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Game Design Articles

Model Thomas Kelvin quoteYou’ve got an action. Let’s call it “build Blooper”. You’ve got a second action. Let’s call it “buy Blooper”. You put your actions before your playtesters and in very short time you notice that nobody is building Bloopers. Your whole Blooper economy, your cute BloopBuilders, everything is just pointless.

And you’ve got no idea why.

So you make building Bloopers less expensive. Now everyone should build Bloopers all the time. Except they don’t. They’re still buying Bloopers.

So you make buying Bloopers really, really expensive. And now your game is stalling out and your playtesters are complaining. Nobody wants to build Bloopers and all the BloopBuilder concept art you commissioned is just so much dollars down the drain. What the hell is going on?

Welcome to the wonderful world of action analysis.

Fortunately there’s a quick and dirty tool you can use to graph your actions and compare them to each other. All you need are three simple axes* of analysis: Cost, Benefit and Risk. (more…)

Hanabi box coverYesterday I played Hanabi and, while it was too late in the evening for me, I enjoyed it immensely until I collapsed mentally and started doing stupid mistakes.

Yeah, the game is hard, especially if you play with a group that doesn’t have the meta-gaming down pat.

But one of the players said something I thought very curious at the time: that Hanabi is the only purely cooperative game out there, that there is no other game that is as cooperative as Hanabi. I smiled, looked at the backsides of my cards, nodded and thought “no way, there are lots of co-ops out there”. But the more I’ve thought about it, the more convinced I’m becoming that he is right. (more…)

Don't limit your POV quoteA novel always has a point of view, someone, or something, that is the reader’s eyes in the story. Sometimes it’s in the form of limited first person: “I walked up the path, scanning the ground for more blood.” Sometimes it’s limited third person: “He walked up the path, his eyes roving the ground for more drops of blood.” Occasionally it’s in omniscient third person: “Jones walked up the path, his eyes searching for the bloody trail. Ahead, the murderer pressed his arm to the wound in his side, clutching a long bladed knife in his free hand.”

In board games we almost always design in first person limited. The player is the avatar, the POV character through which the entire game plays out. And that’s fine. It’s a classic way of presenting challenges: you against the elements, you against your opponents, you against the game. But if we only use first person limited then we limit ourselves.

See, first person limited is great for abstracts but the more theme you’ve got in your game, the worse it becomes. Since the consumer of the experience and the avatar are the same person you’re presenting everything through the consumer. This means that if you’ve got someone who’d never swing a sword or build a pyramid then they’ll see straight through your theme and game to the mechanics instead. (more…)

Break your gameWhen I was little I played cards with my grandmother. I loved playing cards with my grandmother. She always lost.

She didn’t mean to. Grandma played to win and when we played for money, which as all the time, she played to win. Oh, she’d give me my starting cash. She’d fund me on the rare occasions when I ran out of 10 öre coins. It wasn’t like she tried to fleece me, but she did play to win. And she lost.

For years I thought that I was simply better at playing cards than grandma. I was convinced that I had a gift. But when I look back on what was going on I realize that this wasn’t so.

See, grandma’s favorite game was rummy. And we’d play for 10 öre per card. If you had six cards in your hand when your opponent played their last cards then you lost 60 öre. Grandma always complained that I didn’t play my cards but kept them in hand until I could play every card at once. She could never add any cards to my melds and I would win.

Because I had broken rummy. (more…)

Standing on the shoulders of giants Newton quoteSome time ago I bought a game on Kickstarter. It looked gorgeous. The gameplay seemed somewhat simple, and it was a first time designer self publishing but it looked gorgeous. The shipping was horrible but it did look gorgeous so I decided to buy two copies and hope to recover some of the shipping by selling one.

That is, until I opened the box. Yes, the game was gorgeous, the art top notch. But the game, well, after two plays I realized that either the game hadn’t been playtested enough or it had been playtested in a group that suffered from groupthink about how to play it. For anyone with a smidgen of gamer blood in their veins there was a clear dominant strategy: just keep drawing cards.

But it did look gorgeous. I couldn’t let that go. This was a set of components that kept screaming “mod me, mod me, I’ll promise I’ll be good, just mod me and make me a game!”

So I did. (more…)

Lab RatTake a rat and put it in a cage. Put a lever in the cage. The rat will wander around the cage for a while, sniffing the corners, looking around making sure there are not predators in the neighborhood. After a while it will wander by the lever. Sooner or later it will push it.

Hot chunks of cheese, Ratman! A pellet of food dropped down. Wow, look at that, I press it again and another pellet drops down. Jiminy Cricket, rat heaven, here I come!

Now hook up a counter to the lever. Don’t feed the rat every time it presses the lever but only at certain times. Or even better, copy the rat and put it in three separate cages (or if you’re less SciFi minded, start out with three different rats).

In one cage the rat will get a pellet every 100 times it presses the lever.

In another cage the rat will get a pellet at a random interval, at between 1 and 100 presses.

In a third the rat will never get a pellet no matter how much it presses the lever.

What do you think will happen? If you answered that rat C will quit while rat A will presses the lever the required 100 times and gets the pellet you are correct. Rat B, the one with the random intervals, will press the lever as well. But here’s the catch: it will press the lever faster than rat A. Not knowing when you’ll get the pellet is more exciting than knowing that you’ve got to perform your required 100 presses for a surefire Ratilicious Surprise.

Here’s the real kicker though: take away the pellets and rat B will go bananas, clicking like crazy until it keels over. (more…)

Epic WinOptimists are great. They’re upbeat, they spread energy about them, they get stuff done. Being an optimist makes life easy.

Right.

Optimism is good for a great many things. Looking at life realistically isn’t one of them. According to Dr. Martin Seligman, premier researcher on positive psychology (he founded the field), being an optimist, or being in an optimistic mood to be exact, makes us exaggerate everything. Good and bad.

That’s right, optimists exaggerate bad experiences.

BTW, pessimists are bad at quite a lot of things, from self-motivation to achieving their goals, but they’re great at one thing: seeing the world like it is. Which optimists aren’t.

So what’s this got to do with game design? (more…)

Money in handI’ve gone pro with my skills twice.

Once as a writer, once as a photographer. I went pro and I went freelance since that’s what pros do. I managed to make it to around $20 000/year with my writing as a freelance (yes, that’s more than you earn working minimum wage – but not much). With photography I realized quite early that yes, I enjoy photography but no, I won’t enjoy making a living out of it. In fact, if I do make a living out of it I’ll enjoy it less, to the point where I’ll quit enjoying it at all.

Why am I writing this? Because I do enjoy writing. I enjoy it to the point where I do make a living from it and still keep writing.

I’m not sure that I want to reach that point with my game designing. Which isn’t something one should write on a blog about game design, a blog a potential employer, or partner, or publisher might read and decide that, no, we don’t want to hire/publish/work with this semi-pro bozo.

See the sacrifices I’m making for my craft?

Seriously though, there’s a very important point in knowing whether you want to design as a hobbyist, a semi-pro or a pro. (more…)

Speed poster - Die Hard on a busA premise sentence is a tool used (mainly) in the scriptwriting or book industries. It’s a one line sentence that, using tropes or common knowledge, summarizes the contents of a creative work while at the same time building excitement about it.

“Die Hard on a buss.” That’s the premise sentence for Speed. The movie actually sold on that single sentence.

“Speed on bicycles.” That’s the premise sentence for Premium Rush. I don’t know if it’s genuine or not but it could be.

In both cases they use common knowledge (previous films in the genre) and add a distinguishing element that didn’t exist in the original.

“A cross between Cinderella and Starsky and Hutch set at a beauty pageant.” That’s Miss Secret Agent (yes, I’ve seen it, unfortunately). Either way, common tropes, emotional appeal, unique content. If you’re interested in how to craft a premise sentence you can read up on it on Randy Ingemarson’s blog.

How about some game premise sentences? (more…)

Warsaw Sword MaidenHow do you carry your sword?

Me, I carry mine on the hip, opposite my lead hand. That way I can draw it in one perfect motion-and-cut. Or in a stop-thrust with the pommel. I can even do a partial draw followed by a two-handed blade thrust to the side.

You know, in case my buddy suddenly decides to stab me at the dinner table.

I don’t practice Iaido. I’ve gone a few time but it was terrible on my knees and not quite as much fun as I had imagined. I don’t do Aikido. It looks fun but all that rolling around wasn’t for me. I’ve thought about LARP-ing but weaving chain-mail is a drag. I’ve never attended an SCA-meeting.

By now you’re guessing that this post has very little to do with wielding ancient weaponry and something with game design after all. You may be right. But back to the question at hand:

How do you carry your sword?

On your hip, ready for the draw? Over your back? In your hand? At the ready? Or do you carry a blaster instead?

Yeah, there’s definitely a lesson on design in here somewhere. (more…)