Hi, I'm Joseph Craig. I use the moniker "Sadakatsu" whenever it's available. I am primarily a programmer, most of whose experience is with full-stack web development. I have been interested in game development for decades now, but I have found game design very intimidating. Now I am trying to get started and could use advice and ideas from people who have gotten past the start line.
I currently have two projects in mind with which I am hoping to get help.
The first seems more in line with what your community typically discusses. My friend and I love the idea of telling a story together with tabletop role-playing games. Our attempts to play through campaigns and one-shots have each failed for one or more of the following reasons: players did not want to read the admittedly thick and dense rulebooks, players were not interested in spending time building characters, players got bored spending two to four hours mostly talking with occasional dice rolls, players were not interested in agreeing to multiple play sessions, and some players seemed to find fun only in derailing the experience for everyone else. However, these same people will play even big box board games; their current favorite is Terraforming Mars with Corporate Era cards, Venus Next, and Preludes (which always seems to take at least three hours). We think that we could convince these people to play role-playing games with us if there were a system that would allow their role-playing to be more like gameplay from other games.
Our current idea is to make a gateway role-playing game that allows everyone to jump in with only enough preparation to learn the rules - including the game master. We think that it is possible for deck-building mechanics to support a generic encounter system that is quick, engaging, and provides enough hooks and encouragement for players to get into explaining what their characters are doing. We want to include random map generation, encounter generation, and even plot generation based simply on drawing cards and simple checks of the party's level. Of course, neither of us has designed a board game before, and I very much want help getting past stumbling blocks because the idea seems so fun.
My other idea does not seem to line up with what this community discusses, but I need to get ideas and criticism from game designers if it is going to have any chance of success. In trying to find programs to help me work on the game system discussed above, I found that there do not seem to be any successful tools aimed at game designers. Joris Dormans designed Machinations as a way to diagram and simulate game economies, but despite its getting what looks like a recent update, it seems that the game design community is not paying much attention. Vassal seems better, but it seems to be used almost exclusively by game players reach out to play their favorite already-published games with other people. boardgame.io seems very promising since it enables people to launch servers easily and even supports MCTS-based bot play, but some posts on this forum have strengthened my impression that many (most?) game designers do not want to have to learn to program.
Thus, it is my ridiculous, ambitious goal is to design an all-in-one game design tool that game designers could use to refine a raw idea into a product ready for submitting to a publisher. I have started a prototype called Sheireit where I hope to build a general tabletop design tool with an engine capable of playing those games, but I also document the features I think the final product should have.
It is my hope that this community can help me get a feel for whether game designers would actually like such a tool and to give me the feedback that would help me make the tool that game designers want.
So, if there is a tool that you wish you had, please let me know! I am hoping to start a thread here soon where I will go into more of the details behind my ideas that I listed on my project's README.
That's probably too much from me. Hello! Let's be friends ^_^
Thank you all for greeting me. I really do hope to work with this community increasingly as time passes, even if some of the heat I feel about some of the responses I got leak through this post.
Regarding the gateway role-playing game: I am sure that there are other people with whom we could play more traditional pen-and-paper RPGs if we wanted to look for them. I am also sure that there are already published games that have at least some of what we would like. However, both of us really enjoy playing with our specific group of friends, and both of us have wanted to design games for years, so we are trying to wed as many of our play goals together as we think we can get away with to make the game we really want to play. There is a high probability we will fail, but if we learn and have fun, we still gain, right?
Regarding the tool: I had been hesitant to post about my idea for a tool because I read some of the recent threads in this community about such ideas. These threads looked to be dominated by a couple members who were convinced such an idea was impractical and were determined to convince the original poster of the same. I was afraid that I would get a similar response, and it seems that such a response is starting. This community seems to be pretty successful, so I don't want to be driven away or get angry because of a little adversity (okay, a little late for that, but I'm trying). You are the people with whom I want to partner. Even if I can take the first step in making the tool game designers wished they had - even if they do not know it yet - this will be a massive success.
Comments like "such a tool would be useless" or "there is little hope of meeting all the goals well" are ones that quash nascent ambitions, regardless of the author's intent. They are written as though the matter is settled with established fact. They are also incorrect. The first comment does not allow for any room for the unknown. The second intimates that incompletely meeting the project's goals from the first release means that the product would never be adopted and thus never have the chance to perform better. Critical thinking does have an important place in the design process, but it has to be paired with the desire to identify problems so specific solutions can be sought. Immediate rejection of the product or the premise do not count.
I have probably vented my spleen too much (yeah, hi, this is my welcome thread, I'm a cantankerous old coot at the age of 33), so I'll switch contexts. As depressing and frustrating as I found those comments, I think there is opportunity hiding behind those sentiments. Why would an all-in-one design tool be useless? What would it need to not be useless? What is the first feature this tool provide that would soothe your biggest frustration in the game design process?
I will accept in part the concern that someone who tries to meet every possible need is unlikely to satisfy anybody, but I say that there is great evidence that general tools that met one need really well got the support community support to survive through rougher earlier generations as they improved at the other areas as well (e.g., Unity). So... what is the feature that no tool yet provides that would earn community approval such that they keep supporting the effort until it so that a future major version could finally do it all?
I currently suspect that what game designers really want is a tool that operates at the level of concepts and ideas. Something like... "There is a resource called Excelsior. It is represented by a deck of cards that are placed in the general play area, face down. During the round set-up, a new card from the Excelsior deck is revealed, covering previous (if any) remaining cards. The active player can buy this card by permanently discarding four other cards. Upon purchase, the card permanently gives the owner the effects it details." Using different perspectives of the game mechanics, a designer could start adding ideas into his game, linking them in different places with either drop-downs or drag-and-drops. The result would be an IDE that feels like a web site design wizard, but is fact generating data and code from the decisions the user makes. I think that an initial Sheireit release might temporarily export the game to boardgame.io, but I think that providing an engine to play the games as well is a killer feature that is almost as important as the combination of the creation UI and data format.
This is, of course, my supposition as a programmer, not a game designer. My game design experience is limited to having designed an arcade game called _Clean Your Room!_ and an _Unreal Tournament 2004_ deathmatch level. I need your help to answer the questions that will refine Sheireit's design. I understand that people are skeptical, but how often has this community's members had to fight past skepticism to make something great? Thus, I would greatly appreciate ideas regarding what people wished they could use right now or were disappointed was not in other products they tried. With the right ideas and encouragement, I think we can together make something really useful.