37: Stealing is a superpower

Stealing is a superpower if you do it well.

What is Notes on Play?

A game development log where I share the hardest game design problems, and share thoughts on the games I'm playing. My name is John Rudolph Drexler and you can find my games at catacombian.com

I'm stealing ideas from all my favorite games. well, maybe not stealing. but adapting.

Mudlarks now has its strong scaffolding. i know what its core gameplay is, and it's working great. and so now i want to add in all the many cool ideas that will flesh it out. all the weird divergent and interesting ideas that test its bounds and show how much weight the scaffolding can hold so we can surprise and delight players.

John (01:35.807)
Right. So had this giant spreadsheet already of like all of the cool, crazy ideas that I could get in there to say, how much can this scaffolding hold? What crazy weird, divergent ideas can it hold? Most of them won't work totally fine, but

it's really worthwhile for me to fully explore this to figure out are there cool hidden mechanics in there that I wasn't aware of before. So one of the things that I like to do is pull a whole bunch of games off my shelf here, and go through literally every card and just kind of like

John (03:54.207)
Right. So it kind of adapts like the abstract idea of this, but then it puts it into a different place where it says like you're always discarding cards. What if you have to discard a card that's not really that useful and then you get to take an extra turn?

John (05:43.649)
A game that I have extremely mixed feelings about and I'll confess that I don't it's not my favorite game in the world. But I was thinking about that th one of the things that I do like in Catan is this idea that like your resources mean one thing for like kind of building, but then also you can trade them in in these sets to take big special actions like getting a new card. and I started thinking about that as like, it's interesting to think about the cards in Mudlarks as a kind of currency that could do one of

John (09:21.085)
my board game shelf has been such a source of joy and such a source of inspiration. So steal like a game designer. I can highly recommend it.