The Design Diary I Never Wrote
As I find myself doing more and more playtesting, making smaller and smaller changes, and feeling just about ready to cross the pitch-ready finish line, I wanted to take reflect on the design process that has taken place over the past three years in hopes that someone finds something about it useful/relatable. Here we go!
*Quick note: This is a continuation of my first post, "Homophobia Brought Me Here". You can read that first if you want some more context around my the design choices.
-Design Pillars-
When I decided I wanted to design a new game, I went in with some parameters to help guide my choices.
Mechanical
• Gameplay and rules should be relatively simple and accessible to a wide audience, while still providing a level of decision making that is engaging and challenging.
• Setup and play time should be relatively short (~30min), where several playthroughs are possible without inducing player exhaustion.
• Gameplay should utilizing mechanics that eliminate individual player turns and keep players actively engaged.
• Rules and card effects reflect a theme of cooperation between the players and characters. Players should have opportunities to support each other without feeling 'combative' or 'competitive'. Character abilities/effects should always yield positive or neutral interactions with other characters.
Visual
• Character art should depict people of various ethnicities, genders, body types, and physical abilities in ways that are positive and inclusive. Every character should be unique and depicted in powerful, active poses, motivated by their own internal force. (ie. no passive but pretty portraits)
• Characters should be human if possible. Humanoid creatures can be utilized in limited and conscientious ways, but not if it sacrifices opportunities for more equitable representation of real people.
• If possible, the final game should be a product that promotes the work of marginalized people in the gaming industry. As a queer designer, I would insist on taking every opportunity to hire marginalized artists to produce additional elements of the game.
Starting out, I was mainly focused on the mechanics and less-so on the visuals, but I kept in mind that I wanted a design that lended itself to having a lot of opportunity to showcase a variety of characters.
Also, and this is important, I'm a professional creative and I know that having a strong mission statement does NOT mean anything I design to that end is going to be inherently better or successful simply because of that fact. If I want to create a game that people enjoy and actually want to play, I need to put in the work to make it happen. I cannot approach a publisher or the public with a passion for social justice and a half-baked idea for a card game and expect them to immediately buy whatever I put out there. That's not good design, that's entitlement. This is a product-based industry, so if I want to make an impact in the way people approach representation, I need to come up with a solid, well-tested product that appeals to the general public, not just the individuals I'm trying to represent.
-Version 1: The Producers-
Starting out, I was mainly focused on the mechanics and less-so on the visuals, but I kept in mind that I wanted a design that lended itself to having a lot of opportunity to showcase a variety of characters.
Also, and this is important, I'm a professional creative and I know that having a strong mission statement does NOT mean anything I design to that end is going to be inherently better or successful simply because of that fact. If I want to create a game that people enjoy and actually want to play, I need to put in the work to make it happen. I cannot approach a publisher or the public with a passion for social justice and a half-baked idea for a card game and expect them to immediately buy whatever I put out there. That's not good design, that's entitlement. This is a product-based industry, so if I want to make an impact in the way people approach representation, I need to come up with a solid, well-tested product that appeals to the general public, not just the individuals I'm trying to represent.
-Version 1: The Producers-
I'm a big proponent of the whole 'write what you know' concept, so as a filmmaker I thought a movie-making game would be a great place to start. I have yet to find a game that actually captures the process and feeling of making a movie. Many people approach it as a money-making, worker-placement, resource-management concept and completely miss the fact that it's really about talented, passionate hard-working people collaborating across multiple disciplines to tell stories. If it's not a soulless, worker placement game, then it's some form of movie-pitching party game that, while more thematically appropriate, I'm still not all that interested in. So, if I wanted to make a movie-themed game, it needed to be about the people, not the profits.
As I starting thinking about mechanics that centered around 'bringing together teams of people', I was reminded of an online game I played as a teen called gToons.
As I starting thinking about mechanics that centered around 'bringing together teams of people', I was reminded of an online game I played as a teen called gToons.
Without getting into the specifics of the rules and gameplay, the main mechanic of the game revolved around the cards each having up to three tags or categories (human, hero, vehicle, etc.) and numerical values that fluctuated based on which characters were also in play. Placement was extremely important since most bonuses were based on cards 'neighboring' each other. As an example, Dexter's Mom received +10 if she was next to any Dexter's Dad. The rarer cards had more wide-spread bonuses (ex. -2 to all Black cards), but to maximize your score you still needed near-perfect placement.
With that concept in mind, I created my first prototype with players drafting actors, writers, directors, etc... who each specialized in specific genres in order to raise the Star Value of Screenplays.
Mechanics-wise, I was very much inspired by Seven Wonders, so that's basically how this version played. You would draft cards to either add them directly to your Production Team or use them as a Contact to pull different cards from a public Talent Pool, discard pile, or deck. Placement wasn't as important in this version, which quickly changed when I wanted to give the game more structure.
After about a year of development, I basically ended up with the final form of this version of the game. It was playing pretty smoothly with any take-that elements being substituted for more friendly effects. I had thought the game was ready for refinement, until I played it with my partner's family when we were visiting during the holidays. We arrived at the scoring round and his mom looked over at me and said, "You add it up for me, I don't want to screw it up." It sounded harmless enough, but in that moment I knew this game wasn't as accessible as I wanted it be.
-Version 2: Raid Party-
Core Value #1 - Accessibility
I received a lot of comments on how cumbersome the mental load of counting up the different numerals and symbols was, so I decided to simplify even further. I've combined the elemental symbols with the edge numerals and changed the class values to provide straight-forward attack and defense values that players use to determine the outcome of battles.
Core Value #2 - Casual Play
The game plays in about 30min, including teaching time. Each game consists of three Mini-Boss rounds and a final, Raid Boss round to determine the outcome. In my last playtest, one of the players said, "It went by very quickly. I didn't feel like we played that long!" So, I consider that a success.
Core Value #3 - Active Turns
All the actions in the game (drawing, choosing, placing, and scoring) happen simultaneously. I had to work in a reveal step to ensure that everyone was playing at the same speed, which prevents the hand buildup phenomenon that can take place in games like Sushi Go and Seven Wonders. I also decided to forgo the pick-and-pass mechanic used in previous versions, as that type of drafting in a cooperative game just resulted in diminishing returns for players.
Core Value #4 - Positive Player and Character Interactions
All the heroes in the game can be part of a successful team. The powers and values of each character contribute the overall goal in some way, with their effectiveness relying solely on the choices made by the players. Also, in order to encourage interactions, players only place heroes on neighboring teams, never their own. You have to rely on other players to set you up for success, as each neighbor will give you a card to add to your team. After that, it's up to each player to determine how to make the most of the characters they received by strategically placing them around the enemy. Similar to an actual dungeon raid, success is entirely dependent on players' awareness of the status of their teammates.
My final hurdle is the visual design pillar I put in place when I started designing this game. I consciously made the decision to include 45 unique characters, which provides ample opportunity to showcase people who are otherwise underrepresented in hobby games. It's an expensive design choice, and if the game isn't fun and streamlined when I go to pitch, then I can't reasonably expect any publisher to consider working with me. Even if I go to Kickstarter, I'd need a game that generated a considerable amount of buzz in the community to start conversations around inclusion and representation in games, which is a HUGE undertaking. Currently, the game is accessible and novel, but without any established names attached to it, it's just one of the thousands of games vying for space on crowed shelves.
This is by no means an exhaustive insight into the whole design process. I have dozens of iterations of hundreds of paper cards, all cut out by hand (I saved every one). I could easily write an entry for the differences that took place between each and every one. I might still go back and finish my movie version of the game one day, who knows. Hopefully something in here is helpful or interesting, but I enjoyed writing it regardless. I'm extremely excited for the next step of the process, pitching the game, as it leverages all the marketing skills in my wheelhouse.
Wish me luck and I'll be back to share the results and all the things I've learned along the way.
Till then!
A few months into 2019, several movie-themed games had launched on Kickstarter, none of which looked appealing to me and completely turned me off from the theme, so I decided that while I was revamping the game I should consider re-theming it as well.
I started by looking at ways to integrate the screenplay directly into the grid layout, landing on a grid of six cards, offset around a central card. Around the same time, I had gotten back into FFXIV and news of a WoW Vanilla release had been announced, so I had the idea of giving the game a raid party theme. Instead of professions, characters would have classes, instead of genres they'd have elements, and instead of screenplays they'd be centered around bosses. Lastly, I wanted to forgo all written text on the cards and find a way to accomplish the same effect through symbols.
Obviously it was a major overhaul to all of the mechanics, graphics, and text. I essentially ended up with a completely new game, but I felt that it was much more inline with my design goals. I loved that the cards were language independent and that the neighboring bonuses were simplified into numerals that were counted when completed. The biggest issue with deconstructing the gameplay in this way is that it also increased the margin of error in terms of perceived balanced.
My new challenge was figuring out how I wanted this version of the game end up playing. The Producers was a competitive, tableau-building game where players were vying for industry talent that best fit their screenplay. Initially Raid Party started out the same way, but because I was still utilizing a choose-and-pass drafting mechanic, people wanted more ways to actively interfere with other players teams besides hate-drafting. The problem was, any ideas along those lines went against my core principal of positive player interactions, so I shifted gears and tried out the game as a co-op. Thematically, this route worked really well. Players were working together to draft their teams, and in the end there was an all-or-nothing battle against the final Raid Boss. In my limited MMO experience, this seemed to fit extremely well.
And that is basically where the game was at going into 2020. I had my mind set on launching a Kickstarter campaign later that year, possibly early 2021, and had approached a fellow MCAD alum who was excited to work on the art. I had a ton of momentum in February, and then suddenly COVID-19 hit and everything changed. My friend was furloughed, my partner and I were unsure about our careers as well, and finishing development on a card game during a period when we couldn't even see our family or friends seemed like a delusion. It turned out that my expertise in video production made me an extremely hot commodity during a pandemic that forced everyone to communicate digitally, and soon any free time I once had was filled with production work. So game progress pretty much stalled for an entire year, until I jumped on Twitter in late January and saw a posting for the Tabletop Mentorship Program. -Version 3: The Dungeons of Dyad-
That brings us to now. I've put together a schedule so that I have at least one playtesting option available every night of the week. After a couple weeks of great feedback, the game has continued to evolve and refine itself into its final form.
And that is basically where the game was at going into 2020. I had my mind set on launching a Kickstarter campaign later that year, possibly early 2021, and had approached a fellow MCAD alum who was excited to work on the art. I had a ton of momentum in February, and then suddenly COVID-19 hit and everything changed. My friend was furloughed, my partner and I were unsure about our careers as well, and finishing development on a card game during a period when we couldn't even see our family or friends seemed like a delusion. It turned out that my expertise in video production made me an extremely hot commodity during a pandemic that forced everyone to communicate digitally, and soon any free time I once had was filled with production work. So game progress pretty much stalled for an entire year, until I jumped on Twitter in late January and saw a posting for the Tabletop Mentorship Program. -Version 3: The Dungeons of Dyad-
That brings us to now. I've put together a schedule so that I have at least one playtesting option available every night of the week. After a couple weeks of great feedback, the game has continued to evolve and refine itself into its final form.
I received a lot of comments on how cumbersome the mental load of counting up the different numerals and symbols was, so I decided to simplify even further. I've combined the elemental symbols with the edge numerals and changed the class values to provide straight-forward attack and defense values that players use to determine the outcome of battles.
Core Value #2 - Casual Play
The game plays in about 30min, including teaching time. Each game consists of three Mini-Boss rounds and a final, Raid Boss round to determine the outcome. In my last playtest, one of the players said, "It went by very quickly. I didn't feel like we played that long!" So, I consider that a success.
Core Value #3 - Active Turns
All the actions in the game (drawing, choosing, placing, and scoring) happen simultaneously. I had to work in a reveal step to ensure that everyone was playing at the same speed, which prevents the hand buildup phenomenon that can take place in games like Sushi Go and Seven Wonders. I also decided to forgo the pick-and-pass mechanic used in previous versions, as that type of drafting in a cooperative game just resulted in diminishing returns for players.
Core Value #4 - Positive Player and Character Interactions
All the heroes in the game can be part of a successful team. The powers and values of each character contribute the overall goal in some way, with their effectiveness relying solely on the choices made by the players. Also, in order to encourage interactions, players only place heroes on neighboring teams, never their own. You have to rely on other players to set you up for success, as each neighbor will give you a card to add to your team. After that, it's up to each player to determine how to make the most of the characters they received by strategically placing them around the enemy. Similar to an actual dungeon raid, success is entirely dependent on players' awareness of the status of their teammates.
My final hurdle is the visual design pillar I put in place when I started designing this game. I consciously made the decision to include 45 unique characters, which provides ample opportunity to showcase people who are otherwise underrepresented in hobby games. It's an expensive design choice, and if the game isn't fun and streamlined when I go to pitch, then I can't reasonably expect any publisher to consider working with me. Even if I go to Kickstarter, I'd need a game that generated a considerable amount of buzz in the community to start conversations around inclusion and representation in games, which is a HUGE undertaking. Currently, the game is accessible and novel, but without any established names attached to it, it's just one of the thousands of games vying for space on crowed shelves.
This is by no means an exhaustive insight into the whole design process. I have dozens of iterations of hundreds of paper cards, all cut out by hand (I saved every one). I could easily write an entry for the differences that took place between each and every one. I might still go back and finish my movie version of the game one day, who knows. Hopefully something in here is helpful or interesting, but I enjoyed writing it regardless. I'm extremely excited for the next step of the process, pitching the game, as it leverages all the marketing skills in my wheelhouse.
Wish me luck and I'll be back to share the results and all the things I've learned along the way.
Till then!
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