Thoughts on Overflow Part 1

So what happened last week was pretty spectacular and out of the blue; never thought that the production of Overflow would take off like it did. So many things just clicked and because of that we were able to meet our Friday deadline. So I'm going to try to slow down a little bit and look back at how all of this happened.

Turning back the clock, the days have been pretty standard for me. For a few months now I had been prototyping different ideas, some lasting a few day and others upwards of about a week. As a result my desk is covered with old printer paper with hand drawn maps, pieces of code, random words, and idea after idea for games.

I have always been a strategy fan; ever since my family refused to play board games with me anymore I dove into video games. Starcraft is one of my all time favorites; Supreme Commander was brilliant, backed Planetary Annihilation. And because of that I have always wanted to create a strategy game.

Overflow began as a very abstract thought, a water turn based strategy game. Water would pour down from higher terrain onto lower sections, taking them over in a cascading fashion. But what would create the water? Springs? Would they be water towers that overflow? Just kind of a lot of awkward questions that ultimately led me to abandon the idea.

But last week I started playing around in illustrator and ended up creating this:

This file is the game doc for Overflow. I began with some really simple, aesthetic colors and tried to differentiate, yet keep them in similar shades. When I created the first color spectrum the water idea just came back and I knew I could use it in an abstract form.

Immediately I grabbed some graph paper and started cutting out little pieces, colors for one side, numbers for the other to make it easy to differentiate them, and then Mike and I sat on the floor and played it out.