Working Within Limitations

When you engage in creative activities, you often hear things like “free your mind”, “think outside the box”, and so on. It’s important to hear those things – being free to come up with whatever is in your mind is arguably the essence of creativity, and you need to know it’s okay to pursue that.

However, once you’re on that path, it can be a useful exercise to choose some limits to work within, and see what you can do with that. That lets you focus your creativity on certain aspects, and makes you think about how to take advantage of what already exists. It also prevents the paralysis that can be caused by staring at a blank page and wondering how to fill it!

I ended up doing something similar during the design of Close Encounters, and I think the game ended up better as a result. Here’s how it all worked out.

Quite early on, I had what I thought was a pretty firm idea about what the weapons and equipment in each squad of troopers in the game would be. With that in mind, I then started looking for sources of figures to represent them… and I ran head-first into a problem. The figures that represented those weapons and equipment were all unsatisfactory in one way or another. The only figures that seemed satisfactory in all respects – available when needed, easy to assemble, cheap enough to include but detailed enough to be interesting – didn’t match the equipment and weapons I wanted to include!

A fair bit of searching didn’t reveal any realistic alternatives. So I decided to try to make a virtue out of necessity, and reworked the weapons and equipment to match the figures I intended to use. For example, the Cover Fire mechanic became available to two troopers with rifles rather than only one; and the basic weapons of some troopers became pistols instead of rifles and got a slight bonus to their Combat Value as a result.

I didn’t realise it at the time, but looking back I can see this had some good effects. It improved the resilience of the troopers by making specific troopers less critical. It also made it both possible and desirable for the squads of troopers to work together more closely, and made it more rewarding to get their positioning right.

These are good changes. Having to figure out a way to get a good result within limitations ended up making the game better, and even though I can now 3d print more or less whatever figures I want, I don’t want to go back to my original ideas.

If you’re a bit blocked in a creative endeavour, this might be an approach that could help you. Try to take the limitations and make them work for you, or find a way that they don’t get in the way of what you’re trying to achieve. You might be pleased by what it allows you to do!