Herein lie a collection of game prototyping experiments. The main constraint in these experiments is that they must be taken from concept to completion in zero to seven calendar days. If it's a bad week and I am distracted by hairy yaks halfway through, too bad for that prototype.
Since I'm a programmer and not an especially creative person, I'm generating my prototype ideas through a mechanical process: make a big list of all the game elements (chiefly mechanics) that I've enjoyed in my years as a gamer, combine them into a giant NxN matrix and then select randomly.
To start, I'm going to try to give everything a good college try, but if I feel like I'm wasting time on obviously stupid ideas, I may start exercising limited veto power. The point of the random selection is to avoid the uncreative biases that I will undoubtedly exercise if I were to order the NxN pairings based on my perception of their "quality".
Since I am primarily interested in the mechanics of games, most of these elements are game mechanics, but the occasional other kind of element may sneak in.
- Top-down 2D dungeon exploration (ala older Zeldas)
- Golf game-style "set up shot, then time a button press to stop a moving bar within a narrow band to determine how accurately your shot is executed"
- 2D side-scrolling platformer, tile-based world (ala Super Mario Bros)
- Micro-mini-games (ala WarioWare)
- Match-3, replacement tiles slide in (ala Bejeweled)
- Match-same-color, no-replacement (ala QBeez)
- Match-3, evolve matched tiles, match evolved tiles (ala Triple Town)
- Roguelike perma-death, high variance in "luck" in a single session
- Top-down 2D grid unit movement (ala Advance Wars)
- Platformer-style RPG battle resolution (ala Paper Mario)
- Aim and shoot ballistics battles (ala Scorched Earth)
- Environment cultivating to lure collectible animals (ala Viva Pinata)
- Skill-varied minions used in large groups (ala Pikmin)
- Turn-based RPG-style battles (plus rock-paper-scissors) (ala Fire Emblem)
- Solitaire ascending/descending card mechanic
- Poker hand creation mechanic
- Making words from adjacent letters in a grid (ala Boggle)
- Making words from any letters in a grid (ala Bookworm Adventures)
- Building words into connected graph (ala Scrabble)
- Writing small program with tokens which defines your turn actions (ala Robo Rally)
- Hidden role, and also hidden goal/win condition (ala Bang!)
- Tile laying / grid building (ala Carcassonne)
- Head to head puzzle battle (ala Super Puzzle Fighter)
- Fishing/bug collecting; day/night, seasonal appearance cycles (ala Animal Crossing)
- 1/2 hour per day of "garden tending"; slow build up of "house" (ala Animal Crossing)
- Neighborhood NPCs with memory; interact w/ you/one another/your friends (ala Animal Crossing)
- Drop puzzle (ala Dr. Mario, Tetris, Super Puzzle Fighter, Puzzle League)
- Chained combos (in puzzle, or not) (ala Planet Puzzle League)
- Many variants on "puzzle" physics/mechanics (ala Meteos)
- Discrete tool set/powers, obstacles requiring one or more tools (ala Zelda)
- Single world unveiled in large chunks and backfilled as you progress (ala Zelda)
- Territory/resource control, in-place utilization, network of cities (ala Civ)
- Reincarnation with incremental environment changes for progress (ala Shirin, Roguelikes)
- Player and enemies each move one square per turn (ala Nethack)
- Lob soldiers at opponent, counter-lob, further action if they arrive (ala Rocket Slime)
- Peggle?
This list may grow as I think of other things.
All the code herein is released under a BSD License. Do what you will.