Um, every time you want to experiment, starting small and simple is always the best way to go. Or another one is, don’t ever forget that it’s about the interactivity, that if you want to just tell a story, you should be making a movie or writing a book and not making a game, and all too often when I work with people, particularly when they’re new to the games industry and have brought me in as a consultant because I’m the game guy, they’ll say I’ve got a game design for you, and they’re start giving me a story, and they may be 15 or 20 minutes into it when I stop them and say, you know, you haven’t yet said what the player does. You’re describing a world and a character and all the backstory and all things that happen to the character, but not the kind of choices that the player has to make. And those choices that a player makes are, you- really, the heart of every game out there, and they may be as simple as, do I rotate this block left or right, and where do I drop it? But that can be incredibly uh, engaging, and uh, profitable for that matter, if you get it just right.
