Recap of last week's goals...
Split Second
This looked like a light week here, but it was not. I feel like I got a lot finished, though. I was going to discuss mechanics that I had seen in games that I found interesting and different, but while mentally compiling that list, something occurred to me: all the games in said list were hex-and-counter wargames. Fighting Formations, Company of Heroes and Armageddon War were the three that jumped to mind, with only Star Wars Armada's movement tool jumping into my head as an cool mechanical addition to a miniatures game and it's a proprietary gimmick. I guess Guild Ball's success tracks are pretty good too (RIP). I also like Rogue Planet a lot but it's kind of just Crossfire with some more stuff. But, in general, what's going on here? Why does it feel like miniatures games are happy to wallow in "moves guys 6" and shoot" gameplay while the traditional wargame scene is advancing at a good rate? Why does it seem like miniatures wargames are mired in boring 'traditional' methods of interaction? These are not rhetorical questions. I do not know the answer. Recap of last week's objectives:
Split Second
I'm currently working on an expansion for an unfinished game. Afterglow is pretty much structurally complete, but needs to be tested quite a bit before being released. But since I can only play other opponents once or twice a week, I figured I might as well work up a solitaire module. I like solitaire games anyway, and usually work on two parallel projects; a multiplayer competitive game, and a solitaire or co-op game. In a first-time occurrence, both projects are for the same game. It feels weird to work on an expansion while the main game is unfinished, but it's also nice to not have to shift gears mentally from playing one game to another. Outer Dark (aside from being an excellent novel) is a module that introduces a new enemy to the Postcolonial universe, aliens known as the Biocraft who are obviously modelled after Gunbuster's Space Monsters. It includes seven types of aliens to fight with; each of these Biocraft have distinct behaviour and abilities. Crafting each is a fun and occasionally frustrating exercise that's allowed me to explore the basic rules of Afterglow in an unconventional manner and given me insights into the game I probably never would have gotten otherwise. A review of the previous week:
Afterglow
Let's cut to the chase: most people in game design ghettoes should just take an existing game and modify it to do what they want. There's nothing wrong with this. I remember back in the day pretentious nerds on The Forge making up fancy terms for it like "drifting" and "hacking", but in the end it just means house rules. If you take a bundle of house rules and codify them so other people can use them, though, a lot of the time you end up with a pretty nice product. Elder Dragon Highlander's (EDH) Magic format was an awfully nice example of this: made by some guys who were allegedly bored in Alaska, EDH ended up becoming so popular that the company that produces Magic started making products aimed specifically at players of the product. Predictably, official involvement by the parent company had a negative influence on the format and game as a whole, but that's another topic. Another great example is Heroes of the Aturi Cluster (HotAC), a fantastic modification of the X-Wing miniatures game that converts it from a multiplayer skirmish game into a cooperative campaign game. It's phenomenal, and while the website is unfortunately down and FFG also "expanded" X-Wing into the garbage, my fondest memories of playing X-Wing are pretty much all from our two four-player HotAC campaigns, and I've played (and still play) a lot of X-Wing.
These modifications of games are impressive achievements; they've taken an existing product and addressed a desire to meet different needs that the game originally did. I think often, this is what people designing games from the ground up might actually want. There's a game out there that they like, but it's not quite meeting their needs, so they set out to make their own version that addresses their grievance. Unfortunately, this is how we end up with vast tracts of half- or unfinished games in game design ghettoes. Making a game from the ground up is hard and often boring. But working within an existing game? Much easier, faster, and in ways often more rewarding anyway. A review of last week:
Split Second
In wargaming, I consider "focused fire" the idea of continually targeting one unit until it is destroyed. In many, if not most games, this is the nominal strategy because attacking a unit until it's eliminated functions as both offense and defense (the destroyed unit can no longer provide services to your opponent). While effective, it's also unfortunately extremely BORING and often combines with model elimination to make entire games kind of algorithmic. You know to shoot one thing until it's destroyed as much as possible, and then move on to the next thing. This often creates a snowball effect as well, because when one player loses a unit, they have less capacity to eliminate yours, and they enter a death spiral.
Combine this with standard "everything activates once" round structure and low movement rates, and you end up with a typical fairly boring wargame: two blobs of units advance, roll dice, and you hope you can shoot the same blob the most times to end up advantaged. A lot of these games are dictated mostly by deployment. You can make an argument that most games just happen to feature this as a central strategy (your goal is to "outmaneuver" your opponent and hit a target as much as possible while keeping it from happening to you), but I would argue it's the laziest, least interesting central strategy possible. I've been thinking about this quite a bit lately: what are some ways to disincentives to focused fire, or at least ways to make it more interesting? Review of last week:
Split Second
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