Back to Denki and it seems that the key rule about coming up with new game ideas here is to just run with them right away. “Immediacy is about proving something as quickly as possible, by any means possible,” says Penn, “you can do it through pictures, play acting, animation, video, anything it takes to make shit happen.” It’s very much the indie gaming ethic – the same approach that inspired Kyle Gabler to set up the Experimental Gameplay Project, which of course led to the awesome World of Goo. “Quarrel is a great example,” continues Penn, referring to the company’s forthcoming XBLA word puzzler. “[We made] a tangible board game of Quarrel that you can actually play. We’ve done this a lot of over the years – we had a Tetris-style game that we prototyped with bits of paper…” Importantly, the board version of Quarrel allowed the team to experiment with and refine the experience without recourse to an Xbox dev kit. It could have been a good solid game before they’d even written a line of code. The message is, forget poring over design documents for months on end, just start making stuff. As Penn asserts, “It’s about trying to get results as soon as you possibly can, using things like repertoire – as in, the known, the familiar, the practiced, the repeatable. Things like middleware would fall into that category. Use any tools you’ve used before, any code you’ve used before, any frameworks you’ve used before; because getting the results is the most important thing. You’ve got to get shit happening – you can talk about it, you can write it down, it means nothing until you actually make it and think f**k that’s nothing like what I thought it was going to be! That happens most of the time.” (via Gary Penn on the rules of game design | Technology | guardian.co.uk)