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Into the mouth of madness!

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kronik
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Joined: 04/15/2012

Hi everybody!

I'm a 28 year old Belgian geek, testing the grounds of board game design, but feeling a bit lost on how to proceed. I got here via a post on BGG where Genji designer Dylan Kirk explains how his game came to be, and how BGDF had helped him a lot along the way. I however, am nowhere near having solid ideas like that, but I have a lot floating around.

I've been geeking heavily the last 8-odd years, mostly board games. In the past I tried out some CCG's, mostly because it was the fad at the time. I played a lot of M:TG, simply because I couldn't convince anyone else that Battletech or Middle Earth might be better games. I had a dabble with RPG's, in particular Shadowrun, but that ended in a cloud of smoke, quite literally actually. When we finally got to a point where everyone had read the book, built a character and we were set to play, someone pulled out a grenade in a confined space, only to leave just about all of us dead within the first half hour of playing. So that was the end of that escapade. Later, we started playing Settlers, Tigris & Eufrates, Samurai, El Grande,... and found our niche. The others left off. I never quite did and still love playing games of all types.

Recently I've been mostly into medium weight, accessible games, because we play with a lot of new people regularly. I find myself extremely drawn to unique games, and am looking out for exceptional gaming experiences all the time. I recently ordered Fiasco (a one shot RPG system, heavily based on storytelling), and am looking forward to D-Day Dice and 1936 (a self contained card game with CCG elements: before each game, you assemble your personal deck from the available cards).

So what of my designing ventures? Well, I started out with keeping track of random ideas, be it mechanics or themes in google doc files. Apart from a few exceptions, I haven't really gotten further than just writing down ideas. Somewhere in my head, I seem to either be swamped with options, or find faults that I can't remedy. I guess I need to start building prototypes for some that are more advanced, really.

What I'm hoping for here on this forum, is to find some guidance in how to create a workflow, feedback on ideas and some constructive criticism. I'm very much into theoretical aspects of, well, anything really, so I'm also keen to find out more about theoretical approaches that might be beneficial for a game designer. I'm thinking of things like Game Theory (there's a great freely available video class from MIT if I'm not mistaken, just search open university), Auction Theory, anything else choice or strategic thinking related.

So, that's a long story short...er. Hope I didn't bore you to death. Guess it reflects how much thinking goes on in my head before I move on to action! :)

Dralius
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Joined: 07/26/2008
Game Theory: A mathematical

Game Theory: A mathematical method of decision-making in which a competitive situation is analyzed to determine the optimal course of action for an interested party.

Not that it's uninteresting or useful. It’s just not about games as we think of them.

Everybody has a different methodology when it comes to design and you’ll have to find what works best for you.

When I get an idea for a game I start a document and write down everything I think of not worrying about too many details. I’m just getting it in a place where I can go back and work on it. It may sit in this state for a long time as I often can’t get to new ideas quickly because I’m working on old ones. Many ideas are never developed.

For those that do get developed I take my notes and start organizing the information, thinking through how I imagine the players will interact with the game. Eventually I end up with a short description of play, components list, turn order and actions flow. From there I start writing the actual rules, laying out the board, cards, etc…

Once im happy with the rules and components I make a prototype and if possible solo test it for proof of concept. After that it’s all test --> Improve --> test --> Improve --> test --> Improve --> test --> Improve --> test --> Improve --> test --> Improve --> Until its done. Then I start looking for a buyer.

kronik
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Joined: 04/15/2012
Thanks for the comment. Do

Thanks for the comment.

Do you mean to say you plot everything out on paper before making a prototype? I seem to be at a point where I can't think the solution. Perhaps it's lack of experience, but I thought I'd be forced to move ahead and start tinkering with some prototype. But it seems such an undirected approach to try things out until they work.

Dralius
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kronik wrote:Thanks for the

kronik wrote:
Thanks for the comment.

Do you mean to say you plot everything out on paper before making a prototype? I seem to be at a point where I can't think the solution. Perhaps it's lack of experience, but I thought I'd be forced to move ahead and start tinkering with some prototype. But it seems such an undirected approach to try things out until they work.

Yes everything gets writen up in a word documemts including components.

If your stuck i suggest you start a design blog for your game. Starting with a detailed description of play and what issues you are running into.

SlyBlu7
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Joined: 03/15/2012
I do the same thing that

I do the same thing that Dralius does. Usually I come up with a theme, and a major mechanic. The two games that I'm working on right now are 'Ironclad', and 'Forgotten Gods.' I'll walk you through my though process when designing Ironclad, as it's the simpler of the two games. You can probably skim the rest of this post. If you want to see the game, there's a design journal on this site for it.

Ironclad has definitely been the easiest game for me, and is the most likely to be followed through all the way to completion, provided I can find the artwork required. I was sitting down watching a tv show about jousting, and I thought - "how cool would it be to have a game about jousting?" From there, I started thinking about how I wanted to fit a game into that theme. A miniatures game seemed a bit silly - at most, jousting is 2 knights riding towards each other and smashing lances into their opponent. Not detailed enough to really require any visualization of where each knight is located in the lists. So what about board-game? If I went that route, I could focus a lot more on the macro-scale of jousting, with knights roaming the country and entering tournaments, winning fans and prestige in different areas, and becoming the most famous knight in the realm. But that's boring - people who like jousting like it for the action, if I wanted a game where you just wander around playing in tournaments, I could just as easily theme it on football, or rugby. So I settled on cards.

'Forgotten Gods' is also card based, and each player has 1 character card and the players all work together against the deck. I didn't want that cooperative feel for jousting - I wanted it to be 1v1 player interaction. But Knights did get injured or die during jousts, so giving each player a single knight means that they might not last until the end of the game. So I need to give them access to multiple knights. Cool, done. How do they earn knights... there was a sticking point. Do they pick them from the very beginning? Do they have a deck like in Magic? Having a deck for each player means a lot of cards, which means a higher production cost to transfer to the consumer, which makes the game less accessible. Letting them all pick from a selection of cards before the game starts takes time away from the action, and makes the game take longer as they potentially argue over how fair it is for someone to get a particular knight. Can't do that either. So I added a mechanic where the players buy Knights from a communal pool as the game goes on, sort of like buying powerplants in PowerGrid. Then I thought that rather than bombard people with 50 knights, why not add in some form of customization? In the show, the horses were a big deal - a horse could make or break a contest. So I added in horses, and gave them rules that adjusted the Knight's effectiveness. And I added armor, which also affected the knight.

Great, we know that we have cards, the players are bidding on knights, horses, and armor as the game advances. What about the combat? Do I just want to make the players fight each other 1v1? That's fine, but then it's only a 2 player game, what if you have lots of friends over - I want you to be playing my game, not another one! So I made it multiplayer. I gave them Tournament cards, representing where their knights are dueling, and bottlenecking the players so that a few of them will joust each turn. This also gave me a win condition - each tournament awards prizes based on where you place, so the player whose knights have the most prizes at the end of the game wins. The tournaments also let me pace the game - there are 6 tournaments. Now I can start doing match to figure out how many of each type of card I'll need in order to have enough to get through a game.

For combat, I wanted a bit of randomization, to represent the fact that the players are only a coach to the knights - no coach has any control over when Beckham is going to play well or if he's going to be off spacing-out and playing horribly. So I added a dice. A D10 more exactly, because the even percentages make my math easier - I could rewatch the show and record how often knights actually made contact, how often lances broke, and how often knights were unhorsed or injured. Suddenly I had target numbers to use as an average - they hit around 50% of the time, so a 5+ was required on the roll. But my average modifier to the roll is +2, so I boosted the number to 7. An 'average' knight will hit 50% of the time. I didn't want the game to just be about who had the better knight, the best horse and armor, and could roll the best, so I added a card element representing a few jousting tactics used by knights of the time - players played these cards in secret to add deeper strategic value to the game. These cards also serve as currency when buying the knights, horses, and armor.

Suddenly I had a game, and only needed to iron out the details. Players have a team of knights, represented by cards, which they enter into a selection of tournaments over a 6-round "season," to joust against other players to determine how many prizes they win, and the player who has the most prizes after 6 rounds wins. Then it was just a matter of sharing the game, getting some feedback, working out some prototypes to playtest it repeatedly, iron out some bumps, and now it's on to artwork and publishing. Coming up with the game itself only took me about 2 hours. Playtesting etc I expect to take a few weeks, and artwork could take months if it happens at all. And I'll be publishing the game to a print-on-demand so publishing is quick and painless (although I won't make much money initially). If it does well, I'll have a leg to stand on when I take it to a real publisher.

kronik
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Joined: 04/15/2012
It's really interesting to be

It's really interesting to be able to follow your train of thought. I must admit that I don't see solutions for every problem as clearly as you do (did). I think I'll have to lay out my problems step by step, and either choose a solution or playtest different options I come up with to see what works best. I'm sure with experience such things come faster, but right now I just have no idea.

Thank you very much for your elaborate post!

SlyBlu7
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Joined: 03/15/2012
No problem, glad to have

No problem, glad to have helped. Don't be afraid to start small. Smaller games have fewer problems, because there are fewer mechanics. Take a game as simple as Blackjack, for example. You can explain Blackjack in just 3 sentences:
Aces are 1 or 11, Faces are 10-12 starting with Jacks, every other card is worth it's number. Each turn you ask for another card, or stop. The winner is whoever gets their total score closest to 21 without going over.

I used to be the kind of nerd who would ramble on about the minute details of a game long after someone had stopped caring or even listening. One of my girlfriends, bless her heart, finally asked me to teach her how to play M:tG so that she could at least understand what I was saying. I went out and spent $5 on two decks of 60 cards. I had one Red/White deck, and one Red/Black deck. All the lands were standard, none of the creatures had any effects like "Fly" or "Fear" or "Tap to ___." The only spells I put in were basic Red spells like Fireball that simply dealt damage when you played them. She learned the game in less than 20 minutes. M:tG is actually an astonishingly basic game once you strip away the years of accumulated card-effects.

Draw a card every turn, lay down 1 land every turn, and tap lands to play cards. Tap creatures to attack, and the other player can tap creatures to block. Every card comes into play tapped, and you untap at the beginning of your turn. Attack number is how much damage you do to the other card, defense number is your hitpoints - lose all your hitpoints in one turn and the card dies. If nobody blocks, the damage goes straight through to the opponent - knock their life down to '0', and you win the game.

5 sentences. That's all it takes to explain the core rules of MtG. Compare that to the 3 sentences it takes to describe Blackjack. The next game she wanted to learn was my personal favorite - Warhammer. I tried the same thing, set up two basic armies - each had a regiment of archers, and a regiment of swordsmen. An hour later and she was confused and frustrated. Warhammer is a very complex game; it has a 300 page rulebook for a reason.

Every mechanic within a game is just a smaller game in itself. Magic and Blackjack are so simple that they're practically a single-mechanic game. Checkers is a single-mechanic game. Risk is a multi-mechanic game, you have the movment and control across the regions, you have an economic aspect of raising troops, and a combat mechanic when two armies clash over territory. Getting each of those mechanics to blend seamlessly is hard. Try to effectively teach someone Risk in less than 10 sentences. It's a complex game.

Start small. If you have to, pick a unifying theme for each of your games and make them tiny and simple. Then, once you've got some experience making small games, start finding ways to link your games together. Eventually you'll have a large game with several different mechanics - going from checkers and craps, to Risk.

BlueRift
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Joined: 04/01/2012
Welcome

I like reading this post and seeing how people think. I'll add my two cents of how I got started on the game I'm still working on which is a strategy board game.

It started when I was dissatisfied with RISK. I identified the exact things I wanted in a strategy game and proceeded to fill in the blanks. I had two main goals. First, I wanted to have a qualitative difference between armies (I have spent more on my army therefore it should be better than yours). I also wanted to incorporate strategic maneuvering between armies and conquerable locations.

This led me to explore a space opera theme where armies are fleets composed of differing ships that can engage each other between systems. I put it on a hex-board with fleets on the edges so you have options 3 options for moving from each point.

From there, I've play-tested 3 unique combat styles to find out the best way capture the feel I'm going for in combat. I have a post in the mechanics forum discussing this exact topic. This, I think, is a good illustration of how to use this forum. I had an idea for yet another combat method that worked in my head and in excel, but I have realized isn't what I was going for before I had to create 20+ cards to play-test it.

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