My first idea was to make a game about the dark lord who is trying to save himself from a prophesy of death brought by a hero by kidnapping and impregnating the princess so he can be reborn again.
I tried to prototype it as a board game but felt like it didn’t work. The idea was good but I couldn’t make a core gameplay from it. When I tried to mix it with additional mechanics of territorial conquest and resource management things got too complicated for a board game.
It pissed me off a lot and I’ve jumped to another idea in a different genre of platformer. It should be a dark knight running by a castle wall breaking through gates and slashing through guards to grab the princess. I was under a false impression that I have all the tools ready for it but alas my javascript code base lacked several important features:
– frame-based sprite animations switchable by name
– tween-based objects animations switchable by name
– collision detection with collision groups and easy to setup results processing
– simple audio API
So it’s ended in a whole lot of procrastination, waste of energy and lack of self confidence.
In the end of the first day I’ve jumped back to the original idea and started to prototype it as a simple adventure/strategy game where you as the dark lord talk to your servant imp who asks different questions about your actions for the day. Then next day comes, you listen to reports, give new commands and so on.
The goal is to live a long and evil life conquering the realm in the process.
In the beginning you own nothing but your lair and a gang of goblins. You can send your troops to siege, raze and pillow. Your evil actions makes you more popular among the monsters and from time to time they ask to join your cause. If you don’t act much your villainy fades, the monsters run off, and in the end you can even fall into slumber which is a game over.
Your acts of agression against villages and towns break the patience of the people and the king. So at some moment heroes begin their assasination attempts and your territorial conquest meets resistance from the king’s army.
The problem with heroes is everyone of those pesky bastards has a small chance to kill you. The more power you have the more the chance. There is a prophesy after all. To get around this problem you need to kidnap a princess and impregnate her using some special game mechanics. 
Of course when you kidnap the lady all kinds of heroes try to save her and you should be sure you can manage the situation. But if you have done your darkest deed you can die ’cause you will be reborn after several turns.
So much ideas. I’ve got to the level of ugly prototype where you can talk with your imp, the days pass, the monsters come and you can send them to the villages. The next step was to implement siege, raze and pillow mechanics. But I was already out of time.
Lessons learned:
– stick to one idea
– be good at low level and fast game prototyping
– ready your tools in advance ( again )
– get the core gameplay ready in the first day
