Hi to whoever may read this - I don't post much, because I've never published or even completed a design (yet), but I do read almost every thread every day. I've been making a lot of progress on one of my games lately, so I thought I'd start this blog to record my progress. I guess I've got some catching up to do...
About me - I enjoy the process of designing systems. Not surprisingly, I'm in the IT/systems integration world professionally. I'm very interested in gamification theory. I may never get a game published, I don't want to start a game company, self-publish, or do a Kickstarter. I want to design a system where the output is fun, not work. Also, due to a knee injury, I've had to go looking for new hobbies to take the place of sports that I really shouldn't play anymore.
My inspirations - board & card games like M:tG, Risk, Catan, Dominion, Chess... a game we had as kids called "Feudal" (I wonder if anyone knows it?). And video games like Final Fantasy Tactics, Sim City, Kessen, Front Mission, Warcraft 2, Rebuild, Zombieville, X-Men Legends, Legend of Zelda. You can probably see the pattern - strategy, depth, making choices about your kingdom or your soldiers, then testing those choices against other players or AI.
Somewhere in between all these games, there's an experience that I want to create, which is equal parts economic/resource management, army/city management, and combat. I want all three parts to interconnect & I want all three parts to be equally fun. For instance, what if the city reclamation of Rebuild was combined with the fun combat gameplay of Zombieville? I'd never stop playing that game. A lot of games can give me a slice of that experience - I want the whole pie. I'm sure such an experience is more attainable in video games, but I know enough people who have dabbled in video game design, and enough software developers, to know I'm not going to make a video game.
A board game, however... that's something that I can do.
So around 20 months ago, I started really thinking & getting started on a game. I don't have a real title - my fiancee & I call it "Suddenly Bunnies" though it has nothing to do with bunnies. I did a lot of research, I found this forum. I read a lot. I worked on the game. After about 6 months, I had created a monster. Every numeric value was both multivalue and multidimensional. Meaning every unit and every building was basically a spreadsheet, and there were lots of them. I tried to solve the problem through components, which resulted in a game that I could not even prototype. I had page after page after page of rules that I didn't even want to read through. The amount of decision space for the player was overwhelming. So I stopped.
Then a few months ago, I found inspiration again. What if I had my grandiose game, but made it all smaller? What if every space on the board was just half an inch by half an inch? No room for excess detail. Binary values in place of spreadsheets. Custom dice where I needed unpredictability/variety (instead of a complex tracking mechanism for each component). No factions, all players get the same options.
That became Suddenly Bunnies v2.0. I did enough work on the rules that I could actually start making content. I went through my first serious balancing exercise - hours and hours of analyzing the result sets of the five different soldier types against each other, tweaking them, reanalyzing, and so on.
And then, the paralysis returned. I had balanced combat (at least enough to prototype) but I became aware of several other balancing exercises - balancing the distribution of different cards, balancing the costs of the soldiers, the cards, the buildings, balancing the value of in-game opportunities. I got lost - I needed to put some firm stakes in the ground & then work from there.
Which leads me to Suddenly Bunnies v3.0. I'll take all the combat balancing I've done, and a big chunk of the rules I've written, and build a game just around that. I'll prototype with what I've done already, and then maybe start adding the other systems I've designed in v2.0, but if I do, at least I'll have a place to start. And that's where I'm at now. A lot of the content I designed for v2.0 doesn't apply to v3.0, so I'm brainstorming new content. I have ordered blank components for The Game Crafter & I'm eagerly looking forward to building the prototype.
Thanks for reading this far! I'll talk more about the game itself in my next post.
Comments
Tabletop games
Unlike video games (and it is my opinion you should not inspire yourself from video games), tabletop games are in essence usually *simple*. That's not to say there is no strategy involved. But most games like Catan, Dominon, Risk, Chess (as you have mentioned) have a very solid *core* that the game is built around.
For example. if your game is about war battles - well them you should have a *strong* mechanic that you are using for battles. Of course it could be complimented with a "resource" gathering or earning mechanic that blend the battle and unit management into one solid core.
When you started using "spreadsheets" for units, you should have said: "STOP, I've gone too far." Battle mechanics in board games are usually simple. However your idea of using spreadsheets could perhaps be feasible if each player had ONE spreadsheet with ALL the units defined. Each spreadsheet could have strengths and weaknesses... That would be *interesting*.
See what I mean by *simple*? You need to stay away from video games with their level managements, stat accrual, inventory handling and all that *micro-management* a video game does (and we all take for granted). Find what you want the game to *known* for and go with that...
Personally I think the idea of ONE spreadsheet per player could make for an interesting combat game... You just need to find what is overly complicated and simplify it!
Best of luck with your game!
Thanks for reading
Hi Quest, thanks for commenting. Maybe I wasn't clear - using spreadsheets was definitely not the idea. And is not the idea. I was using that more as an analogy for the complexity that I had built in the first version. As I said, my first version was too complicated, hence the last few paragraphs I wrote about simplifying. The direction I'm currently headed will probably be clearer after I have time to type up a summary of the game as it's currently designed.
To spreadsheet or not... that is the question!
Well to be honest with you, when you designed your first prototype "Suddenly Bunnies" maybe your idea of the spreadsheet wasn't as big of an issue...
Meaning instead of *scraping* all of that, you could *reuse* some of the principles and put together a "Game Mat" per player (Spreadsheet) with information about the units in your game. To me this sounds cool and it seems to be a very *serious* solution to a battle mechanic for a war game.
I don't think I've ever seen a game like this. Most "Game Mats" (Spreadsheets) are use to track income and/or health (like in my game) - but nothing prevents you from using them to define combat rules (in some tabular fashion).
I'm just saying, you felt it was not good for your games, and I'm saying perhaps with a different approach you could have something original based on what you had thought of.