tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11102275993100354892024-02-19T23:24:09.636-08:00he had a novel idea for a gameAlexhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06320977465810683684noreply@blogger.comBlogger51125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1110227599310035489.post-54424477048806725432009-04-13T11:57:00.001-07:002010-08-06T17:13:21.845-07:00On the Keeping of a KingdomHas it really been 6 months since I posted here? My concept of time has been simply mad this year.<br /><br />A couple of hiatuses from, and subsequent returns to, game design, have lead to a crystallization of my thinking on the process. I find I'm less inclined to go down poor paths, to flesh out ideas that aren't workable. My instincts for good and bad designs are growing more keen, and I can bring them to bear on less well-formed designs. I was attempting to pin down what exactly the insights are, but they're slippery. Here's a start:<br /><br />- Don't fall in love with engines. I sometimes figure out a conceptual way that certain game entities might interact, creating an engine that the player can influence. This is a bad starting place for a design, and placing such a mechanism first is going to put you down a design path that is unlikely to actually be fun, and will to tough to deviate from mentally. This was the biggest problem with much of my early designing.<br /><br />- What is the challenge structure? This is the biggest insight I've had, is to ask this. Challenges, as I think I discussed in a previous post, are at the heart of interesting gameplay. When the player sits down, what challenges are presented to them? Ask this of any new design you have, if you don't have a good answer, work on the idea until you do. If you still can't solve it, its not a good design.<br /><br />- What is the simplest version possible of this game? God, this exercise is useful, this is a great way to judge the early viability of a game.<br /><br />- What are the first two sentences you say to a new player when you sit them down to play this game? Imagine you are just sitting down to play this game, and it is being explained to you, is it something that you want to play? This is an important step-back method later in the process, when you're trying to sort the details out. Is there a core way to explain the game to someone new that is understandable (grokable even) and appealing? So often you wander from the core of what you wanted to do in a game, get so excited about some mechanism that its become impenetrable to the new player.<br /><br />I think games need to be constructed in layers of elegance, and that this can be detected by the way that a new player perceives the game. Is there a quick, high-level picture of what the game's about? Does the rest of the stuff fall under that as reasonable extensions of the initial principles?<br /><br />My point is, a teachable game is a good game. The more easily players can internalize the logic of your game, the sooner they can get to the business of playing it. Thinking about how you would present the game as it currently exists is a valuable exercise in the quality of the design.<br /><br />---<br /><br />This is all to say these are techniques for seeing your game in terms of the experience it provides, rather than the makeup of its parts. And this doesn't mean the decisions that are presented, or the per-turn nuances that you're trying to create: that's the sort of stuff you think about naturally while you're designing. The challenging part is to see the big picture, to see if all that stuff is adding up to a game.<br /><br />Because honestly, usually when you take a stab at the detailed mechanics of a game, you're going to end up with ones that just don't work. Its such a fragile, fickle, brittle, wicked thing, game design, the low level stuff you create that seems good in isolation just rarely works in the broader context. The trick is to recognize that early on, and try again, and again, and to keep your searches shallow and your process broad. When you dive too deep into a given mechanic, and invest too much time into it, and allow too many assumptions inherent to it to calcify, you've ruined the entire design for yourself. You're no longer able to throw it away and try something else, it has crusted into place around the rest of your design the two have to live or die together. So they die.<br /><br />---<br /><br />So yes, this is all a bit dramatic, mostly for effect. Of course generating ideas is good, as is exploring them, falling in love with them, honing them and being patient. Finding elegance is hard work. But I rant like this because I think that the other side of the coin is easy to ignore, especially for the novice designer (like me, still, to be honest). Of course, yes, you can throw ideas away, and good designers do. But my point is, its harder than you think, and hard work and focus on a given idea that shows promise is not always the right course of action.<br /><br />--<br /><br />This ties into two general design theories that have come into focus for me this year, that I will allude to just briefly here:<br /><br />1) Design is about creating approximations of the outcomes and experiences that you expect your design to lead to. You need to create sketches, models, mental simulations, actual simulations and other approximations of your design, and see how they fare in approximated practice. This is tough in board game design, where the actual experience is borne of the complex unknowable interactions of mechanics and human minds, but the tips I mention above are a start.<br /><br />2) There are special challenges when you are designing information-based products such as software and board games, when you are creating not a physical object but a system of rules and ideas. In these cases, too much depth early on is a death stroke. Its as if your first step in designing a building was to lay down a huge iron column and decide what to do from there (with apologies to Christopher Alexander).<br /><br />Here's the myth about software design and board game design: that mental design decisions are wholly malleable. The ideal is that you just think about stuff, and if a given solution doesn't work, well, you'll just try something else. You won't.<br /><br />Once you've thought about a given idea in enough depth, put the effort into developing it, gotten used to thinking about certain idea's you've developed as givens and constraints to work around, they become solid. They become as solid as if you'd physically started building something.<br /><br />What you need to do in board game design, and software design as my ongoing research is trying to prove, is take lots of little stabs at the problem. Explore it from a variety of angles at minimal depth, and slowly work your way in. The preliminary work on one angle will provide the means to understand the other angles, and as long as you don't go deep on one too early, you won't lock the whole thing up and ruin it.<br /><br />Some of the tips I mentioned above are towards this aim. You think about the challenges, the simple version, the explanation of the game. They yank you out of your current angle, show you the others, show you where they clash. And if you're lucky, you can try to build an elegant solution that involves the shifting of all of the angles' needs, instead of building them around one big calcified spike of an idea that you're just too attached to.<br /><br />---<br /><br />Again, I know, this is all very dramatic. The idea of spikes you can't move, of all these angles, of clawing your way back out of your ideas? Its only to draw contrast to what you might think about game design.<br /><br />Every idea you generate is a double edged sword that represents progress in one direction, but resists deviations from that path. Its a fortress. You've staked out a space, and now you can use it, but if you try to uproot it, it will bristle with crossbows from palisades. Build little outposts on the landscape, but don't let any of them get so strong that they defy you.<br /><span style="font-size:85%;"><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Edit: added 3rd section as something of a response to Chad's comment - thanks Chad!</span></span>Alexhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06320977465810683684noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1110227599310035489.post-57266941836438007142008-08-14T16:15:00.001-07:002008-08-14T16:31:01.671-07:00Progress?Yesterday I sat down for a quantity-over-quality design session, a bit more detailed than outright brainstorming, but just trying to get some ideas flowing. It ended up going on, on and off, for about 2 hours, and resulted in 21 preliminary game designs over about 5 pages in a notebook. Its got me thinking in a lot of directions, working on my intuitions about what works, noticing my tendencies, noticing mental traps and ruts that I go into again and again. I also found that just having the TV on quietly in the background was helpful to give me some stimulus, some inspiration to get ideas flowing. Writing down words that kept kicking around in my head also helped to spark new directions when I was in a mental loop/trap/rut. So useful in a few ways, pretty satisfying. I will try to do more of these in the future.<br /><br />For reference, here's a 1 line description of each. Some of these werent' developed much more than this, some got a half page of side ideas to themselves:<br />1. A party/parlor/word card game about rapping/poetry/rhyming words<br />2. A game based on google searches, each person gets a laptop? Guesses about searches?<br />3. Minigame Social Game sub-idea: Numbered hats as rank, determines matchups<br />4. Minigame Social Game sub-idea: What room you're in determines challenge types availible<br />5. Climbing game based on reveals of vertical tiles<br />6. A traditional-deck game about rigging and betting on sporting events<br />7. Each player makes a dungeon and explores others' dungeons - an improved design of an idea I saw in another game<br />8. Moving furniture into a room<br />9. Simple sports game with a cheating/steroids element<br />10. Alchemy still hasn't been done right - some notes.<br />11. Game of Games - this is an involved one.<br />12. Marching band field show game<br />13. Play at the plate - a 2 player game of the subtle sub-second moments and movements of a single opposed action<br />14. Totem Pole Building<br />15. Fight/chase in an abandoned suburb<br />16. Chili Cookoff - expansion of a DnD minigame I had in the day<br />17. Game of being dungeon masters and keeping players happy<br />18. Zen Game - trying not to adhere to any of several false "victory conditions"<br />19. Poker/combinations with "squared" deck<br />20. Guiding a teammate through the maze/situation/obstaclt course you can see that they can't<br />21. Minigame Social Game sub-idea: 2 on 2 team approachAlexhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06320977465810683684noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1110227599310035489.post-58390611353588931342008-08-11T17:55:00.000-07:002008-08-11T18:56:02.824-07:00Victory ConditionsHow do I see myself succeeding at this game design game? I'd like to create something playable; something fun. I see three main ways this might be achieved, three kinds of games, or more accurately three kinds of game designs, that might forge that path.<br /><br />1. The real game. The traditional-sized, fairly complex game that doesn't reinvent the hobby, but that I just happen to make better than average through some effective designing. This is the hardest to accomplish, the hardest to prototype, and the most daunting to playtest.<br />My Examples: Pirate coop, nearly every early game I designed<br />Real-World Successes: Puerto Rico, Arkham Horror, most games.<br /><br />2. The simple game. Sure its not the best game you ever played, but its an illustration of a clever mechanic or interaction, and it was obviously designed as a "small" game. Pet games might use cheap components, or existing components like traditional dice or cards, piecepacks, or minimal custom decks. Can seem unexciting, but are far more feasible to prototype and play.<br />My Examples: Several designs, tellingly though, few that get talked about here.<br />Real-World Successes: Many public domain games, many cheapass games, card games such as 6-nimmt and rage, For Sale, many smaller Knizia games.<br /><br />3. The innovative game. Take a simple idea and make it fly, providing something really new, without necessarily recombining things that you'd seen in the past. This best explained through:<br />Real World Successes: Apples to Apples was able to go with nothing but a decko f words and like 3 rules to create gameplay. Tales of the Arabian Nights brought the book of tales concept to its full height (and most of the rules they added afterwards really weren't necessary). Finstere Flure built a simple set of rules around the idea of an autonomous monster, Roborally added some (too many, perhaps) rules around the basic notion of prealigning moves with a card each. Magic obviously blew things up with its collectible notion (though the game itself is one of the most complex around if you really get down into it).<br /><br />The real game is the hardest to create, the hardest to work with, but its easy to slip into. I often start with something simple or innovative, and I really like it. But it doesn't quite work, and I can't quite get it to come together, but I liked the original idea enough that I can't really let go of it. Soon I've painted myself into a corner, and don't know it, or cling onto the idea anyway. Making a real game work requires, as I've described recently, resources and/or bravery that I currently don't have, and rather than fight it, I'd like to satisfy myself with smaller designs for a while. So, how to proceed.<br /><br />1) Accept the growth and go ahead and try to make the "real" designs that start to emerge work.<br />2) Show more discipline in keeping ideas simple. Easier said than done, but something I'm working on.<br />3) Generate more simple ideas, creating a large number of them, and not getting too attached to any one.<br /><br />This last one is where I'm going with all this. It seems a little unintuitive, essentially a strategy of quitting. To explain: I think its far, far too easy in design in general, and game design in particular, to get hung up on a given idea, work out some additional rules/constraints/decisions to make it work, get locked into those ideas, and find yourself in a failing state in the space of possible designs, without the will/wisdom/wherewithall to know how to salvage what was working. In fact, in the midst of working on a given idea, I'd say its nearly impossible to even throw away everything other than the core idea and try a different direction on it, let alone retreat to a more complete, later, partially successful state.<br /><br />But that idea was good - what's needed is a way to keep it, but to get a clean conceptual start on it. I wonder if rather than hashing out a single idea, it would be wiser to create a large number of ideas, take a stab at working out each, but then log them, move on, and use the time working on newer ideas as a palette cleansing period to take on those that have fallen by the side.<br /><br />Perhaps I'm not succeeding in explaining the motivations behind this process, let alone the process itself. But I want to find a way to:<br />1) ride that enthusiasm of an idea, which is fun<br />2) explore it a bit<br />3) but not keep pounding on it until its broken<br />4) find away to return to it later<br /><br />In short, going a bit more breadth first with my design process for a bit - increasing my chances of keeping the core good ideas straight and sticking to those simple and innovative games without letting the need to make them work distort them. This might involve a more rigorous approach to my sketchbooks and filing, or might emply this blog somehow. We'll see.Alexhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06320977465810683684noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1110227599310035489.post-28655699143799594372008-07-29T21:54:00.001-07:002008-07-29T22:06:21.651-07:00regarding the real worldI'm constantly looking at the world in game design terms, but this can lead to lots of excitable trips down dead end paths. Oftentimes, I find:<br /><br />1. Modeling an interesting real-world decision process in a game does not necessarily result in an interesting game mechanic.<br /><br />2. Introducing an interesting real-world effect as a rule does not necessarily make for an interesting rule, let alone interesting gameplay.<br /><br />There's getting inspired, and there's getting distracted. Telling them apart is difficult.Alexhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06320977465810683684noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1110227599310035489.post-34902730957141169302008-07-29T20:32:00.000-07:002008-07-29T21:12:00.032-07:00gosh but designing games is hardI worked for a while on the pirate coop game, and the asymetrical monster city game - and I think both have potential. Lately I've hatched an idea for a strange drafting / sports game that seems to have learned the lessons of previous similar designs. But its proving tough to get past a certain point with these designs.<br /><br />I think part of the problem is, there is only so much you can do without a playtest group. Furthermore, I think you need hours and hours of playtesting at various levels to make any progress. And while I might have had the possibility of such a group years ago, I didn't take advantage of it, and now the possibility has largely evaporated.<br /><br />What is the solution? I'm not sure, I suppose I could look for / recruit for a group locally, on craigslist of whatever. Its a bit of an intimidating prospect, but I think a groups of this kind are the only hope for moving beyond the sketches and doodles phase.<br /><br />But then, is that a goal? The sketches and doodles phase is fun, and maybe that's just where I'll stay. Its a bit useless, but no bigger a waste of time than, say playing video games. And I do feel like I'm honing my sense of what will work and what won't, catching duds earlier in the process, steering designs away from pitfalls I'm learning about.<br /><br />The latest draft-ball-game is a good example of this - maybe something I'll write up later.Alexhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06320977465810683684noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1110227599310035489.post-66268751454008367802008-06-24T22:57:00.000-07:002008-06-24T23:00:11.484-07:00updates?I've worked a lot on Robin and my Coop pirates game, though that is a big beast of a design to really finish.<br /><br />In other news, having a girlfriend is detrimental to getting board game design work done.Alexhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06320977465810683684noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1110227599310035489.post-83847182982171728322008-05-06T15:21:00.001-07:002008-05-06T15:29:45.944-07:00The Drama of DiceWhy board games over computer games? Why bother with board games at all? I think a lot of it is that they're an excuse to hang out, to enjoy face to face interaction. But its also the bits, some intangible quality of the physical components.<br /><br />I've been reading this book about In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, with these impassioned descriptions of how certain fuzziness was achieved using analog techniques, how acoustic guitars trump electric, how lo-fi can be better than polished. I think a lot of the appeal of board games lies in the same subtle corners of "realness".<br /><br />In particular, dice. There was this geeklist a while back where someone was saying what was wrong with American-style board games. Dice was one of the problems, too many dice. But it made me realize how much I *like* dice. Here was one of my responses, about the appeal of an important die roll.<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">They bounce and rattle and tease you with the face you need, spinning on end, your mind grasping for the first moment when the result is rendered, eyes darting across the seven settling cubes; a five! did I see a one and a two out of the corner of my eye? I swear that was about to fall a six! Everyone's eyes fly about, trying to be the first to declare the result. And someone yelps, and a ripple runs through the players, a mere half-second in length as everyone sees the result - success!<br /><br />That dulcet anticipation of the result is terribly underappreciated, and terribly lacking in other mechanisms.</span><br /><br />Its just not the same as flipping a tile, looking up a result on a chart, or your opponent revealing a card. The die has been cast, nothing can be done now, but to watch and hope, and try to figure out the result as soon as possible. Its like a basketball shot flying through the air, as you try to determine whether you think its going to go in, as all has been done, and soon physics will tell you the outcome.<br /><br />Here's another example, from a Battlestations session report I did (that, by the way, was featured on their official site, for some reason). Note that all rolls are two dice in this game, needing a total of 8, in this case:<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">At this point, despite having the “lucky” perk, Leonov was completely out of luck. The ship was size 4, the speed was 6. Leonov had one point of piloting skill, and he had prepared. He *needed* a natural roll of 8 to turn the ship.<br /><br />We made this clear, and got ready for the roll. We psyched ourselves up and leaned forward on the couches. Nate readied himself, and rolled the dice. The first die came up a 2. Immediately. We all agreed afterwards that there was a subtle but distinct backward motion in each of us, as we slouched backwards in defeat and disappointment. It was just instinctual, you see a 2, and its over. 2’s are really, really bad. But that damn second die just spun on its corner, I can still see it now. It spun and tumbled and came down a flippin’ 6. We totally lost it.</span><br /><br />That actually happened that way. So strange, that the low number slapped down right away, while the other die spun for so long. The odds of all of that coming together for maximum drama are ridiculous.<br /><br />------<br /><br />So I like dice. As an actual game design post, what is the conclusion? Well, its made me realize the importance of the pieces you use. I've long considered the relative merits and abilities of cards, tiles, dice, discs, etc., but another dimension is the psychological impact of the actual physical objects that are at play.<br /><br />And when it comes to dice, how do you use them to determine outcomes? This came about when I was designing this superhero game today, which is really more of a candidate theming of a mechanic I like, rather than a theme I'm married to. In any case, I wanted a simple die roll to determine the outcome of a crime-fighting activity. At first I considered a single die roll + modifier check. But then I considered, this is a simple roll that will often have a very big impact on things: it needs to carry as much drama as possible. From that perspective, rather than looking at the result of a single die, it would be more exciting to have that brief moment of uncertainty as you roll. Its that moment when the two samurai have run past eachother, and you wait to see which generates a jet of blood indicating he had already lost.<br /><br />So maybe two dice, as in battlestations. Or maybe a number of dice equal to your skill, requiring a particular number of successes, as in Arkham Horror, Betrayal, etc. I think its telling that those two games, theme-rich as they are, both use that mechanic, and I certainly have gotten some good drama out watching those die rolls unfold.<br /><br />Plus, double counting makes it tougher to pin down the actual odds at play, vs needing a given number on two dice.<br /><br />My point is, I had often seen randomization mechanisms purely in terms of the outcomes they could produce, and in what proportions. But there are also implications to the user experience of actually handing those components, and using them to determine the results of their actions. What kind of physical drama does that create, in the real act of playing the game? Its a subtle issue, and not one that I've seen get much overt attention from the game design community.Alexhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06320977465810683684noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1110227599310035489.post-12139633669754071342008-04-28T15:16:00.000-07:002008-04-28T16:36:51.495-07:00The StrategizingI think the clues were all there. This will maybe be no big epiphany to most of my readers, who mostly know me well. But the full realization came as something of a surprise to me: I like talking about games more than I like playing them. In fact, I think one of the main reasons I even bother playing games is so that I can talk about them afterwards, or even during.<br /><br />Whatever it might be, the design of the game itself, the way the game played out, or the strategies that one might employ. The latter of these was what really got my attention yesterday. I was playing a bit of this flash game <a href="http://www.newsandentertainment.com/zfproximity.html">proximity</a>, and was mulling over the strategies one might use. The game was fun, but it was mostly a testing session to puzzle over what the overall strategies might be. And when I came to interesting tradeoffs, about defensive moves vs offensive ones, for example, I wanted to chat over them. If I'd been playing with a person, I would have found that much more interesting than continuing to play the game in isolation of one another.<br /><br />What does that mean? Some offshoots:<br />1) It help explains some of my issues with being chatty during games.<br />2) This explains why I like games like Magic, where discussing new cards, decks, strategies, formats, are totally part of the game. Similarly, I like that Apples to Apples is mostly about discussing the choices (at least for me), and can see how I might come to like an open-ended game like Race for the Galaxy once I could talk competently about the cards.<br />3) Maybe this means I'm cut out to design games, in that I like thinking about games and externalizing said thoughts. But maybe it means I'm a lousy choice - I mean, if I don't even like playing games, just theorizing about them, does that disqualify me from doing it right?<br />4) Is there a way to leverage this appeal into a game? Cooperative games are a start, where you discuss strategies. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomic">Nomic</a>s are a start, but sort of too fiddly. I guess the problem is that it can't be competitive, at least not openly. Maybe what I want isn't a game at all, but a conversation. Is there a way to structure an activity that would scratch this itch? Now I'm just getting out there. Maybe there is room for something like this in a Social Game (a topic I've not really touched upon yet properly here, but likely will some day).<br /><br />Games are more interesting than they are fun, for me, these days. A troubling realization, perhaps.Alexhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06320977465810683684noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1110227599310035489.post-31584274340954523982008-03-19T06:11:00.001-07:002008-03-19T06:12:49.380-07:00I'm a bad bloggerJust been too busy. I think the monster game is really coming together. It is COMPLETELY different than when it started, much cleaner, though still evolving out from under me all the time.<br /><br />I've also rekindled ideas of a software design game. Uh oh.Alexhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06320977465810683684noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1110227599310035489.post-54579963660932084582008-02-28T17:38:00.001-08:002008-02-28T17:40:25.055-08:00Stuff I've been doingI made a pretty substantial <a href="http://ilovetheeverything.blogspot.com/2008/02/stuff-ive-been-doing.html"><strong>post</strong></a> over on my brain dump blog about some of my recent non-game projects, which might be interesting to some of you.Alexhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06320977465810683684noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1110227599310035489.post-39383066385074583252008-02-28T17:08:00.000-08:002008-02-28T18:21:44.564-08:00The OriginIn case you were wondering about this blog's name...<br /><p><a href="http://www.ics.uci.edu/~abaker/temp/sign.jpg"><img style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 320px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="http://www.ics.uci.edu/~abaker/temp/sign.jpg" border="0" /></a>It comes from a fairly perfect (educational?) sign that Chad got me back in the day. Trivia for when I'm famous. </p>Alexhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06320977465810683684noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1110227599310035489.post-36179333886318692072008-02-24T02:07:00.000-08:002008-02-24T02:10:17.616-08:00Monster CityJust a quick update. I playtested a new, action-point-based version of this with the Tigris and Euphrates components, featuring a much smaller-scale city, and it seemed to go well. There are some interesting, emergent things that I'm liking. It still needs something, but its the best I've felt about it so far. Something special is happening with it, I just need to hone that into a proper game without losing that.<br /><br />Don't have the time to do a proper update now, but will soon.Alexhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06320977465810683684noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1110227599310035489.post-53541882282155890202008-02-10T19:55:00.000-08:002008-02-10T21:37:42.717-08:00ChallengesI continue to wrangle with ways of thinking about designing games, looking for metaphors and perspectives that might shed light on which approaches are most promising. One perspective that has seemed promising is Challenges, that is, looking at designs in terms of the challenges they present to the player. Does the play have a way to translate their overall goal of winning into lower level strategic and tactical challenges? Ideally, a game has a variety of cycles of goal-setting, goal-pursuit and resolution.<br /><br />For example, a game of Puerto Rico might involve a player who says "I'm going to pursue a factory strategy", "I need a coffeee roaster", "I need to get more money", "I need to get that last small market", "I need to sell my goods", "I need to make sure I sell my goods before Ted, who aslo has a sugar and would clog that market slot". Etc. There are challenges that have subchallenges, and a player can pursue them.<br /><br />Challenges are good. They give the player something to strive for, and even feeling like you have chosen the right goal is itself satisfying. Plus, whenever you have a challenges, you have an opportunity for drama. Either you have victory or defeat, either you meet your challenge or fail.<br /><br />So a challenge is:<br />- Setting a goal<br />- Making decisions in an effort to achieve that goal<br />- Resolution of the challenge, as success, failure, or a bit of both.<br /><br /><strong>Challenge Establishing</strong><br />It would seem that all games would have challenges, but some are surprisingly lacking, and suffer as a result. In a game like Fresh Fish, where results are largely emergent can defy challenge-making, at least the first couple of times you play. You have the challenge of "get your production facilities close to the delivery spots" but it can be hard to translate that into lower-level challenges. Strategies are not readily apparent, so you blithely throw down cubes. If you fail, you don't feel as if you're failed to meet a challenge, but rather just shrug at the situation.<br /><br />An unexperienced Go player will see opportunities to surround enemy groups, and establish their capture as a Challenge. But more experienced players will know to look for sublte aspects of eyes, sente and aji, carefully choosing which battles to fight, setting up areas of power, and psychological ploys. Their challenges extend to higher and lower levels of abstraction, giving richer gameplay.<br /><br />So its important that the gameplay provide opportunities for players to establish challenges in the first place. Ideally, this happens from the first play. For example, in Ticket to Ride, tickets suggest the challenge of completing them, and beneath that there are the challenges of finishing particular routes, and therefore challenges of gathering the necessary cards. The game is such a successful gateway game because it provides a rich challenge structure, right off the bat.<br /><br /><strong>Challenge Pursuit</strong><br />Once a challenge has been established by a player, they need to have the tools to satisfyingly pursue it. There should be uncertainty about whether you will succeed, but you should have some control over your fate. If you don't feel like your efforts affect your consequences, you're going to stop caring about the challenges before you.<br /><br />A lot of well-known problems with games can be related to this idea. If a game is too luck-heavy, you can find yourself establishing challenges, trying to meet them, but being arbitrary thrwarted. Eventually, you're liable to lose interest. Similarly, there's the "runaway leader problem", where once a player gets ahead there's little other players can do to stop them (often in a racing game). This means that other players' challenge of "winning the game" might not have any subchallenges that could reasonably lead to success. Players end up disengaged from the game without challenging challenges.<br /><br />-----<br /><br />So this is a perspective on ways you engage the player, and provide them with opportunities to engage themselves in the gameplay. The encouraging thing is, I can look at a lot of my failed designs and see how they didn't present viable subchallenges. They gave the player win conditions, and choices, but not any interesting nuggets of intermediate goals, success and failure. Conversely, I can see how nearly any game I like has a good challenge structure. I hope that by seeing things this way, I can have a better concept of how to separate promising designs from unpromising ones earlier in the process.<br /><br />One direct offshoot is that I think the current Monster City design has some real problems here. But the good news is that I have some ideas, albeit drastic ones, on how to fix it. More on that soon.Alexhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06320977465810683684noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1110227599310035489.post-32834464917141923372008-02-07T12:59:00.000-08:002008-02-07T13:14:15.896-08:00Malleable Monster and Branches of PowerI talked with Chad a bit about the Monster City design, one thing we batted around was having changable sides. On the city side, there would be six possible factions, each with their own unit and set of cards, and you would choose three of them to use during a game. This would give each game a different feel. Similarly, the monster would choose a number of parts to its body, each of which provided specific move cards. The overall balance of attacks and movement would be preserved by associating them with "leg", "arm" "head" etc, card types, which would tend towards certain types of moves, and each monster wounld choose on of several options from each category.<br /><br />There's a part of me that likes this for the replay value. The balance would be wonky at times, but this isn't an abstract asymetrical strategy game, its just meant to be fun. More Memoir '44 than Fox and Geese. Players would have more ownership over their abilities, and would be able to try drastically different approaches.<br /><br />There's a part of me that is aesthetically repulsed by it though, it seems so messy. I'd want to really clean up the basic mechanics down to nearly nothign, and keep the cards themselves very elegant.<br /><br />Also, because I would no longer be trying to perfectly balance the game, some games would be a little lopsided. So I would design it more as a "one more game" game, with a quick play time.<br /><br />The end result being, I need to really streamline this down. I think shrinking the board *way* down might also be in order. The district idea might go away.<br /><br />----<br /><br />Also, I realized I need some kind of drama that rises and falls over the course of the game. Something that makes each turn different than the last, and provides a secondary concern. I know this is at odds with what I just said, and if I streamline the game down enough, maybe I can avoid this. But everything seems very linear these days. A "rage" value that rises and falls might be a step i the right direction, where more powerful moves are enabled by a higher value. Conversely, there might be a "morale" value for the city troops. Some secondary concern to strategically balance against, to carefully judge the importance of at a given moment.<br /><br />-----<br /><br />I wonder if cards are even still the way to go for the monster. Dice, in a particular way, are starting to become appealing again. Its a long story.Alexhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06320977465810683684noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1110227599310035489.post-43643370750237606062008-01-15T12:57:00.000-08:002008-01-15T13:17:18.939-08:00Monster City updateStill working on this design. I've got some stuff in place that I think is generally working, but I think I need some outside input. I am just too damn involved in the design to be able to think about it rationally any more, too invested in particular avenues and concerns, and I need a fresh set of eyes to say "well, obviously this part is the problem."<br /><br />The basic innovations of this version are:<br />- A more interesting city map. No more straight grid, but a series of city blocks and alleys with some character. I should have done this in the first place, it is already much more interesting.<br />- An unconventional movement model. The city is broken up into 6 districts. Each unit can undertake "normal movement", moving X spaces on the board. But they can also use "strategic movement": if they are outside the district the monster is in, they can move directly to any other space outside the monster's district. What this means is, your units are never completely out of the fight, they're always a move away from the border of the area where the action is. So far this looks to have some very nice emergent strategy as the monster considers when to change districts, and the city player tries to prevent or anticipate these changes. Credit Europe Engulfed for inspiration on this matter: thematically it means that its easy to move through uncontested areas, but a lot tougher when you're implicitly being careful, being attacked, or otherwise moving through a warzone.<br />- Finally! The "damage" model. As I mentioned previously, the monster can't destroy buildings when its within range of a unit's attack. This feels really right, giving the city player just the right amount of control over the monster mechanically and thematically.<br />- Card-based movement. This is giving me the kind of semi-predictability I wanted, I think, though this is the part of the game I am least certain of.<br /><br />The game feels a little slow right now. but I need to playtest a bit because:<br />- Games always seem slower and more boring when you're self-playtesting, need to see how much that carries over.<br />- I think the basics are in place, and I think it could just be missing some changes to the board and cards, rather than fundamental rule changes. This is something I definitely need another head for.<br /><br />Things I'm looking for:<br /> - Keeping the pace brisk<br /> - Balancing the sides<br /> - Avoiding a runaway winner<br /> - That pop. Right now, each turn is a bit like the last, needs some ramping tension, som buildup of power, some unexpected turns. This is probably my biggest issue, but one that should be fun to try to fix.<br /><br />Maybe I'll employ Robin for this, though I will certainly bring the prototype to Seattle for some poking on my visit.Alexhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06320977465810683684noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1110227599310035489.post-46715789768971141672008-01-08T01:26:00.000-08:002008-01-08T01:29:47.613-08:00slow daysBetween the holidays, workshop papers, and general turmoil, I've not been on the game design train lately, but hope to be back next week. In the meantime, I started this <a href="http://ilovetheeverything.blogspot.com/">blog</a>. It's everything this one isn't, and will hopefully help keep the toxins away from here. Until soon - AlexAlexhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06320977465810683684noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1110227599310035489.post-90796250289362318892007-12-20T17:28:00.001-08:002007-12-21T12:15:05.582-08:00Romantic Bits<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/ciu/9a/0f/e680b220dca05638b9662010._AA240_.L.jpg"><img style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; WIDTH: 225px; CURSOR: pointer; HEIGHT: 225px; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/ciu/9a/0f/e680b220dca05638b9662010._AA240_.L.jpg" border="0" /></a><br />I was looking at a board game book on Amazon, and noticed this cover of a related item. I'm a big fan of bits/pieces/tokens/components in a game - I liked the little <a href="http://www.boardgamegeek.com/image/238680?size=medium">gems</a> in Niagara so much that I bought 7 bags of them in various colors for use in prototypes. I just wanna touch em.<br /><br />For some reason, the little dice with an Anchor on it, in the top right of this picture, really appeals to me. I want to roll a dice and hope for an anchor.<br /><br />It's strange. Suppose there's a game where you can take a number of actions, as determined by a dice roll, and one of these actions is to move your ship. I'm not that excited about a game where a standard dice is used, and a 6 corresponds to ship movement. But when I need to roll an anchor to move the ship, now I'm stoked.<br /><br />This is tough to get past when I'm prototyping. You don't have time to do every little thing right in an exploratory prototype, and you certainly don't have the ability to get custom pawns/dice/etc made. So you make do. But sometimes when a game is missing some spark, I have to wonder if the spare physical composition is to blame. I feel like a Niagara prototype, without the canoes, waterfall effect and gems, would belie the appeal that the finished game ended up having.<br /><br />I even let this problem impede me in the monster city game, where I wanted to use the Memoir 44 dice (depicting tanks, infantry, grenades, etc) so badly that I let it dictate some probabilities I might not have gone with otherwise. The effect wasn't all that profound, but I found myself drawn by the components in a strangely seductive way.<br /><br />I suppose the answer is to learn to see past the components during a prototype, but that's tough. At very least I need to separate my emotional dissatisfaction with the feel of a game from whether or not its actually working. If its "working" in some sense, I might need to gussy it up a bit and see how it feels then. The more I think about it, I know of plenty of games that would have seemed pretty lame before a proper componenting out.Alexhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06320977465810683684noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1110227599310035489.post-86773158229649068562007-12-18T23:58:00.000-08:002007-12-19T01:25:27.577-08:00More Monster CityThis game continues to plague me. There are just a very large number of ways you can take the game, so many ways to do the monster actions, so many ways to do city actions, so many city layouts, so many extra twists, all exploding combinatorially. This is the nature of game design, but its especially tricky this time.<br /><br />I've tried to focus on my actual goals, to back out of assumptions about how things should be done. What I've come up with is:<br />1) City units should be able to hinder the monster, getting in his way.<br />2) The city players should not be able to damage the monster. This emerged over time, that it just felt wrong for the city to slowly damage and kill the monser. The city is in a desperate fight to avoid getting obliterated, but they are not an actual threat to the monster's supremacy.<br />3) The way the city player wins is to survive until a point where they get an ultimate weapon done, which is the one way they can kill the monster and win.<br />4) The way the monster player wins is to do a boatload of damage to the city, and return to the sea before the ultimate weapon destroys him.<br /><br />So, the monster is trying to screw stuff up as fast as possible, and the city player is trying to keep the monster from screwing too much stuff up until they can get the weapon online, and either kill the monster with it, or use the threat of it to drive the monster back to the sea.<br /><br />So how do the city units do anything useful? Well, for one, they can contain the monster, who can't use his big long-distance moves if there are units in the way. So we get a bit of fox-and-geese, where the city units try to slow the monster down and cut off his options. Second, and this is a fairly recent idea that I'm not completely cemented on: the units have an attack range, and they don't do damage or anything, but the monster can't attack a building while he's in the attack range of a unit.<br /><br />So this leads to an interesting interaction. A city player piles up a bunch of units near the monster. The monster might try to kill all those units, and then will be able to wreck the nearby buildings, but this might take a while, especially if the city player keeps bringing in reinforcements. So the monster is liable to just head off to some other part of the city, where the resistance is less stiff, and wreck that freely. But the city player can use units to try to slow the monster's avenues of movement, to keep it in the areas where the city is well defended. But if the monster breaks free, its going to rip stuff up for a while, until the city player can stop it.<br /><br />If this happens, does the city player desperately send in a single unit to buy himself some time while the monster kills it and goes back to wrecking? Does he send in a big force, which the monster might just avoid? Does he start cordoning off the main routes out of that area, and then send in a big force, to reestablish control? Or some combination of these effects? I think the strategic depth has a lot of potential.<br /><br />In addition, I like the thematic feel better than some other versions I've come up with. The monster shouldn't actively seek out tanks, he should just wail on the ones in his face and then go back to beating up the city. And the city player shouldn't be able to control the monster, but can still limit its options, make stands, block certain streets. They will never be in control, but they just might buy themselves enough time...<br /><br />Some questions remain as far as making this work:<br />1) How can I balance the monster and unit mobility so that these sort of questions are interesting?<br />2) How can I keep things unpredictable within the game? I don't want it to be complete information, where the monster can say "well, if I go here, there is no way he can stop me". I feel like in a game like this, it could get frustrating, and I'm not interested in crafting a perfectly balanced, open information, asymetrical, thematically sound game, its plenty challanging as it is. It'd be nice if he could instead make a reasonable guess about how likely the city player was to be able to stop him, based on some secret or unpredictable element, and had to weigh that. Think Memoir '44, but with more reasonable mission balance.<br />3) Can I keep the tension high throughout the game, or will one side clearly be doomed 2 turns in. This relates to the win condition, how many points does the monster need to win? Does he know, hits it, and escapes? Or should it be a press your luck affair, where he wants as many as he can get without dying. Could it be secret somehow?<br />4) I want to encourage the monster to get to the heart of the city, and the city player to want to stop that. But I also want it to be a bad idea for the city player to just hole up downtown, letting the monster bulldoze the shoreline. Its a tricky business, and might involve the scoring system somehow.<br />5) How do I give the game some pop? I still need that OMG turn, that memorable sequence that turns the game around.<br /><br />Lots of open questions, but I think I'm on an interesting track. I have a new city design that I think will be more compelling, and a card-based approach to actions that just might work. I think this is maybe where the pop will come in, through narrowly applicable but powerful cards that can have a splashy effect if used just right.<br /><br />In any case, I need to mock it up and playtest it again; there's too much theory swirling that needs to be confirmed or refuted.<br />-<br />Also, I went back and added lables to all the old posts. Might be useful?<br />-<br />Note to myself: I should do a post on "pop" and how it relates to "the bomb" from that Games Journal article. It's been coming up a lot.Alexhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06320977465810683684noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1110227599310035489.post-81790313190001796502007-12-15T12:25:00.000-08:002007-12-19T01:00:59.086-08:00Flexibility in Representations / Racetrack DesignI've been sketching lots of maps for the Pirate Co-op game, just trying to get a feel for the design space. But it occured to me it would be really nice to have a way to be really flexible about this, to have a physical map that could be readily rearranged during playtesting.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.boardgamegeek.com/image/202032?size=medium">Heroscape tiles</a> might be nice if we ended up with a hex-based game (this is still not certain, believe it or not!). But just starting with a map with a blank grid, and then placing island / trade route / dangerous seas tiles on it could work too. Its strange, I assumed we would have a printed map, but there's really no reason that must be the case, especially not during playtesting.<br /><br />-<br /><br />The concept of a flexible, intermediate representation of design ideas is something that I've been thinking about a lot. When you're designing, its often a matter of finding a medium that reflects the properties you're looking for and then:<br />1) creating a representation of your ideas in that medium<br />2) evaluating that representation to see if it has the qualities you're looking for<br />3) adjusting or creating a representation based on what you saw<br /><br />Ideally, you end up in Schon's of Reflection in Action, where this all happens as a unified, creative thought process, where you're evaluating as you create.<br /><br />So, you want a representation that is easy to create, but that tells you what you need to know. These are the two steps I've always focused on when thinking about this stuff, ignoring that third step of adjusting course. Maybe that's because most of the books I've seen on this subject focus on sketching, where you usually make sketch after sketch, rather than trying to adjust a previous drawing.<br /><br />But what about a representation that lends itself to changing its configuration? That is, rather than sketching map after map, should I be creating a physical set of objects that can be nudged around as I see fit?<br /><br />-<br /><br />So I was already thinking about this a bit, but what prompted me to post was seeing this show about a guy who designs racetracks. They had this footage of his studio, and I immediately started to wonder, what sort of representations would you use for this? As he pointed out, you need to consider making the course challenging to drive, interesting to watch, you need to work with the topography of the land. They showed these drawings of course layouts, but I didn't see how you could get to those just by drawing squiggle after squiggle and saying 'that looks like a good one!'<br /><br />About 5 minutes later, I wasn't disappointed. They had built a topographical model of a location out of layers and layers of cardboard, and were using pins with yarn between them to lay out possible course routes. They had multiple routes in different colors, and when one guy placed this red segment, they talked about how it had this nice drop down the hill, and how the cars would really fly down it given the angle and the speed they would have. How cool is that?<br /><br />The lesson I got from this was how to build prototypes so that you can readily adjust them as you're playtesting. More specifically, don't assume that the approach you're going to use in the final game is the approach you have to use for a playtest: even if you plan to use a static map in the end, tiles might do you good in the meantime. For reasons I won't get into here, I firmly believe playtesting is one of the only good ways to get feedback about a board game design, and ensuring that third "adjusting" step is as easy as possible seems like a good idea.<br /><br />Is this obvious? Maybe? Its something I overlooked though, and it seems like an observation worth holding onto.<br /><br />[Finally started adding labels. Will maybe go back and add them to the old ones some day.]Alexhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06320977465810683684noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1110227599310035489.post-65275900711741041762007-12-07T03:32:00.000-08:002007-12-19T00:55:35.985-08:00Friggin MarlinsWhy did they have to hand-deliver two great players to the Tigers? For nothing but prospects.<br /><br />I'm tempted to put quotes around "prospects", to derisively say that the Marlins're doing nothing but cutting costs so that they can put a subpar product on the field for a payroll under 10 million. But, they did this in the past and enough of those prospects payed off that they still won another championship.<br /><br />Part of me says, this is bullshit, you can't sell off all your best players just to cut costs. But if you can cut costs to the organization and still contend in the long term, isn't that genius?<br /><br />The dual nature of victory conditions got me thinking. Wouldn't it be a rad game where you run a sports team, trying to win a championship, while also trying to run a savvy business? Where the glory (and ticket sales) of a winning team are nice and all, but where a carefully planned "rebuilding year" can win you the game on a 20-year time scale?<br /><br />The strategy of the rebuilding year, that's what really gets me. When do you enter one? When is it a bad idea? Would the Yankees (huge, huge, huge payroll, nothing to show for it lately) be losers in such a game?<br /><br />I'm not going to design it, but it piqued my interest.<br /><br />Edit: snipped. No need to be silly.Alexhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06320977465810683684noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1110227599310035489.post-64796411699263283152007-12-05T14:12:00.000-08:002007-12-19T01:01:12.728-08:00Co-op PiratesLast weekend, Robin and I spent a goodly number of hours working on a cooperative pirate-themed game. I'll not get into too much detail here, but important details are:<br /><br />1) The big insight was that if you want to do a pirate game right, it really should be cooperative. Everyone wants to be a pirate, but pirates aren't really in the business of directly competing with eachother. Pirate's Cove was illustrative of this, usually the last thing you want to do in that game is spending the time and resources to fight another pirate, and you spend most of the game trying to stay out of eachothers' way. Pirates are mostly in the business of preying on the weak, so why not let the game itself represent the players' targets, and let the players work together to conquer them. Robin came up with a really nice theme for the cooperation, but I'll tease it away for now.<br /><br />2) There's more to pirating than pirating. We tried to make multiple strategies that a player could undertake, and make sure that each is interesting. Specifically, players can a) attack merchant ships, while avoiding navy defenders b) smuggle contraband between islands c) explore far-off islands in pursuit of epic treasure. There are skills and items that support each of these angles, and no one player can fully adopt one strategy without weakening themselves in terms of the others, so players can informally establish roles for themselves, and work together in disparate ways towards a common goal. I see it almost in terms of a WoW clan, where players have different classes, and might find an item that they can't use, but that is useful to someone else. That's good, fun camraderie.<br /><br />We have pretty nice systems in place for all of those details; mostly we need to refine out how exactly the actual ship movement hangs together so that the pacing of the actual pirating-smuggling-exploring subgame occurences feels right. Then its actual card design and balance, which will just be fun.<br /><br />The biggest threats right now are component overload and rules complexity, but we've been pretty mindful of both, and it certainly won't be worse than Arkham Horror, or your average Fantasy Flight big-box game on either count.<br /><br />-<br /><br />In other news, I suffered through the old ticketmaster price double-up to ensure I had my ticket to <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7yfP-80Wlc">Ultimate Reality Live</a> / <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4ibl5vnJZk">Dan Deacon Set</a> Jan 15th. Because, lets face it, Dan Deacon is the man that makes me most want to quit grad school, blow off my life, and become him somehow.Alexhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06320977465810683684noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1110227599310035489.post-22712077950715610802007-11-21T16:45:00.000-08:002007-12-19T01:02:21.457-08:00The Stoke of GeniusAnother idea I'm haunted by is the stroke of genius, the feeling that there is a wholly unique approach to games that is waiting out there to be happened upon, some utterly elegant, appealing idea, that is just out of reach. I get so excited about looking for it sometimes, but so far I've come up empty.<br /><br />On a few occaisions, I've had the experience where I'm sleeping, and in my dreams something really good will happen, maybe I'll come into some great sum of money. And while I'm still dreaming, it occurs to me in this vague way that I can't "keep" the money, that its not real. I'm filled this vague, deep sense of loss that I suspect can only be felt by the sleeping mind, my dream's existential crisis, I suppose. And after that flash of recognition, fevered dream logic frantically bargains with reality, thinking there must be some way, and then the whole thing folds in on itself and I wake up, always a tiny bit disappointed that my boon didn't find its way through with me. Its sort of like that when I think way outside convention, looking for that overlooked gem of an idea: this excitement, and then sense of something slipping through my fingers.<br /><br />I have a game that I respect a lot, and its not really one you'd necessarily expect. Apples to Apples is not a perfect game, and its something of a crutch when the group gets big, and we've played it to death, and the gameplay is shallow in various ways and so on. But it is such a simple idea, it is so utterly clean, and it has no precedent that I'm aware of in games. Its such a pure example of emergent gameplay, where the actual mechanics are absolutely tiny, but the discussions and repercussions of each choice are where the fun lives.<br /><br />On some level, maybe I get frustrated trying to carve out a game the right way, which is really difficult, and I just hope for that flash of inspiration to free me from my "lack of having even a single game design I'm really happy with under my belt". Its like summing the numbers from one to one-thousand by hand, knowing in the back of your mind that there must be a formula that will let you find the answer in 15 seconds.<br /><br />And I don't even want commercial success, just something satisfying. I think maybe the answer at the tip of my brain still has something to do with drawing, or maybe it was physical-levels, or maybe... but its always too quick to grab, too smooth to hold, as Kevin Drew says, tbtf, and so on until morning.Alexhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06320977465810683684noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1110227599310035489.post-35794121316418232602007-11-16T11:21:00.000-08:002007-12-19T01:03:44.564-08:00The Theme and Mechanic Traps vs. Tension-ResolutionThis idea is something that I have had percolating for some time now. I don't know if I can quite bang the whole thing out, but I wanted to get the essence down.<br /><br />My early game designs fell into two approaches, both "traps", in the sense of leading me down wrong paths and ending up at games that weren't going to work.<br /><br /><strong>The Theme Trap</strong><br />The theme trap is where you think of an awesome scenario, and want to make a board game that creates the awesomeness of that scenario. For example, my early versions of my Monster-in-the-city games were born from this. I liked the idea of monsters wrecking a city; you could wreck buildings! Stomp tanks! So I started from that point, and let some major, important decisions be made in that spirit.<br /><br />I.e.: Each player has a monster. But who controlls the city? Well, each player also has a set of army units! What are some appropriate army units, how about infantry, tanks and planes? How should those move? Well, infantry should be slow, planes should be able to move really far in a long line. And monsters should be able to have fire breath and eye beams and...<br /><br />It sounds really childish, and I am giving myself a hard time a bit, but its really easy to fall into this trap. Some games can pull it off, but they usually do so with an (unpredictable) one-effect-per-card deck, give the cards to the players, and let the whole thing fall out as it may. It sort of can work, but the gameplay is usually pretty unsatisfying.<br /><br /><strong>The Mechanic Trap</strong><br />This is where you come up with a clever mechanic or interaction, and try to build a game around it. You would think the outcome is a successful game with no theme, but that's not quite it in my experience. For me, it doesn't even turn into a workable game.<br /><br />A lot of my designs have fallen into this trap. And I think the problem is, I see an interesting interaction of rules, and I build a game around them, but there often isn't any game there. I might call a sub-problem of this the "engine trap", where basically I build an interesting engine that the players can toy with, hoping that their doing so in opposition to one another will lead to interesting gameplay, but it just doesn't. It doesn't lead to good player interaction, there are positive feedback loops of success or failure, the whole thing ends up feeling like its playing itself, or its just not fun for some reason.<br /><br />I had a game design (lets call this Mistake Explanation #4) where you were a scientist/wizard who was collecting body parts and workers and buildings, and using them to create zombies, which could be used as workers, and made money for more buildings, all powered by some kind of drafting mechanic (which I spent far too long in love with). Basically, one thing lead to the next, lead to the next, lead towards a victory state, and it was up to the players to grab the right stuff. But the game ended up feeling totally arbitrary and frustrating from the player side, and the player interaction was minimal at best.<br /><br />It ended up feeling like sitting with your opponents at one of those conveyor-belt sushi bars, trying to get full the cheapest (god dammit, that sort of sounds like a doable game). But my point is, it was a clever machine, and you were competing, but it wasn't much of a game.<br /><br /><strong>The 2-Player Monster/City Experience</strong><br />Recently, its mostly been the theme trap that's been messing with me on the 2-Player Monster/City game (any name suggestions? this is getting ridiculous). I realized I wasn't getting the gameplay I wanted out of the top-down city map, and kept shrinking the board, turning the easy knobs, without looking at the root of the problem. Shouldn't it be more interesting to maneuver around the city? Why wasn't it?<br /><br />I realized that I had decided on the city unit types/abilities/stats basically for thematic reasons, but not because they actually figured to lead to interesting gameplay. There should be artillery, it should have infinite range. There should be infantry, they should basically be canon fodder to slow the monster down.<br /><br />Even monster rules came about this way, and I fell into traps of things that seemed to have nice synergy, but that didn't necesssarily contribute to overall gameplay. I want infantry to slow down the monster, and thematically it seems like the monster should be able to stomp right over human units, so I'll say he can kill the first unit he gets to, but then has to stop. This, lead to other decisions that were made in similarly willy-nilly ways.<br /><br />This wasn't wholly responsible for the failings of the design, but it wasn't the right way to make the decisions. I wanted, at one point, for the game to be about containing the monster, but I made decisions counter to that. Artillery as a unit made no sense at all in this game, but I liked the image of artillery shooting at a monster, and in the unit went.<br /><br /><strong>Solutions?</strong><br />I've cone to realize that player interaction is crucial as a starting inspiration point and evaluation criteria, especially in a 2-player game, you would think. Further, I've started to see designing in terms of tensions. The core of a game is <em>establishing tension and providing satisfying resolution.</em> You have to create a situation where 1) the outcome is in question, and possible results fall into categories that are more or less advantageous to the player, 2) where the player is able to affect the outcome in a way that makes its resolution satisfying. I won't go into a long string of examples, but I think this is present in nearly any good game I can think of.<br /><br />Conversely, games where the outcomes aren't forseeable enough to be hoped/pushed for, or where the possibility of outcomes produce tension but the resolution is so arbitrary that the player loses interest, abound - and can blame many of their problems for this failing. I was working on a list/taxonomy of game problems, and many of them fall into here in one way or another. A game with too much luck is an obvious choice, but the runaway leader problem is on a larger scale; it is an inability to maintain tension because while the short term outcomes are still predicatable and affectable, players are so far behind they aren't compelled to care.<br /><br />So can your mechanics yield tension in the short term, on a move by move basis, and maintain it over the course of the game? And, on repeat plays, does the game remain unpredictable, yet controllable enough that it remains compelling. I think the double-sided loop game Chad and I worked on in Seattle last year was actually well designed in the sense that we put move-by-move tension as a first priority, but its most-pips-wins aspect eventually killed it, since the overall result no longer seemed to resolve satisfyingly (there's still something in that game).<br /><br />Anyway, this has gone on quite long enough, I'm going to try to rethink this monster game drastically, get back to the kinds of tensions I'm trying to build, and make my choices around supporting them. Interestingly enough, I think there might be futures for both the top-down and side-scrolling games - at least if I get stuck on one I can work at the other for a bit. Cheers to you if you read this far!Alexhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06320977465810683684noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1110227599310035489.post-30274281968263729412007-11-15T14:51:00.000-08:002007-12-19T01:04:13.455-08:00Dammit!I am totally stuck on this Monster/City game (pictured <a href="http://novelgame.blogspot.com/2007/10/2-player-monster-city-game-playtests.html"><strong>here</strong></a>). Basically, originally, the monster started at the top, and worked its way to the bottom, with some potential for lateral movement. I found more and more that I wanted to narrow the city, since the lateral movement just wasn't interesting. If I turn it all the way into a single column, I have all this unused space. If there's only forward and back, why not make it side scrolling?<br /><br />Alongside this, I jotted down some priorities I had for how the game should feel, and working with those came to what I'll call Monster/City 2.0. Basically, the monster Roborally-commits a number of move cards, then the city player gets one move, alternating with a pre-chosen monster move, and so on. The monster deck is "<strong><a href="http://novelgame.blogspot.com/2007/07/predictable-vs-unpredictable-decks.html">predictable</a></strong>" [man, that ended up being a key concept for me], and certain types of city attacks can counter certain types of monster moves, so it becomes a bit of the city player trying to outguess the monster player's moves.<br /><br />I still like it, but I just can't seem to get it work right in practice. I think I have the right monster moves, but can't find city player gameplayer that hooks into it well. I'm going to run it all by Robin at some point, he may be able to jar me out of my assumptions a bit.<br /><br />Stepping back, I wonder if the reason that the lateral movement felt wrong was the building thing. I had it set up in a set grid of buildings, each surrounded by street spaces. But this lead to weird choke points. I wonder if I need to reexamine that assumption to make the lateral movement more interesting. For example, do we need bridges that can serve as interesting options? Also, I wonder if my (very simple, elegant, even) morale/damage solution is really quite right. I think maybe it needs some gold-type effects along the way. And I wonder if the basic monster-can-stomp rule isn't causing some of the problems. But, I'm rambling, these are notes that aren't likely to make sense except to myself. Welcome to my thought process. Still working on this design, in any case.Alexhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06320977465810683684noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1110227599310035489.post-41554946146878490962007-11-06T02:27:00.000-08:002007-12-19T01:04:42.557-08:00Portal is goodI don't want to get too review-heavy on this blog, but I just finished Portal, which is part of Valve's friginexelent new Orange Box half-life 2 comp. Portal's a short game, clocking in at a couple of hours, but it's really good. When I played it, I was strongly compelled in a way I've rarely been in a game. When I finished it, I was totally filled with joy, to similarly unexplored degrees. Granted I had been drinking. But still!<br /><br />You've probably heard of its basic gimmick: there are portals that you make and go through. It pulls that part off well; going beyond the jumping puzzles I saw in Narbancular Drop and the 2d Java Portal game. They got pretty creative.<br /><br />But that isn't even the point; the things that Portal does right are things that I wouldn't normally even think to look for. Something in its tone, its pacing, its feel.. it got something right. The game swept me up the way a movie or piece of widely-accepted-mediumed-art-proper might.<br /><br />It seems like a lot of the time the game development process is: 1) make an engine that enables killer screenshots; 2) bang together some levels that will take "long enough" for people to complete to justify the game purchase. Portal could have gone that route, and used the gimmick to bang out some portal-jumping levels. But instead the designers demonstated a lot of creativity and a great attention to detail. There's a craft and vision to it that seems rare these days.Alexhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06320977465810683684noreply@blogger.com1