That said, working on that pitch really opened my eyes about how instructive this blog has been. Frankly, when I started it I didn’t expect too much from it. Would writing pitches for random themes, outside of real-world constraints, really make me a better designer? I believe it did.

The assignment I got at my new job was to work on a licensed title. It would have been easy to go for the obvious idea, the kind of stuff you always see for licensed games. In fact, at first I did. When I looked back on what I’d written, I realized that I could do better than that. Heck, I’d done a more interesting concept for a game about wine, of all things. That pushed me to search for something better, something that would do justice to the license and would be more interesting to play.

After thinking and searching for a while longer, I believe I found the right approach — an idea simple enough that it sounds obvious once you hear it, but which wasn’t obvious at all at first. This blog taught me to be confident that there was a better idea to be found, so I kept searching until I found it. But I obviously can’t talk about it. NDAs and all that. Suffice to say the project went from just-another-licensed-title to something pretty interesting, I think. Let’s hope I can help transform this original vision into a cool end-product.

I really recommend this kind of design exercise to anybody who wants to improve as a game designer. Being able to make game concepts without having to fear about the reception it will get from bosses, publishers, license holders and everybody else who can judge your work is liberating. It lets you push yourself to your limits. It’s like exercising in a gymnasium: it’s easier to go to your limits than when doing real work, so real work becomes easier afterward.

The limitation is that the exercises I did here were limited to the initial concept of a game. It’s a critical step, to be sure — if the core of the game sucks, it’ll be hard to make it good — but it’s not everything. I want to try something else: to write a design doc free of external constraints, to train myself in better detailing my designs.

So I plan on working on a design doc in my spare time. The game is a mix between the “Giant Steampunk Robot Battles” and the Drones high concepts I talked about earlier. Problem is, it’s not quite as easy to blog about this since writing a design doc is much longer and is filled with a lot more details than a pitch. I’ll try to find a way to update this blog about my progress, but I’m not sure when that’ll be or what form it’ll take. We’ll see.

One last thing: a number of people wrote me, telling me they have a game design they’d like to sell and asking how to go about it. My honest answer is: I don’t know. I don’t expect to sell that design I’m writing, because there’s no path to selling designs in this business. Somebody could write the world’s greatest game design in his garage, yet he’d probably never be able to sell it because nobody would look at it. And I think that’s a shame.