Tom used to be a lawyer. Now he's a game designer. The two have more in common than you think.
Sorry for the late update! I’m hammering away on art assets for Three Days to Retirement.
Unfortunately, I don’t actually know much of anything about art, so the results are . . . not impressive. đ One can only do one’s best!
Please forgive the non-update here. I’ll put up some screenshots when this is done . . . and when I think the world can handle the horror of my sprite art. đ
Just a quick note about something interesting that happened today . . . .
I asked a bunch of people if I should build Three Days to Retirement as more of a horror game, or as an exercise in challenging the player to stay focused while effectively playing a game about working a day job. I expected the answer to be “horror;” that’s a known genre, and frankly, do people really want to play a game about doing dreary things?
The answer turned out to be, overwhelmingly, “yes.” Horror was considered acceptable as something to tack on, but the real interest was entirely in the unusual concept, even if it’s not an obviously fun one.
Quite the lesson learned!
You work for Big Bad Evil Guy. You don’t really do anything evil yourself; you’re just the security guard in a hallway. What? Everybody’s got to eat.
Tonight you’re working an extra shift. Somebody needed to swap. Two shifts, back-to-back. You’re a little tired, and your mind is wandering.
There are rumors going around that a ninja clan your boss angered is coming for revenge tonight. If so, they’ll have to go right through the hallways you’re guarding. In the process, they’ll have to go through you.
Rumors like that start all the time, though. Nothing ever comes of them.
You’re three days to retirement.
If someone was going to spend 30 minutes introducing a new game genre to you, what would you want to know? Key design lessons? How to play an exemplar of the genre? A history of games in the genre?
I was honored recently to have the opportunity to play Advanced Civilization with Geoff Englestein. Professor Engelstein was a superb teacher (not to mention a most skilled player!), and Advanced Civ proved even more fun than its “Grail game” status had suggested. It’s an exceptional design, more ambitious even than most civilization games but nevertheless approachable, fast-moving, and fun.
“Fast-moving” probably deserves some explanation, given that the game is listed as being six hours long and is actually much longer. Advanced Civ is not long because it’s fiddly or burdensome to play. It’s long because it’s sweeping in scope. You’re playing across continents and thousands of years. The length feels like an appropriate design decision, rather than being a byproduct of uncontrolled complexity.
New Advanced Civ sets are pretty expensive at this point, but used ones are reasonably available, and the game is easily recreated in print-and-play form. Finding or building one is well worth the effort; I 100% guarantee you that the game has great lessons to teach, even if you have no interest whatsoever in its genre. (For example, Professor Engelstein pointed out that the game’s complexity is only revealed over several turns, so it’s a surprisingly easy game to teach and to learn.) Seek it out and play it at least once; you’ll be glad you did.
By the time you’re reading this, IndieCade will have just ended. Whether you’re deeply invested in the alt-game scene or just looking for some new inspiration, the games featured at IndieCade are worth checking out. Some will be exactly what you’re looking for, and some will be precisely what you aren’t, but they’ll all interesting.
If you’re looking for somewhere to start, I’ve personally played Badblood, Ninja Tag, and Prune, and found all of them remarkable. There’s a lot of different stuff on the featured games list, though, and you needn’t be guided by my preferences! If you just start going down the list and trying them out, I’m confident you’ll find it time well-spent.
It struck me that the discussion on polishing the experience probably seemed to amount to “avoid downtime.” That’s a part of what I was talking about, but there’s a little more to it.
Games can slow down or stop for many reasons. Sometimes it’s because the mechanics require players to pause and wait for something to happen. It could also be because there’s a table that has to be consulted again and again, or a complex rule that needs to be looked up repeatedly. The physical processes of of the game might be the issue: fiddliness in the components can make the game drag, especially if it’s unproductive fiddliness–things getting knocked out of alignment or off the table that then need to be dealt with.
Take a broad view as you look for slowdowns. Anything that interrupts the game, or even brings down the tempo unintentionally, deserves your attention.
Years ago, as a school teacher, I found out that the easiest way to lose control of a classroom was to have a handout in the wrong place. The few seconds it took to walk across the room were enough for sotto voce conversations to spring up. Inevitably those turned into larger, longer, louder discussions, and trouble was in the air from then on out.
Playing a game is much the same way. As soon as friction appears in the play experience, players start to think about other things. Minds wander while someone looks up a rule. Phones come out as resources are counted. Shuffling cards becomes an excuse to watch a minute of the ballgame that’s on TV in the next room.
If you’re lucky, everyone comes back when the task is complete and the game is ready to resume. Relying on luck is dangerous, however. Like students who don’t enjoy a class, players who aren’t very invested in a game may never quite fully renew their attention, to the detriment of the group as a whole. They may just wander away and never come back!
It’s therefore vital to keep an eye out for rough edges that catch and delay your game’s progress. When does play stop? When do the players have to wait? Every time that happens they’ll spiral away from the game, like planets being spun off from a star. If they’re permitted to get too far away, they’ll leave your solar system entirely.
To the greatest extent possible, you want to remove those moments. Ideally you want to get rid of them entirely. Failing that, cover them over with something else happening.
As an example of the latter strategy, consider Dominion. Dominion involves a tremendous amount of shuffling. However, the next player can start her turn while the previous player’s routine end-of-turn shuffling is going on. The game therefore doesn’t have to stop; things are still happening, and everyone stays engaged.
Now imagine Dominion built a little differently–say, a player gets to make one final buy at the end of her turn and put that card on top of the deck. Now all shuffling has to be done before the next player can go. That game is significantly longer, and thus quite a bit more likely to lose people’s interest.
Polishing those little rough edges, sanding them down so that they don’t grab and slow the player experience, is a vital step in design. Eliminating rid of those problem moments will do a great deal to keep players involved in the game. Leave some time in your process for this work; it will pay dividends.
OK, Unity question:
What is the actual mathematical relationship between the scale of a parent object and the local position of a child object? It doesn’t seem to be 1-1; if the scale of the parent increases by 10%, the child object’s local position doesn’t reliably increase 10%. Anybody know what the equation is?
A project I just turned in for my MFA program. Three weeks of Javascript is both not nearly enough and far, far too much. đ
http://phaser.magnet.tsoa.nyu.edu/tom/www/combineBlocks/
One major lesson I learned from this project: don’t get too caught up in solving technical problems, and neglect to design with pencil and paper. It’s much easier to solve design problems when they’re not wrapped up in the complexities of coding.
The Law of Game Design 