Last minute predictions on theme ranking...

Falun on 2010/08/21 20:15
— edited on 2010/08/21 20:15

Make a fool of yourself with me by being completely wrong! How do you think the themes will rank?

I'm going to guess Caught or Pop-up for first and Election last. Not sure how the other two will place.

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Comments

Cosmologicon on 2010/08/21 20:21:

I'm guessing Wings or Pop-up first and Primed last. Unless of course the theme I have the weakest idea for will be first, which always seems to be the case. In that case it will be Caught. :)

adrwen on 2010/08/21 20:31:

Obviously, wings or caught will win and "pop-up" will come last (unless election manages to make itself less attracting).

blakeohare on 2010/08/21 21:36:

Where's Wolf Blitzer when you need him?

I think Caught will win.

Here's why...
 
I felt that Caught was the theme choice that allows specific on-theme inspiration without being too limiting. Pretty much every character-running-around game has the notion of either capturing something or running away from something that's trying to capture you. There are also numerous other variants that people could have run into during brainstorming session. Getting "Caught" while trying to do something sneaky, catching a cold, some sort of sport thing (I've talking to someone who saw a televised sport once and I heard there was catching involved). 

On the other hand, Pop-up and Wings are similarly concrete but are much more inhibiting. Many of the thought paths we went down forced a specific kind of game mechanic that we weren't keen on. Of course there are other definitions such as "winging it" but such abstract ideas would give the appearance of a backwards-thought theme where the team members would feel it may appear to others that they created a game idea they were keen on and forced the theme backwards into it. 

Primed is really abstract. After hours and hours of brainstorming we finally came up with a viable plan for it, but I think we hurt our brains plenty while doing so. 

Election as we saw it had two possibilities. Election as in a vote, which is extremely specific and somewhat limiting unless we included it in a simple backstory. The other was the notion of "election" as just meaning a "choice". Just like before, this gave me fears that it would have been a stretch to make the theme evident as every game is comprised of a series of choices and would look like we slapped the theme on after deciding on a game. 

This was my experience while coming up with ideas. I may have missed obvious gaps that others saw in the theme that we didn't. Also, we were keen on making an adventure game from the start so most of our brainstorming was in the context of that. 

marciano on 2010/08/21 22:04:

I agree with you, Falun. I'll like to guess that "Wings" will get the 4th position, because it's closely related to the "Feather" theme of PyWeek 9.

saluk on 2010/08/22 00:11:

Nice guess blakeohare.