Lately I have been reading a bunch of games designed by other people. Usually they are in the early phases of development. Most of them are probably never going to be finished. The main reason I say this is because of the way they were presented. The simple reality is that it's a "shit in, shit out" process. If the person designing the game isn't willing to put in some minimal effort on presentation, the likelihood that they're going to put much serious effort into finishing the game where it gets into the boring parts of development are probably pretty low.
A lot of this stuff will be related to a series I wrote on getting feedback from people on your games, and you can find all that stuff here. If you even want to get to that step, this article could be considered a useful precursor to getting your foot in the door. I'm not an expert on making games or anything, but what I am pretty good at is reading other people's rules and deciding if they're worth caring about or not. This is totally divorced from my pretense of making games, and just advice I provide as a guy who spends quite a bit of time analyzing other people's materials. I received the game Interceptor Ace as a gift recently. I'm not knowledgeable about the subject matter and didn't know anything about the game, but I like airplanes and wargames. I'm also a loser with no friends so I like solitaire gaming. I fired the game up, played it a bit, and don't like it for a variety of reasons. But the main takeaway I got from it is the importance of well laid-out player aids. Interceptor Ace is not a particularly complex game but it's heavily reliant on referencing charts. Unfortunately, the way the charts are placed on the player aids is done in an irritating manner, requiring constant flipping, searching and general manipulation. I didn't end up digging this game much, but it did impress on my some principles I'd like to try to adhere to in the design of player aids from here on, though. 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. 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.
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:
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. |
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