What are you going to read about?

In this Post, I will try to explain the process behind finding the theme for the game and the first game jam. Bite me Boss is a 4-Player local party game, with a few different minigames and the development and design process wasn't, what you would call “normal”

Why do I write this as a devblog for a game, which was not part of a game jam? 

Well, for Bite me Boss, we had a unique structure, namely, that we created each individual minigame, in a team intern game jam. With everything from theme announcement, really dirty prototyping, being cramped up in a cellar for 3 days and the occasional confusion. As we initially only decided on the game jam part and minigames, we had to find a theme, restrictions and a few more things. While the restrictions were done beforehand, the theme was quite important, as well as the story, as they would grant us a necessary foundation to create minigames.

Democratically finding a theme must be a horror, right?

Not really. I was in charge of thinking about a design process, where in the end, everyone would have parts of their idea added, it should be quite freeflow and everyone should be able to visualize possible games.

The process “Add evil music”

The process I devised focused on combining individual themes. It followed a few easy steps:

• Feelings/Adjectives/Themes
• Verbs/Things to do
• Setting
• Combination

It was basically nothing more than a glorified brainstorming. 

The materials

We only needed a few things

• Writing stuff
• Voting stuff (We used paper money)
• Something to play music/sounds
• Snacks (Not needed, but recommended)
• At least 2 People
• 1-2 hours time

Finally: How does it work

First, everyone got a few pieces of paper and had a few minutes to write adjectives/general feelings or themes on them. Everyone had to write 3, but could come up with more.  These should only contain a single word in most cases. A few things we came up with were:

• Boring
• Glamorous
• Sparkly
• Natural
• Calm before the storm

… and many more.

Afterwards, we voted on which of the ideas we found interesting. We used a money based system, where everyone could place 1x5€, 1x3€ and 1x1€ on ideas they liked the most. We also added a “underdog” element, which we could add, for an idea, that was a bit too undefined/broad/special, which thus would still have an extra chance. Also we sorted related ideas together. So if someone had silent and one had stealthy, we added them together, if both authors agreed.

Then we repeated the first step, but with things to do. If applicable, we added the adjectives, which inspired us, into one corner of the card. Then we voted again. We also added music or a soundscape in the background, according to our adjectives, to gain additional inspiration.

After this step, we had things like

• Jewel heist
• Summoning
• Racing

… and again, many more. We voted again and repeated it again, but this time with settings.

Then we got things like 

• Graveyard
• Company

… you get the idea.

The final step: Combining crazy ideas and beyond

This time, we didn't vote immediately, but rather made combinations, out of all the cards we had. We combined at least one card of each category to experiment with stuff. Then we shifted things around, had more stuff, shifted them again and so on and so forth. Finally we voted again on the 3 most interesting subjects, which were:

• Office workers, bored in an office, wanting to get fired (sounds familiar)
• Insects, doing some stuff in forests (can't remember the details, we had a bit more stuff to add to it)
• Undead, performing rituals to create new friends, as they are lonely and sad

or at least I believe those were the final options.

To finally decide between these candidates, we did some improv. We either told a story and switched after one minute, to mostly just amuse ourselves, but also immerse us into the story and world, to see what feels good. Finally we polished the setting, added a bit more stuff to it and out came the foundation for “Bite me Boss” 

Conclusion

This process took us around 2 hours, we had a lot of fun with it and I might search for my notes again, to write a clear guide on how to do this brainstorming method. I devised it myself, mostly under the idea that we should create the setting with feelings we want to explore, as well as going from a big number of options into a small one, while always being influenced by the earlier ideas.