To recap last week...
Split Second
My current multiplayer game project is Afterglow. This is a ship-versus-ship space wargame meant to be played on a 3'x3' surface. The "space boats shooting each other" genre of wargaming is a comfortable middle ground between the overcrowded (like World War II anything or "generic skirmish") and under serviced (archery-focused combat and side-scrolling Contra-like "platformers"). There are lots of very good games in the area: Star Wars: Armada, Full Thrust, and Talon are all reasonably well known to people with an interest in this type of sphere. And, as I said, they're all good games. Great even! But they all capture a similar feel: wet navies IN SPACE kicking the shit out of each other, grinding one another down, jockeying for the best firing arc, destroying armour and systems. They're kind of like Battletech with boats, which I guess makes sense since Battletech is sort of a hack of a naval combat game.
I've been working a lot of Split Second lately. It's a solitaire card-driven wargame played using a clock to add pressure to players, meant to emulate action like the Air France 8969 raid, the Munich Crisis, or the Rainbow Six games (the early ones, anyway). Playing this game at all requires scenarios that give the player a layout of challenges that are presented to them, and each scenario presents different mechanical obstacles the player has to overcome with planning before and during the game. There's going to be twenty scenarios in the game. It's been a lot of work to test them, but also rewarding. It's also made me think back on some wargaming I've done, both design-wise and as a player, and made me reflect on the fact that scenario design is an under-discussed aspect of wargames but is, in fact, the beating heart that drives the whole experience. It also separates good games from bad games, and a quality scenario is responsible for the the highest points of my wargaming career in all instances.
In a sense, I think that designing scenarios is probably one of the best ways to get into game design altogether. Recap of last week's goals:
Split Second
Then I started designing Afterglow, I wanted it to feature actions being set under time pressure double-blind. That was the central feature I wanted. This is easy to do using some component configurations that I can easily make myself, but I also wanted things to be easily replicated by print-and-play people who would like to play the game, without relying on elaborate components that most people won't make.
Additionally, since action markers are also essentially the core of interaction during games, they need to have some important properties:
When first prototyping a game, nothing matters more than making a functional, playable game. This is the tipping point you want to cross where your game goes from being an idea to being a game. Ugly, functional counters work at this early stage. Scraps of paper with scribbles, nuggets of dog shit, old board game pieces, whatever you can scrape by with is good enough. You just need to get that first bit of play done so you can tell if the project is worth pursuing. But after a while, working with very temporary counters gets old for a few reasons:
Last week's goals:
Split Second
I spend some time in various game design ghettoes: online communities where a bunch of people are grinding away on making their games and interface with each other for help, ideas, and motivation to some degree. These are a sort of swirling maelstrom of creativity and theorizing. This environment is a powerful incubator for ideas, and can provide a project with a lot of momentum towards getting started.
Unfortunately, this is usually where I see things stop and fizzle out. Ideas rarely become games. I posted a spicy hot battle report for Plamo vs Plamo hosted on Imgur. Please do check it out! In this game I was testing the Mystery Box acenario and also working out some of the Flying rules, as well as the Placement Weapons which the Loto was carrying.
The flying rules are ok. I'm not 100% happy with them still, but they're perfectly functional. The placement weapons are pretty cool, with the mind game of laying decoys and a variety of possible combinations of weapon types, triggers and effects. In this game the Loto was using normal mines, but you can build ones that push the enemy away or knock them down, set them on fire, all kinds of stuff. They were quite useful. All considered, a pretty good time. It was also interesting to play a four-way game with each player independently controlling one machine. The Action Track system makes this type of play very viable and fun, since everyone is involved constantly and there were lots of reactions flying around. I'm really happy with the way this game has shaped up. It's only taken two years. Let's review from last week. Development Goals: June 1 to 8Split Second
Afterglow
Plamo vs Plamo
Down in Flames: Locked On Expansion
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