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Photo by "unconstructive_bry" on Flickr

After using the theme “100 Things” from Experimental Gameplay to produce “Envy” last week, I’m going to use “Attraction” as this week’s theme.

This month’s Experimental Gameplay theme is “Rejection,” which I thought that “Attraction” fit well with, as a contrast. I plan to tackle “Rejection” next week, with that game coming just in time for Valentine’s Day.

This bit of pre-planning will help to lock in my theme for the weeks, and force me to commit to the theme and less to the game I can design around the “best theme” of the list I’ve got in front of me. At the same time, choosing a topic ahead of time just gives me that much more time to think about it, and that much more to have going on in my brain while trying to focus down on the current week’s game. The locked in theme from last week, where I really had no choice about it, challenged me in new ways, and led to something altogether different than I might have produced if given a full choice about what to base the game on.