Having the complete freedom to decide what you want your next indie game to be is kind of a strange phenomenon.

My time with Magnetic Butterfly is drawing to a close. At this point, I’m waiting on some music pieces from a good friend of mine, then I’ll work on some sound effects that fit in with that, then I’ll do some final polishing stuff, but that’s about that for the project. The time that the game’s development spanned is months, but all things told it was about a four-five project of actual work. I have thoughts about the game, but those will be saved for when I actually release it. Nothing says “game release” like listing everything that I feel went wrong with its concept and development.

Over the course of the last couple of weeks, I have been thinking about what kind of project I want to work on next. It’s a strange freedom to have and, really, it makes the process incredibly difficult. Having no constraints aside from the fact that it’s a project that has to be almost entirely doable by myself (and has to take into consideration my attention span, or lack thereof) still leaves a huge amount of room for creative mobility. Working with few constraints is almost always more difficult, at least for me, than working with complete creative freedom.

After a week or so of idly musing about my next project and coming up with nothing that stuck, I decided to think about the process differently. Instead about thinking of a project, I decided to think about a work-flow. I loved working with Unity for Magnetic Butterfly, but as I got closer to finishing the project, the work I felt was necessary to polish everything and make some decent assets was more than I prefer. I probably only spent about ten minutes on each asset as it is now, but if I wasn’t working entirely from a laptop on a hotel bed that time would have grown substantially. Working in 3D, regardless of how amazing the toolset is, is always going to be more work than 2D. That all said, I absolutely love Unity — and will talk about more when I release Magnetic Butterfly — and will return to it for future projects.

What I’m in the mood for right now is a work-flow that allows me to spend no more than two to three weeks on a game. These will, obviously, not be very complicated or lengthy games, but rather gaming vignettes. With this in mind, I started to narrow down the scope of the project I would start working on. I mentioned this goal on Twitter earlier this week, and Ben Abraham mentioned Flixel to me. As soon as I checked out the site, I knew this was exactly what I was looking for. As soon as I saw Queens and Gravity Hook in the games list at the bottom of the page, I was, ahem, hooked.

Once I saw Flixel and the games that it has been used with, I returned back to the thoughts I was having about what kind of project I wanted to make. So far, most of the games I have worked on independently have consisted of, primarily, arena gameplay. Asplode! was a fast-paced arena shooter inspired by my love of Kenta Cho and Geometry Wars and Magnetic Butterfly was… Well. I’m not entirely sure. It was about a butterfly born with a wrecking ball that took place in an arena. My goal for my next project was to deviate from that; which isn’t that hard, but it was one goal.

The next part of the brainstorming process came down to deciding whether I wanted to do an experiential game or a game based around a single mechanic (which, given my scope, would not be a bad design choice). I have been leaning towards doing an experiential game; making the gaming equivalent of a short story. I have always had a soft spot in my heart for short stories, if solely due to the amount I had to write for Creative Writing classes (and it always yielding fun work). Concentrating ideas into as short a format and efficient a presentation as possible was a great way to focus intentions. At the same time, experiential games don’t really line up with my primary ideology as a designer: I like to make things that people can play. As much as I loved Jason Rohrer’s Passage, it’s not really a game that I enjoyed playing so much as I enjoyed taking it in.

The end result is that I thought about making a game that told a minimal story about a character whose “job” may yield a fun game mechanic. And that was my thought process, and hopefully the game it resulted in is done in a couple weeks.