What is a New Game?

The assignments in this class ask you to make a "new game". What does that mean?

It means that you expect the experience of the game to be novel. In other words, if we picked a random, reasonably-game-savvy person and had them play your game, they would feel like they were playing something that they hadn't played or seen before.

I expect best-effort novelty. Make something you think is fresh. Spend a bit of effort to verify this (e.g., asking your room-mate). I'm not going to scour the internet looking for duplicates of your game. I am not going to mark your game down because, e.g., it happens to overlap with an obscure Ludum Dare submission.

One of the easiest ways to create a novel experience is to work from a known idea and change one crucial thing in the theme or gameplay. The "crucial" part of that statement is crucial. If the thing you change doesn't have a big impact on the game experience, then the game will not feel new.

Some concrete examples of games that used this strategy well:

• Ikaruga adds a color-matching mechanic to a bullet-hell shooter.
• Gish adds soft-body physics to the main character of a 2D platformer.
• Stephen's Sausage Roll is Sokoban with sausages that roll instead of crates that slide.
• Analogue: A Hate Story is a visual novel with a tragic, horrifying plot. (Making up a new plot is a great way for a game to feel fresh, even if the format matches an existing genre. Unfortunately, new plots are hard to make in the time frames we care about.)
• Counterfeit Monkey is a text adventure game where the player can edit words to transform objects. (This is an example of a simple conceptual modification which requires a lot of code to deal with. Beware!)