Gamespotting

Shiny things. They’re the bane of my creativity. Those new ideas that seem like precious unique flakes of snow that you must give your attention to before they melt away.

This week I had an ambitious goal – to tear apart a key aspect of The Queen Must Die that had its’ carefully engineered mechanics throughout other systems of the game and would refuse to be extricated without a critical breakdown. And then to come up with a leaner version that held on to as much richness as possible while being fast (hopefully play could be much more rapid) and less prone to analysis paralysis. It was going to be a lot of manual overhead, and apart from a few parameters and sub-goals I had basically no idea where to embark.

And then things ran away on me. Badly. I try to leave a few evenings a week to hanging out with my wife. More often than not we just watch TV, and that is good. It shuts down my mind for a few hours and I focus on other things than “What is the expectation value of these custom dice with a non-linear progression?” …or at the very least it makes me forget that I’m thinking about it incessantly.

So we’re watching Snowpiercer. I could talk at length about how I feel about the show. “Enthralled yet baffled” is the short version. How can such a blatantly absurd premise, supporting a plot that is almost entirely a scaffold for bald and obvious metaphor, manage to be so compelling? Honestly, I don’t know how anyone who has worked in creating film could possibly think anything else while watching the show. (But, that’s me. And it’s also a different conversation.)

And yet, apparently I can think of something else... It broadsides me (like a freight train – ugh… I said it, and did so in the larger context of obvious metaphors) – a random thought out-of-the-blue derails (whatever – going with it) my whole week: “What if Snowpiercer was a game? What is that game? How does it work?” And NO amount of reminding myself that I have no reach for that IP, and that none of the ideas that follow from it are clearly conducive to elevating to a different theme, will change my (ahem) train of thought..

NOTE: Some oblique <SPOILER ALERT> in the next paragraph.

I’m not going to burden you with the game idea that formed, just a few key aspects that lay out the route I am on. While the TV show's plot arc is leading to class warfare, it’s more about the uneven influences that lead towards that – conflict is the narrative destination, but the outcome will be determined by the currency of influence. All of that drama happens before a single improvised knife is drawn. And everything is geographically linear. The stowaways in the tail can’t touch the First Class, let alone the Engineers, without working through the 3^rd and 2^nd class divisions (and sub-divisions) first. Nothing is direct. Resources at hand for any faction along the way are dissimilar in numbers and effect. The final confrontation spans a long-line without flanks and the ultimate adversaries are on either end, leveraging those who stand between them.

And the idea won’t go away. No matter how many times I try to focus my mind on the goal of the week – to strip-away the complication in The Queen Must Die’s combat – I keep finding my thoughts commuting over to Snowpiercer… and damn it all if it isn’t starting to seem more and more like a game I want to try to make, in spite of the futility of the effort. The thought process chugs along and the pieces of the puzzle keep coming together – and the endorphin rush of that is SO compelling.

I write it down. I outline it to get me off this dead-end track (yeah, yeah, yeah). Once it’s on paper I can forget about it – it’ll be there when I’ve done what I really need to do… which is to think about the game I’ve invested years of thought in, rather than the shiny new one. But that doesn’t work either. I keep drifting back to the inevitably barren wasteland of an IP I will never get to touch.

I could draw this out, but bad metaphors would give way to bad puns and I would get increasingly dissatisfied with the journey. So, here is the final destination…

With the terminus of my cast-in-stone play test day of Sunday rapidly arriving, I forced myself to try something – ANYTHING to switch – on Friday night. I picked a route and followed it to the end of the line. It wasn’t terrible. But it did nothing to address any primary concerns, and really only marginally addressed one of the existing minor ones. But as a solution it did draw attention to a key problem that had not been obvious from a fixed position. What was slowing combat down had less to do with all the various abilities that needed attention, and more about how granularly those were divided up as possible options. The problem wasn’t how the numbers inter-acted, it was the number of numbers. I had Saturday to resolve that in.

How could I simplify that? Re-engineer the game so that all the various bits were put in place long before the combat was triggered and all that remained to be done was choose when to engage and roll the dice? What if resources were distributed and built-up linearly? What if the single option that was brought to bear was the one at the proverbial tip-of-the spear? What if players could only interact with their closest adversary?

You see it right? The metaphor isn’t that forced? All that work I’d put into Snowpiercer was, with some variation, all being applied by my subconscious to The Queen Must Die. I just needed to manifest it by Noon Sunday.

So, there was a LOT of kluge and approximation engineered into today’s jury-rigged playtest. But it was promising. And fast. We tried the previous iteration for comparison and discussion – it took 35 minutes to explain, set up and play out. The “Snowpiercer variant” was a maglev. It took a mere 10. 

Yeah, I still have to go in an clarify how three or maybe four interlocking systems interface with the new version, but it seems I am back on track.