I’ve been working on initiatives for Women in Games International for four years and have recently been involved with some organizing for the rebooted International Game Developers Association Los Angeles Chapter.

To get some ideas for WIGI and IGDA LA, I attended the recent meeting for the IGDA’s Orange County Chapter. Held at the offices of Foundation 9 in Irvine, it was a fun event!

I’ve been in the game industry for 13 years, but I had never before participated in a game design contest. The attendees were split up into 10 groups of six to nine people and we had an hour to come up with a game design including a company name, game title, platform, game engine, main characters and game features.

Every team picked three random words out of a hat and was required to use two of the words in their game design. Our team picked two food-related words along with “toe ring.” We decided to throw out toe ring and starting planning a food fight game.

We initially intended to publish our game for the Wii console to take advantage of the motion controls for a simulated food fight in a school cafeteria. But a “publisher representative” came along and said they wanted our game to be a PSP title. It kind of screwed up the whole motion controls aspect of gameplay, but our team was able to move forward with game design.

We ended up with a game where players start in kindergarten and progress through the grade levels to eighth grade, improving food fight skills, earning better weapons (food items) and using coins earned to customize their player with clothes and protective gear.

At the end of the hour, all teams had to present their game to the group and the “publishers” decided on their favorite. I thought our game was a marketable idea, but a game about drawing with a marker on passed out peoples’ faces with at a party won the competition. The publishers wanted to “play that game right now.’

I’ve spent my game career making packaging and other game marketing materials, so this was my first time brainstorming with a team on game design. It was a lot of fun and I really admired our team’s ability to work together, compromise and roll with the punches of random publisher changes.

I’m not sure WIGI or IGDA LA are the right audiences for a meeting of this type, but I definitely got a new perspective on creating chapter meetings and events for video game professionals.

Way to go IGDA OC!

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 28th, 2010 at 2:58 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.