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The Game Designer Who Won’t Call Himself a Game Designer

153 game mechanics down, 147 to go. Game enthusiast and sometimes developer Sean Howard explains why he wants to develop 300 game ideas.

Pellet Quest is one example of Howard's wild experiments, in which Pac-Man goes the way of the RPG.
Pellet Quest is one example of Howard's wild experiments, in which Pac-Man goes the way of the RPG.

We all have goals--some long, some short, and most of them will never happen. Maybe it’s finishing a beloved game that’s fallen into a pile of shame, or shuffling our feet to the gym more than once a year. For Sean Howard, who refuses to call himself a game designer, it’s devising and fleshing out 300 game mechanics and putting them online.

Howard, who most recently contributed dialogue to both of the DeathSpank games, is otherwise a stay-at-home dad who’s hoping to finish reading the Song of Ice and Fire series “before his nerd wife spoils the damn thing."

He also needs to come up with 153 more game mechanics to add to his current pile of 147.

The reason for drawing the line at 300 ideas is simpler than you might think: it’s a big number, a dramatic one, and perhaps a number that would be difficult to top. It's a feat that would be something Howard could call all his own.

“The reason I wanted to do something like that in the first place was because I was sick of people saying that ideas were worthless,” said Howard over email. “It's something I've been hearing for so long, and always at such a deafening volume, that I just wanted to fight back. I wanted to say that, if nothing else, good ideas inspire. They excite you and get the gears moving. That's not worthless. I don't think you can worship the fire without respecting the spark that starts it just a little bit.”

Negative Space was an early idea that Howard has iterated on several times over the years.
Negative Space was an early idea that Howard has iterated on several times over the years.

Negative Space, in which he explored the sizable number of gameplay possibilities from being able to flip between black and white spaces, was the first concept published in the experiment, all the way back on May 9, 2007. It's one that he’d actually first started developing farther back in a Usenet post from September 2001.

He goes deeper than a few expository lines about a half-baked concept, instead producing extensive pixel art--a personal expertise--to elaborate on what might otherwise be hard to mentally visualize. Practice within the art of the pixel comes from Howard’s own webcomic called A Modest Destiny, which has lived for years.

All of these ideas used to exist in a notebook, and besides providing a sense of grand ambition and scale, collecting and publishing them online was a way to categorize them for Howard’s own perusal.

“I do feel a need to create at all times,” he said. “It's a clawing need that gets worse if I'm without a project for too long a time.”

How many of us don’t have a similar, gnawing passion? When I go a few days without putting pen to (digital) paper, it hangs heavy. It doesn’t matter what I end up writing, I just need to get a thing out, or else I feel terribly guilty.

“I just want to feel closer to games,” he said. “There's something about them. I'm drawn to them in a way I can't possibly describe. When I was kid, when my future could hold any possibility, I played a game that spoke to me in a way nothing else has. It inspired me and turned on a little light that I've never been able to turn off.”

Outside of contracted dialogue work on DeathSpank, Howard hasn’t been a part of any other game that’s shipped, and the game he worked on that didn’t make it onto shelves, he has no kind words for. It caused him to step back.

Some of the dialogue you may or may not have chuckled along to in DeathSpank was by Howard.
Some of the dialogue you may or may not have chuckled along to in DeathSpank was by Howard.

“The Three Hundred [Mechanics] is a way for me design games without being a game designer,” he said. “Ask a hundred people how to be a game designer and you'll get a hundred answers. Many of them involve paying your dues. Many involve classes you have to take in college, jobs you have to be employed in, people you have to know, slogans you have to follow, skills you have to have, programs you have to master, and employers you have to flatter.”

One might wonder about the risk of publishing all of your ideas online, and Howard is well aware of the problems. He claims to have seen some ideas taken and turned into commercial products. At one point, he simply asked for credit in such scenarios, but after a few situations turned sour, he waved that away.

“I decided that I would remove that requirement, releasing the ideas fully into the public domain, to end that threat forever,” he said. “It wasn't an easy thing to do. I still feel pride in my ideas. But I've decided that pride should be the reason I share these ideas instead of the reason not to.”

Some ideas are begging to be made, such as Pellet Quest, where Pac-Man gets infused with RPG sensibilities spread across a gigantic, persistent map, and the main character must return to old areas with earned abilities, ala Super Metroid. Or Diorama Designer, in which players create a “screen shot” for a game they’d like to play, and the game procedurally generates a game that makes that scene possible. Or SimMMORPG, in which the player doesn’t manage an ant colony, tower or civilization, but a simulated MMO world. None of these ideas sound easy to make, and there are much simpler ones within Howard’s set of 147 ideas, but they’re exciting to page through and dream.

“I may never earn the right to call myself a game designer,” he concluded, “but the Three Hundred [Mechanics] allows me to feel closer to games than being in the game industry ever did.”

You can continue to follow Howard’s work at www.squidi.net.

Patrick Klepek on Google+

66 Comments

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Eyz

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Edited By Eyz

You gotta admire it, such impressive stuff! :D

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ZmillA

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Edited By ZmillA

Very interesting. I look forward to going through his site.

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jasondesante

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Edited By jasondesante

This guy should use KICKSTARTER :D

great article

Get him to use Kickstarter, and use the GiantBomb community to create the art sound and story.

Who's with me?

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BeautifulSpaceCowboy

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His blog has some interesting ideas. Thanks for the article, Patrick.

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ProjektGill

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Edited By ProjektGill

I love these more personal pieces that come about every 2 weeks or so. It's awesome to hear stories about people who are doing great things in with video games that aren't backed by a lot of money and it's so cool how he's essentially like a crazy inventor but he designs games mechanics instead of automated shoe polishers (I don't know why that was the first idea that popped into my head).

Continue on your noble quest Mr.Howard.

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mercanis

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Edited By mercanis

I remember reading Squidi's webcomic several years ago. It transitioned to absurdly dark material over the course of a single strip. It turns out cartoon sprites and pedophilia and rape don't mix well together. Stopped reading and never missed it.

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Sooty

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Edited By Sooty

Patrick Klepek - The asshole who won't call himself an asshole.

I'm joking.

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DrifterInGreen

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Edited By DrifterInGreen

I like how these recent articles seem to be small glimpses not just at the creations but into the creators as well. It really gives another dimension to the games and the industry.

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superxash

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Edited By superxash

Modest Destiny was hilarious. As well as Starship Destiny. And most of his stuff is pretty good.

Just the lengths he went to, to develop the world of Modest Destiny, was astounding. Even though you see a very small portion of this world, it still feels alive. And some of the twists he utilizes are pretty smart.

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audiosnow

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Edited By audiosnow

Man, Patrick. You just went up another peg in my book by writing the phrase "terribly guilty."

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mortface

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Edited By mortface

I want to play SimMMORPG so bad.

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KestrelPi

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Edited By KestrelPi

I'm not sure this guy is actually making the point he's intending to make. I don't think anyone is arguing the value of a good idea. Good ideas are lovely. But they ARE much easier to come up with than actual games, which he's demonstrating by doing it 300 times.

The nature of ideas is that it doesn't take any effort to have them. In fact, most ideas are had while not trying. It does take effort to flesh them out and make them work in the way this guy is doing on his site, but even then, not nearly as much effort as building the mechanics for real, all the assets, getting the game up and running, testing and refining the mechanics and so forth.

That's what people mean when they say ideas are cheap. I've made one medium-sized indie game and a few little ones in the past year and a half - in my spare time, mind - and in the time it took me to make those, I've had three times as many ideas as that. Some of them are even as fleshed out as the ones on that website. Not all of them are as original, but they're all games that I think are worth making. But I will always have ideas faster than I can make games, so some of those ideas I have to be willing to kill. That's why if you're actually planning on making games, it's better to think of ideas like really cool toys rather than children. They might be awesome, but you have to be prepared to chuck 'em away in favour of whatever makes sense right now.

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Stormwatcher

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Edited By Stormwatcher

I really like Sean's comics, they're very good. And he has some pretty amazing ideas. But the Penny Arcade thing was really ridiculous. And people there are not cultish at all, of course we like PA, but we talk shit about them a lot of the time. The forum community is really detached from the site, Gabe and Tycho go nowhere near it. Also, the problem was not with them, but with one forum goer who had the gall of making a freaking avatar.

Anyway, glad to see he's so productive, I love his work.

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KestrelPi

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Edited By KestrelPi

Oh yeah. I was trying to think where I'd heard of this guy before. I started following him because he was briefly in the news for calling out Telltale for some decline in quality, around a year ago. And I agreed with him. But then I found every other tweet of his irritating the hell out of me, so I stopped following him after a while.

And look at this: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=418136&page=48

Hmm. Why is Giant Bomb giving this dude the time of day again?

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Nethlem

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Edited By Nethlem

Heh i can relate to that guy so damn much it's nearly scary..

But i never manage to write my mechanics down, dunno i'm just a too unorganized person for that so i keep the ideas mostly in my head to play around with. Problem is that stuff keeps me up at night when i'm too much into it :/

Yet i wonder: Does anybody know if any developers try applying game theory to game design? Because both of these fields overlap in so many ways that the right usage of game theory could and should lead to a game that's allready perfectly balanced (at least in a statistical way) in it's design phase.

It also sadens me that the game industry by now has become so profit driven that people with the right creativy mind just get left out because they can't manage to penetrate to corporate structures that by now have build themself up all over gaming. It's these same structures that many industries by now have build up, where people with the right "qualifications" (as in: paid money for some kind of title) get further and the people with the ideas and no qualifications get ignored and left out.

It used to be simple: You have an great idea and people would get excited about it.

Now it's kinda like this: You have an great idea and the first thing you hear from 10.000 people is why it will NOT work.

That's the wrong approach for a creative process.. if you see a problem you try to find new solutions for it and not throw the whole thing down in frustration as soon as you run into the first sign of trouble.

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jononono

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Edited By jononono

From reading the title I pictured Sean Howard as a skinny jeans wearing hipster who thinks game designing is too mainstream.