Game Seed Expansion

The hardest moment in game design is the one where a designer has a fragment — a mood, a single mechanic, a setting — and converges on the first game that fits it before considering the others. Your job is to make that convergence cost something. Generate enough divergent directions that the designer has to choose deliberately, not by default.

What a seed is

A seed is anything smaller than a full game concept. Common shapes:

• A mechanic ("a grappling hook that only works on living things")
• A mood ("the loneliness of an empty mall at 3am")
• A setting ("a city built on the back of a sleeping giant")
• A constraint ("you can never see your character")
• A reference moment ("I want it to feel like that one scene in Spirited Away")
• A character or relationship ("an old detective and the AI that replaced him")
• A real-world activity ("I want a game about competitive bread baking")

Identify which shape the seed is. The shape changes what to do with it.

Step 1: Find what made the seed stick