Category: Game design theory

Link: PRACTICE 2015 Tumblr

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Records of conferences are one of the best sources for game design information. As a field, we don’t do a good job of storing information over the long term (a point Leigh Alexander made at a conference this past weekend!), but we at least have central locations were the data is made available. The recordings and documents that come out of those conferences become the closest thing the field has to searchable, peer-reviewed journals.

For that reason, I’d encourage you to take a look at the Tumblr for PRACTICE 2015. The conference was excellent, and the people running the Tumblr did an amazing job of getting key information down. Give it a look!

Theory: The Unsolved Problem of Ongoing-Release Games

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Warmachine recently unveiled a new format: Champions, in which only certain pieces are legal. Champions is probably a great solution to some troubles Warmachine has been having. It also, however, points up an interesting design problem: how to keep games that have more and more content released manageable without resort to rotation.

By way of background: up until now every piece ever created for Warmachine was tournament-legal. It didn’t matter whether the piece’s rules just came out a month ago, or whether it was the first piece ever released for the game. Absolutely everything could be put on the table.

Over time that system has become less and less manageable for players. The sheer number of pieces and combinations has become overwhelming. Can your army handle a general like Morvahna, who can manipulate dice in her favor? What if she instead focuses on endlessly resurrecting her army? Deneghra can flatline your army’s stats for a turn; will you survive? Bradigus and the High Reclaimer both block line of sight, but in entirely different ways; can your army see through both? Saeryn’s army can’t be engaged in close combat for a turn, while Vlad can shut down most ranged attacks; you’ll probably want both options so you can always get through losing one. Sorcha will freeze you in place if you don’t have a way to become immune to ice attacks . . . .

The list goes on, but you can see the problem. It’s impossible for any one army to deal with all of these threats. As a result, players inevitably started to get into rock-paper-scissors matchups, wherein they didn’t have ice immunity or the ability to stop resurrection or whatever. Unsatisfying games invariably followed.

Magic: the Gathering had a similar problem of multiplying complexity, and answered it with rotation, a system in which older cards are excluded from tournaments as new cards come out. Rotation proved so effective at keeping complexity manageable that it’s become the accepted answer to the problem of “how do we keep releasing product for this game without rendering it incomprehensible.”

Warmachine will, I think, benefit from having a rotation; only needing to think about Saeryn without also needing an answer to Vlad will be a big help. Privateer Press’ form of rotation is even especially generous to players, since older pieces will rotate back in over time; Magic forces players into “eternal” formats when they want to use their old cards.

Nevertheless, I find I’m a bit disappointed. Rotation is a good solution, but it’s only one solution. I have to think that there are others, if we’re imaginative enough to find them.

The specific form of rotation Privateer Press has chosen demonstrates that there’s still thought to how it should be implemented. I’d still like, though, to push out the boundaries in this area. We know rotation is a good tool; now let’s put our energy into finding some equally good alternatives!

Three Days to Retirement: an Interesting Lesson

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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!

Theory: The Best Game You’ve Never Played

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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.

IndieCade

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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.

Theory: Following Up on Polishing

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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.

Theory : Polish the Experience

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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.

Inquiring Minds Want to Know

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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?

Theory: Everything I Needed to Know About Game Design, I Learned from Space Invaders

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  • Start players out slow, then add more challenge.
  • Safe places create moments of respite; moving out of them then creates moments of excitement.
  • Simplify the player’s interaction with the game as much as possible.
  • Forgive enough player mistakes to let the player learn, but not so many that the game is trivial.
  • Keep the effects of your medium in mind. If, for example, your computer chips are going to move the aliens faster as they get blasted, you want to know that in advance if at all possible. 😉
  • Let the player do things that clearly provide progress, but make it hard to tell which action offers the most progress.
  • Related to the above, make it easy to be OK at the game, but as soon as the player reaches that point, let her see how much more there is to learn and do.
  • Cute, appealing monsters are easy to like.
  • Related to the above: art doesn’t need to be complicated or realistic to be cute and appealing.
  • Tune everything. Player movement, enemy movement, victory requirements, average game time, everything. If it can be expressed numerically, tune it precisely.
  • Don’t be ashamed to monetize a good product.