionally load up QBASIC and putter around until I had a program that functioned a lot like an text based RPG but was, you know, created by someone with their age still taking only a single digit.

What I really wanted was something that looked JUST LIKE THIS:

[tabgroup][tab title=”Map Editor”][/tab][tab title=”Class Editor”][/tab][tab title=”Party”][/tab][tab title=”Enemy Editor”][/tab][tab title=”Shop”]

[/tab][/tabgroup]

Ah dammit! Shit! Look at RPG Maker VX Ace. You can plot out stats for your heroes, make cool monsters, create caves and castles and towns. It even has customization tools that allow you to make sprites and portraits without having any art skills. I’ve used Ace a few times; it’s simple enough that a kid could use it to make rudimentary adventures and powerful enough to make some legit jRPG goodness. Add in online support (both technical and through extra sprite sets/music) and you have the program of my 9-year-old-self’s dreams!

You kids are all are so lucky. Well, we’re all lucky, really. There is no excuse any more for us game designing weirdos not to make the games we want to, even the shitty little kids that don’t appreciate what they have. So get the nerdly kids in your life these fun toys, and pick them up yourself too. That game designer inside of you never really goes away.