Processing my process. Or: How to get better at game design.

Saturday, May 9th, 2009

I’ve sent my alpha version of Strangers out to some folks for feedback.  Most of the feedback boiled down to: ‘This is kinda complicated’ and ‘Where’s the fun?’

After getting the third return with the same feedback, I started to do some serious introspection.  While I don’t talk about it here on my gaming blog (heck, I don’t talk about much here at the moment) – I also do web design and programming.  Over the last few months, I’ve been lucky enough to gather a nice stable of clients and steady coding work.  It’s taken up a lot of my ‘free’ time, which is why I haven’t had much to say here.

Since I’ve been programming a lot more lately, I’ve started really honing my process for development, at least when it comes to web projects.  What I’ve discovered is that I’m: iterative, atomic and utile.  I’m no rockstar when it comes to coding – in fact, my programming blog is called ‘Groping for Code’, which it sometimes feels like I’m doing – looking at an end result that I want to achieve, and slowly building a scaffold to get me there, refining it along the way.

So:

Iterative: I make a lot of small changes, seeing what the result is along the way, and usually breaking shit.

Atomic: I work on one feature at a time, making it work, then integrating it with the whole.

Utile: I look for the best, cleanest way to do what I want to do, regardless of any sort of overarching programming principle.

I realize these things may even hold me back from being a good coder, but I’m working on improving – and more importantly, they’re working.  I’m getting things done.  Projects are moving.

So let’s contrast this with my game design process.  First of all, I don’t really HAVE a process, as such.  I just sort of jump into a design with both feet and see what happens.  Part of this is an artifact of how my completed (or mostly completed) projects to date have come about – they’re products of things like 24-hour RPG challenges or Game Chef, which imposes either a one- or two-week deadline.  Soup to nuts, make everything at least look like it hangs together.

But it’s not entirely that.  I have a sense of myself as ‘game designer’, so to some extent I’ve pre-judged the end result of my efforts: it will work, because this is hat I’m passionate about.  My designs tend to be all-or-nothing thunderclaps of effort.  This is just about as opposite an approach to process as you can get from my programming.  

I’m not iterative: Any changes that I make, I propagate them through the design without testing their viability, or the relative merits of the original version.

I’m not atomic: Games come out of me whole-cloth.  Any one section of the rules may or may not stand on its own.

Utile: I work from more formalist principles (the desire to create games that push certain envelopes, like integrating board game components, or exploring some facet of play) as opposed to looking for what works, then throwing mechanics at it until it sticks.

And the results are perfectly obvious: my programming gets done.  My games don’t.  So the question now is: how do I apply my programming process to my game design?

Iterative: Test, test, test.  Start with a framework for the game, then start hanging components on it, testing each component as I go.  If it doesn’t work, figure out what’s wrong and change it.  Question everything: is the form factor wrong?  Is the theme wrong? Is the approach wrong? IS IT FUN?

Atomic: Work with the minigame model – write up  mechanics for each aspect of a game, keeping in mind the overall shape of the project.  Test each minigame, then integrate and test again.  Obviously, some sort of testing mechanism is going to be crucial, here.

Utile: If principles are getting in the way, eject the principles for now.  If the principle is important, integrate it into the process at a lower level – does this facet support the principle AND the game, or just the principle alone?

Obviously, there are implementation problems that are independent of the process problem.  It’s a lot easier to iterate my web projects when all I have to do is alter a few lines of code and sync my localhost web directory.  But I like the shape of this, and I should invest brain cycles in trying to figure out a) how to make it work, and b) applying it to Strangers and Terrible World.

The Bucket List

Saturday, February 21st, 2009

I recently combed through the last 100 or so posts (we’re almost at 300 now!), and came up with a complete Bucket List of every game project that I’ve put the least amount of thought into.  Here they are, in no particular order:

1. DEAD
2. AFTER
3. Terrible World
4. Strangers
5. OORT
6. Expressionism
7. Bluebeard
8. Decathalon
9.  Merchant
10. Elsewhere
11. Elseworld
12. Cold War
13. Makuria
14. Get It On
15.  On the Air
16. Big Kahuna

So let’s play with this a bit to get priorities straight.  If I rank them in order of “words on paper” or “work done”, the list looks like this:

1. Elsewhere
2. DEAD
3. Merchant
4. Terrible World
5. Elseworld
6. Strangers
7. Decathalon
8. OORT
9. Expressionism
10. AFTER
11. Cold War
12. Makuria
13. On the Air
14. Get It On
15. Big Kahuna

Really, Big Kahuna is just an idea – but I included it for sake of completeness.  So now if I take this list and put it in order of “games I would want to have done”, it looks like this:

1. DEAD
2. Elsewhere
3. AFTER
4. Merchant
5. Terrible World
6. Strangers
7. OORT
8. Elseworld
9. Expressionism
10. Decathalon
11. Cold War
12. Makuria
13. Get It On
14. On the Air
15. Big Kahuna

So if we add the ranks from the two lists together, we get:

1. DEAD
2. Elsewhere
3. Merchant
4. Terrible World
5. Strangers

The interesting part of this exercise is that Merchant made it to the top five – the things that I really want to get done.  I think this is a sort of wake-up call that my pursuits are out of whack.  That I have so much done on things like Elsewhere and Merchant, but they’re sitting there on the shelf.  Mind you, they’re definitely not in a place where I could exploit them for the GenCon Year – not by a long shot.  But I think I need to take a long look at myself and my process – and figure out how these sorts of things happen.

More on the podcast.

Thursday, February 12th, 2009

I’ve been combing around in my brainbox since I started thinking about recasting the Elsewhere podcast.  Here are a list of ideas that I’ve been kicking around between my mobile and my laptop, gathered while staring at the amazing blue sky we’ve had here lately, along with a brief explanation of each:

• My story of gaming in 8th grade – more than one episode?

This is one idea that’s in the ‘definitely’ column – talking about the rather dark days I had in middle school, and the way that games and the escape that they provided kept me from far more destructive activities.  Talking about the characters, the storylines, and reflect on how they were a part of my life.

• My struggles with Elsewhere.

Talk about the process of designing of the omega to my alpha, Elsewhere, and about how very hard it is to design a game.  Talk with others about struggles in designing, and biting off more than you can chew.

• Bren & Antony.

These are two Vampire characters, one mine and the other belonging to my friend, Marcy.  We played them, on and off, for about four years.  It’s the only time that I’ve delved that deeply into a role-playing character (hell, any character), and perhaps getting Marcy on the phone for an interview wouldn’t be out of the question, he said knowing that she might read this on Facebook.  Perhaps it could be part of a larger arc on people’s characters and what they meant to them at the time and later.

• Immersion?

The weakest of the ideas so far, because it’s very nebulous: getting people to talk about their experiences with immersion in games – computer or otherwise.  My 60+ hour marathon with SimCity 2000, for example.

• Metanarrative of Total War – audio diary?

This is something that I definitely want to explore – the corollary to the stories about people and their games – the story of the games themselves.  More than once, playing the Total War series, I’ve had the impulse to just write a journal of everything that was happening, to get caught up in the sweep of the story.  This merges with the last idea: take someone who’s never played, say, SimCity, and have them talk their way through a session.  Or the Sims.

• The Horseheads Crew.

This is a long-shot.  Finding and interviewing the people in my D&D group in high school.

• How to Lose WWII.

The story of how, at my first convention, I played a game of Third Reich as the British and basically lost the game for the Allies.  Still my most crushing loss to this day, if you don’t count the hammering I took recently in Paths to Glory, a WWI game that I played (and lost terribly) to my friend Mike in Minnesota.  Maybe a whole podcast on loss and losing.

That’s what I have, so far.  Other than that, I’ve mostly been trying to figure out what sort of equipment I’m going to need to get to have a decent-sounding podcast.  Suggestions are welcome.

And message me, MJ.

Ira Glass & Elsewhere

Sunday, February 8th, 2009

So the other day, I was talking to Ira Glass, from This American Life.  

That’s such a fun sentence for me to write, and that makes me such an NPR geek it hurts.

Last Wednesday, I attended WBEZ’s Audible Feast - a fundraiser where you got to rub elbows with various WBEZ personalities along with Ira Glass, Scott Simon (Weekend Edition) and Peter Sagal (Wait, Wait …)  I walked into the event out of the bitter cold and surveyed the landscape – lots of women in furs and long dresses (there was a $500 option for a sit-down dinner) getting out of BMWs, and then schlubs like me, walking through -15 degree windchills from the L.

Anyways, I went to the table to get myself registered and had a very peculiar moment: I heard a voice right next to me that’s usually emanating from a radio.  I had (almost literally) bumped into Ira Glass, who was mingling with the hoi polloi.  I screwed up my courage and was about to introduce myself when he was intercepted by one of the aforementioned ‘women in furs’.  I retreated a few steps and waited for my chance to strike.  All the time, my mind was racing: What in the world was I going to talk to Ira Glass about?

When the time came, I decided to go the eccentric route.  Everyone at this function knew about the radio show.  But how many of these people knew he’d made a comic about producing for the radio?  So when I stuck my hand out (and helped him get some schmutz off his jacket from dinner), I told him that I really enjoyed the comic and had read it over and over for inspiration.  

“Do you do radio?”

Not wanting to drop the thread, I said that I blogged about games and gaming, and that I’d been trying to screw up the courage to do a podcast for some time.  This is when he asked me to walk with him to find the bar.  Which I did.  In a fog.  Not only had I met Ira Glass, but now I was having drinks with Ira Glass.

We talked for some time about what was going on in games (boardgames are more than Candyland and Monopoly; the digital divide is growing wider).  He’d just been in Arkansas where the ice storms had gone through, talking to people.  He related a story about a girl who was fascinated to find out that you could play Solitaire without the computer. (!)  I related my story about Guild Wars players who didn’t know what Dungeons & Dragons was, or who E. Gary Gygax was.

I recommended playing Pandemic and Carcassonne.  He talked about being completely fascinated by Katamari Damancy – the last video game that he played extensively.

After two glasses each of really mediocre red wine, we shook hands and I relieved him of my company.  He clapped me on the shoulder and graciously told me this was probably the most interesting conversation he was going to have tonight.  

I wish I could say that he gave me his card, or told me to send him a story pitch.  Neither happened.  But something did happen, later on at the main event: Ira, Scott and Peter relating stories about ‘driveway moment’ stories they’d done recently.  Ira did his piece (a remix of the ‘Big Pile of Money’ show on the mortgage clusterfuck), then went on a semi-rant about how journalists are losing ground everywhere to entertainment because it’s become they’re not telling stories – they’re not talking like humans to humans.

And this brings me around to this podcast that I’ve been wrestling with for months.  

On the train home, I wrote the following note to myself:

Taking a page from tonight’s stories: a podcast not just about story-games. The stories behind games, the stories of games, the culture of games and playing. Games are a mode of human connection – a podcast about the connections between games and people’s lives, their lives inside games. Stories about people’s lives being spent elsewhere. 

Games tell several stories at once: the flow of the game itself, the larger narratives touched on through the game experience. What people are bringing to the table.

State of the Kuma Union

Sunday, February 8th, 2009

I just realized it’s been about two months since I updated (and I dare hope that I’ll be back on the ball with that now), so I’ll start with a major status update. 

I’ve had (two) successful playtests of Terrible World, the story/board game that is based off my entry to Game Chef in 2007.  It’s a boardgame with some roleplaying elements, where the players are four elemental beings shaping the creation of a new world.  One of them has been corrupted by The Adversary, a sort of Cthulhu-esque being who needs a world to be born into the universe on.  The four Anima (as they’re known) are vying for control of the world, but at the same time they’re trying to figure out which one of them is the Adversary before the end of the last age of the world.

I’ve made a lot of refinements to the game: it’s shorter now than originally designed, the resources are much more coherently tied together.  The last big problem that I’m having is that the beginning of the game – the first couple of rounds of play – are very static.  I’m not 100% sure that I need to ‘fix’ it, but it’s still a concern.

I’ve also finished a rather short write-up on a party game called Expressionism, which comes from my own rubbery face.  There’s a deck of cards with things like ‘Eating a cabbage donut’, which each player flips over in turn around the table.  Every player also has a number of cards in their hand with my face emblazoned on them with different expressions.  Each player chooses one that they think is appropriate, including the person who flipped over the card.  The goal is to match the expression you think the currently active player (or ‘flipper’, if you will) is going to make.  Each player who matches gets a point, and the ‘flipper’ gets points for everyone who he matches with.

My next-door neighbor, Andrew, is a phenomenal photographer and hopefully we’ll be collaborating on taking about 300+ hi-res pictures of me making every shade of facial expression that I can manage.

So the two of these things together don’t provide the whole picture of why I haven’t posted.  Since I’m now a housedad, taking care of the little ones, I’ve been selling myself to just about anyone who will stand still long enough to listen.  I’ve landed some freelance graphic design and programming work, and hopefully I’ll also be doing a bunch of web work as well.  The end result is that I’ve been doing a lot more coding lately than writing, and less blogging than writing.  Of course, I’m also Facebooking more than writing as well, so you’d think that I’d have some time to jot down my thoughts for the day.  I’m making a resolution to change this decline, starting today.

But there’s another aspect to the blogslide: The decline of the blogosphere in relation to story-games and the other things that I’ve written about for so long.  There are still some people who are still going strong: Jason Morningstar and Jonathan Walton are two that spring immediately to mind.  But going through my own list of links, more than half are dead or dying.  Maybe people have better things to do – that’s certainly what happened with me.  But there’s a sort of deflationary spiral going on lately that’s not helpful.

So I’m going to re-focus and broaden my blogging here to include a lot more topics from around gaming in general: more boardgames, more video games … always tying it back to my own work and the AGE Model when appropriate.  And in the meantime, I am at T-185 and counting for GenCon Indy.  This means that I likely have T-95 days left before things need to reach printing establishments.  The time for thoughtful reflection on my designs is over, at least for Terrible World and AFTER, the two games I want to have at GenCon.

T +368, plus a new Cairn twist.

Wednesday, August 13th, 2008

So I’m an idiot and I thought that GenCon was this last weekend – a weekend that I actually spent playing a lot of strategy games (GMT’s Paths of Glory and Fantasy Flight’s Cold War, mainly), but not writing a whole lot.  I was sitting down to do the first serious work in about a week, lamenting my lost seven days, only to find out that GenCon is this coming weekend (the 15th of August), meaning that I got a reprieve of seven days, with three days left.

Official countdown total: 368 days left.

* * *

During this trip, I interviewed my opponent (shout-out to Mike Bellar!) and we talked about his perfect game.  The answer was a manageable tabletop 4x (explore, expand, exploit & exterminate), with two different boards: a strategic and a tactical.  We talked a bit about the obstacles to 4x on the tabletop, and here’s my AGE-Modelish take on the problem:

4x games suffer from two conflicting forces: Authenticity and Simplicity.  Play should carry enough verisimiltude that you feel that you’re making valid decisions in the gamespace you’re playing – a space-empire game should feel different from a business/stock market game.  The addition of authentic rulespaces, though, creates complexity and exceptions that clutter up the game play – to the extent that now two different people that I’ve interviewed that have worked on their own 4x-ish games have resorted to Excel spreadsheets to manage play.  (In the interest of full disclosure, past versions of both Merchant and Manor have required the aid of a computer to make them work – so I’m no saint in this matter.)

Streamlining the mechanics of the game, however, dissolves the authenticity – pushing chits around on a board that provides only marginal thematic feedback isn’t satisfying.  The chits could be crates of exotic spices, tons of dilithium or shares in Gizmonics Institute.  If the play doesn’t create the right “feel” then the experience is lost.

Balancing the two is, if not nigh impossible, at least grindingly difficult.  On thinking it over for the past few days, the conclusion that I’ve come to is this: choose the key aspects of the experience that separate it from other 4x experiences, and keep those aspects to a minimum.  For my merchant game, maybe it’s spoilage orf the cargo.  For the space game, a unique mode of travel.  Then tie those core mechanics together to create secondary layers of derived mechanics.

Derivation of mechanics means less to remember, and an easier flow to the game.  Secondarily, layers of information that would take up a spreadsheet can be represented in a few key stats, so long as the derivations are relatively straight-forward.  The derivations themselves can aid verisimilitude, so long as they conform to the player’s expectations.

An example: In a space exploration game, the population of a colony could be derived from the Habitability score of the planet added to the Tech level of the colony, that technology representing the ability of the colonizing power to alter the habitability.  The habitability could be a raw score on a card; the Tech level a stat that the player is already keeping track of.

Of course, where this runs into problems is with highly dynamic/volatile aspects – for example, the price of a company’s stock during the course of a business 4x.  Part of the solution, I think, comes from the use of multiple-derivatives.  The stock price could be dependent on trade volume (a stack of chips of two colors), the scale of the company (its ‘market cap’), and the actions of the current round of play.  This is where Cairn comes into play: with three mediums of information storage (chips, cards and a tracking sheet), these factors can all be presented simultaneously by chip color and number, location on the card, etc.

This is where 4x and complex wargames get it wrong – and where they’re starting to get it right.  Information is stored in the rules instead of right in front of the players – a multitude of exceptions instead of play structures that encourage following the same thought patterns.  In playing Paths of Glory, I was stunned by how the rule structures for Entrenchment and core mechanics simulated the plodding course of the war, and the rigidity of the fronts.  Despite endless attempts, both of us didn’t manage to budge the Western Front of the Great War more than a space in either direction.  Towards the end of our play time (we got through 1914 and a bit of 1915 in 4 hours, our time window), I decided to get bold, and I paid for it by winding up in a position where Germany was going to fall by 1916 at the latest.  WWI wasn’t about audacity, no matter what the posters said.  It was about grinding attrition and economic ruin for the win.

The other thing that GMT gets right in the game is the use of cards with multiple uses (this is similar to their Command & Colors system): you can use a card to order up replacements, advance the action, or as an event (say, phosphene gas attacks).  Deciding what to use each card for, and by placing mulitple forms of information on each card, they become much more versatile, and the game is deeper as a result.

This is distributed play at work – a wargame with cards plays out differently than a wargame with just the chits and dice.  Cairn is built on that philosophy.