I have recently realized that approximately in 90% of my game design (I made up the stat) consist in taking something big and making it smaller. You probably have done some fractions in math where when you end up with an expression like "4/16 + 6/8" and know that it can be simplified as "1/4+3/4". It seems that when game designing, I am almost doing this all day.
Since many of my game ideas comes from board game like video games, it is somewhat normal that the original idea has more information and calculation that needs to be simplified to be played as a board game.
But now I have reached a point that since I am naturally simplifying everything, I am wondering if I am not in fact removing fun aspect from the game and making the game more bland. I have 3 examples I want to explain.
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Example A:
In arkham horror, each investigator has a certain amount of money he can spend on spell and items through the game. I have a similar game design idea but I did not want to add play money to the game in order to reduce the amount of components.
So by thinking about it (from an high level of view), money restrict the access to certain elements of the game to some player either by quality or quantity.
An idea I had to simulate the same effect was that each player had a wealth level. And that level indicated the place you could access, the items you could buy, etc. Extra money received by a character would have been distributed on a 1 time use card which would have a wealth level on it giving you access to that amount of wealth when spent.
So it somewhat do the same thing, but it removes the need to the player to manage their money so that they can think about more important things.
But what if managing the amount of money you had was actually one of the fun part of the game that made the game more immersive? Would removing it make the game less fun?
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Example B
I am currently playing an old Xbox video game called "Shattered Union". It consist of beign a war game where you have multiple kind of units that moves on an hex grid. In a battle, you can have around 30 units to manage + planes.
Last night I had this situation where I wanted to conquer a city, so I decided to split up my force and attack the city on 2 different flanks. This is my "Strategical decision" in the game.
Of course, the 2 groups of units you are going to use needs to be made of equal forces and capabilities in case they get ambushed. For example, you want each group to have the same average strength and some anti-air interception units. To do so, you must move every unit on the hex grid so that in the end, you end up with 2 equal strength group. This is the "Logistical decisions" of the game.
Now at the beginning, it might be fun to do all these moves, but after some time, it can be boring. It end up that the city was empty and I needed to move my troops forward to next next city. Suspecting it was empty, I decided to send scouts to capture the next city and it was indeed empty. So it remove the need to move every unit and made the battle end faster.
Now one way to simplify this is to remove most of the logistical movements out of it. I thought of using a larger hex map where you place 1 pawns that each represents a group of units. The group of unit is actually made of a stack of face down cards where each card is a unit. So in the example, above, I could have 2 pawns of equally distributed forces that moves to capture the city. Strategically, it would be the same.
The advantages of this mechanic is that it is easier to remember which of the 2 pawns you have moved rather than which of the 30 units you have move. Second, by placing the unit cards face down, I get some sort of fog of war which could never reproduced with the other system.
But the problem is that maybe removing this logistical part of the game makes it less interesting. Maybe the fun of the game is actually to do all these logistical maneuvers. So if I simplify this, I need to add a lot more to the game else the game will feel empty.
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Example C:
Imagine a civilization game. By playing the video game I realized that most of the time, you ended up with a defense force in every city and you build up some mobile armies to attack or strengthen certain areas.
First I removed the need to manage units types across the board because I considered that you had officers under you command that would make sure that your cavalry or your tanks would be present in all the cities over the world.
Second I removed the city defense force since all players would protect their cities, I would assume again that officers under your command make sure that all your cities are well protected. So there is no need to mark them, all cities comes with a defense force.
So I end up with a game where on the map, there is only city tokens and a few pawns indicating the location of the mobile armies. Nothing more.
The problem is that there is now so few components on the board that it actually hard of thinking about special abilities, given for example by technologies, that would actually influence these components.
The only advantage of this is that I can allow players to manage much more other things, like trading, diplomacy and espionage since they have less thinking to do about military mobility.
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So it always end like this: Simplify. And it feels like every time I am simplifying, which sometimes has very good reasons, I am removing something important or something fun.
So I was wondering if the simplification syndrome was actually something that you experienced as much as I do?
Could you evaluate the focus of a game as the amount of time spent on a certain task of the game. Task which could be anything from mechanical task (move components) to intellectual task (calculate things).
If this is the case, you could technically try to calculate how much time was spent on every aspect of the game through the game ( a bit hard to calculate precisely), take the highest ones and determine if I actually want players to spend most of their time on these activities.
That could be some sort of way to define where is the focus of your game. I suddenly like the idea of "focus" like when taking a picture. Because when you adjust the focus, some parts of the picture are clear and some part are blurry. So you want the clear parts to be interesting and the blurry parts just to be there.