Game Design & Exercise Books
Earlier this week, I suffered an injury on my leg which required me to undergo a surgical operation and was subsequently hospitalized. While I am now discharged from the hospital and able to work from home, I thought it would still be good to take the rest of the week off to rest and recover.
Incidentally, I also found some time during this period to tidy my room, and came across some old creations of mine - some “tabletop role-playing games” that I devised back when I was just 9.
Using a bunch of spare exercise books, I was introduced (by a classmate of mine) to the concept of designing and creating games that could be played in school classes that were boring or when teachers were absent, and promptly proceeded to fill these books with what you would typically find in RPGs - maps, quests, monster entries, equipment, character pages. What I lacked in artistic skill, I made up for it by pleading with a couple of talented classmates to collaborate and draw pieces of art for the game. Then, I invited the few classmates sitting near me to embark on adventures, kill monsters, and upgrade their characters.
My friends would “log into” the game almost daily over at my desk, embark on co-op adventures, and even competed against each other as to who would have the best equipment. Definitely beats looking at grammar forms and exercise papers any day of the week, haha.
As the games’ popularity grew, so did the content. Observing the cheers and frustrations of loyal friends of mine who avidly played and supported my games, I made adjustments along the way to ease some of the pain points, and accentuated epic moments.
To me, I enjoyed creating games as much as playing them. I honestly wasn't aware of the concept of game development until many years later, but this was probably the first time that I felt the liberating freedom and joy of creating an interactive experience for my friends at school.
Years later, I would still cling on to that imaginative spirit and work on game projects bigger than I had ever imagined.
Looking back now, these exercise books never fail to put a smile on my face. What was a seemingly fun activity for a bored kid, in fact, turned out to be my first foray into live game production!
They say that life's twists and turns change a person - but I believe that if you look really closely, a person's core never really changes. And that, for me, is one of a dreaming gamer.
