Later Swink
Ernest

So, from your previous response I find that your “game design game” is more of a game than I had originally thought. My first notion of it was a Virtools-based game-creator, like http://www.gamemaker.nl/ or the programs at http://www.garagegames.com/, but now it looks like I’ll have to play some sort of game to earn the tools/parameters that I want to use in my own games. This could definitely be an interesting way to walk someone through tool uses before giving them the access to all of whatever mystical items of power await them, but what about the folks who want to hop right in, or have played it before and already know the steps? Will there be an “advanced” mode or some such with unlimited access to the tools (or, at least, access to the tools but not the maximum parameters available to those tools)?
Right now I’m assuming that players will earn new tools or parameters for their existing tools by completing tutorial-like mini-games while using the Tune tools that they want to unlock/improve. Is this far from the truth?
Also, when whatever goal you set for the player/designer is accomplished, can the earned Tune points be distributed over multiple tools, or will their allocation by limited to the tools that they used to earn them?
Will the player be able to choose to learn and earn points towards tools of their choices, or are you going to have the tutorial-games laid out in a linear fashion? I say this because some players might be more eager to experiment with the “Gravity Warp” tool than the “Inclined Plane” tool, and will want to hop right into the tool of their choice, fleshing out the other ones later.

I’m going to limit the amount of tuning you can do on any one variable with some kind of system design, “tune” points you can earn and spend or something like that. Where it gets really cool is when you can, say, hook a gravity parameter into a slider which allows you to ‘fly’ in a way. And a logical (to me at least) step from there is to then allow access to an engine powerup of some kind. If you have an engine attached to the ship, setting gravity to zero makes an Asteroids-like tuning possible, and so on. Then maybe you can fly up into the sky and play a totally different game with a different set of goals. I’m brainstorming as many of these different little mechanic mini-progressions as possible, with the aim of hooking them all into one another somehow.

Your “game design game” has me a-tingle with antici…pation. I think the basic gateway to success with this project (whatever that means), is to provide the designer with simple, open-ended tools that have the potential for creative results. A basic “goal” system is an obvious choice (i.e. the designer creates an area via a click-and-drag interface that triggers whatever event follows), but what I’m most curious to know is how you plan to make the game design open-ended when including pre-made tools is inherently limiting (at least to some degree) without asking the player to try their hands at programming.
My guess is that once a designer/player sees an example of Tune at work, their first statement is going to go something like “Wow! That’s so cool! But can I make it do THIS?”

Drop a player into just about any platformer, and they’ll assume that their objective is to go forward and kill stuff. Because many other games give them such easily recognized pre-designed goals, they accept that the base game design is simple and repetitive without even thinking about it, ignoring the game’s (and thus their own) obvious limitations. However, by making a “game design game”, you are requesting that players stretch their imaginations, and the limitations which formally kept them shackled fall away. As soon freedom is introduced, players will immediately become aware of other constraints placed upon them by whatever tools you have included, and, ironically, will probably judge the more lenient rules of Tune harsher than the platformer game they happily played five minutes ago.

[/rant]