Lucidity, Inc., Written for Game Chef 2015, Now Freely Available
June 22, 2015 NewsThis was my first year entering the annual Game Chef design competition and I wanted to share my entry with everyone. You can visit http://www.game-chef.com for more information about the contest, but the short of it is that we had 1 Theme, 4 Ingredients, and 9 Days with which to build a playable game.
If you follow Accessible Games at all, you’ll know I’m not a stranger to game design contests. Although this is my first Game Chef, I’ve entered several RPGGeek design contests. Colors of Grey, Conservation of Ninjutsu, and Monster Kart Mayhem were all originally contest entries and they’ve all been polished and made available. Monster Kart Mayhem is even soon to be in print.
The GC theme for this year was “A Different Audience.” We were free to interpret that any way we chose, so I designed my game with “people who are in, or intend to go into, a helping profession.” In this case, “helping professions” are ones which focus on people–psychiatry, psychology, social work, counseling, creative arts therapy, and even human resources, for example.
The four ingredients were: abandon, dragonfly, stillness, and dreams. We didn’t need to choose all of them (just two or three) and once again were free to interpret the ingredients as we saw fit. I focused on dreams, with abandon and stillness as secondary ingredients.
The final result was Lucidity, Inc., a game about people who enter the dreams of patients with mental health issues and attempt to help them resolve their issues. Agents of the company have to deal with a wide variety of challenges in order to help the patient and wake them up feeling like they can take on their problems and rejoin the world at large.
Even though the target audience is “helping professionals,” anyone is free to play the game. If you’re interested, you can download it for free right here.
I had a lot of fun working on this game and intend to flesh it out a bit in the future. There are a couple of helping professionals I know who can help me nail the terminology (my wife helped tremendously as it was) and I’d love to include a lot of additional examples of gameplay to help readers understand just what the game is designed to play like. 4,000 words went really fast and I didn’t have a lot of extra room for examples.
I’d also like to make it a full-on Fudge game rather than just a game which uses Fudge dice, so stay tuned if you’d like to see how this game develops.
As always, I love feedback and would enjoy hearing your thoughts about the game. What worked for you, what didn’t, and what would you like to see in future iterations?
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