April » 2011 » DarrellHardy.com

A World of Adventure

It occurred to me this week, between juggling three projects and defending my home against a particularly aggressive woodpecker (Seriously! The beast put a 3″ diameter hole clear though the siding in a single morning!), that I haven’t yet blogged here about my upcoming Karthador venture that was announced last week.

Here’s the announcement from my good friends at Reality Blurs, in which Sean says some lovely things about me and the world of Karthador. The TL;DR version is this: Karthador is a new science-fantasy world that I’m developing, and Reality Blurs will be publishing as part of their line of tabletop roleplaying books.

Karthador is a setting I’ve been working on, on and off, for five or six years now. I ran an RPG one-shot there, then designed a board game around it (never published; I should try to get that prototype back), and even wrote a short novel based in the setting. And each time I’ve visited the world, I’ve found my imagination set ablaze with all of its adventure potential. Dinosaurs! Super science! Air ships! Exclamation points! Once I found myself without a day job, it seemed the perfect opportunity to kick Karthador development into high gear and start looking for a commercial outlet. I’d been thinking of pitching it as an RPG to Reality Blurs, and when Sean called, it felt like providence.

We don’t have a timelime yet — at least, nothing we’ll commit to in public — but I’ll keep you posted here and Sean will make announcements on the Reality Blurs site as we get closer to announcing product and release dates. In other words, don’t hold your breath, but do bookmark Reality Blurs.

If you need me, I’ll be in the western wastes of Karthador — right after I go another round with this stupid woodpecker.

Playtesting 1, 2, 3… is this thing fun?

The hard part of playtesting a game prototype isn’t the playing. It’s the testing.

(If the playing is the hard part, you’re either suffering some serious hardware issues, or need some new playtesters. “Dice are for rolling, Doug, not for eating.”)

But what are we testing? Ah, that’s the question that separates a productive playtest from the other kind. Rather than judge the game as a whole, consider each sub-system of the game individually. Ponder the resource system apart from the conflict system. Reflect upon the card-drawing step separate from the monkey-punching step. Meditate on the turn order itself. And for each of these elements, ask yourself:

What is the purpose?
Is it fulfilling that purpose in play?
How can it do so better?

It’s this last question that’s the real stickler. That’s where you have to consider each of the variables in the system. Are players spending too long moving when they have six movement points? Does the supply of bananas run out too quickly when they pick three a turn? Are three colors of bananas enough? Does that work for six players?

The key is to be prepared. Before the playtest, identify the element and their variables. Armed with this knowledge, it’s much faster and easier to identify the parts of the game that are stinking up the room.

Trust me on this. I’ve gone in unprepared more times than I care to admit, the stink-search is as frustrating as it is time-consuming.

Any other playtesting tips I’ve overlooked? Share ‘em with the class, and we’ll all be a little bit smarter.

A Few of my Favorite Things

Remember the old days of the Internet? When you could drop a bulleted list of links onto a shocking pale and naked page of HTML and call it a website? Boy, those were the dark ages, weren’t they? But they did have one thing going for them: when you went to, say, “CoolCars.com” you knew you’d find enough car site links to virtually choke a virtual cow. (Remember virtual cows? Boy, we were easily amused in those days.)

As you might have guessed, today’s post is little more than a list of links. But your virtual cows are safe; the list is all about quality, not quantity, and of a fairly limited scope. So without further ado:

Darrell’s Recommended Game Design Links

What Games Are is the website of Tadhg Kelly, a game designer who’s writing a book by the same name. He updates once or twice a week with insightful essays on video game design and development. It’s a bit high-brow at times, but always accessible, and he’s got a knack for proclaiming business heresies like “Embrace your Pirates!” and “Forget the Money!” and then backing them up with solid reasoning. You might not always agree with him, but he’ll always give you something worth thinking about.
Flark Design is the website of Mike Birkhead, a senior game designer who’s sharing the lessons he’s learned about game design over the years. Again, it’s mostly video games, but a lot of principles apply to tabletop games as well. Mike presents a more “from the trenches” view than Tadhg, and emphasizes the practical over the theoretical, but gives theory its due when relevant.
AltDevBlogADay is the communal blog of a bunch of video game developers (designers, engineers, and artists) writing about their respective crafts. I’ll warn you: especially with the engineers on here, it sometimes gets very technical. But if it’s too much for my little writer brain to handle, I can always come back the next day for a taste of something new.

I’m always on the lookout for game design websites and blogs. Yes, Gamasutra. But what else is out there? Any good suggestions, people?

Theme and Mechanics: Gaming’s Cake and Icing

In last week’s accidentally-long post on immersion and engagement in games, I touched on something that I realized could be its own (much shorter) post: the difference between mechanics and theme in a game: Mechanics are the cake. Theme is the icing. And I am physically restraining myself from making a Portal reference.

Mechanics are the rules, actions, and victory conditions that make a game a game. For example, the mechanics for a FPS videogame might include moving, shooting, picking up power-ups, and hacking devices with minigames.

Theme is the thick, gooey layer of story that’s lovingly poured over the top of the mechanics to give the player’s actions some context. For example, in our hypothetical FPS, you might be an amnesiac gunslinger trapped in an underwater city, fighting your way through mutants while trying to escape. (This sounds like fun. I wish someone would make this game.)

Mechanics Come First

You can have mechanics without theme, and have a legitimate, fun game. (Tetris, anyone? Dominoes? Bejeweled? Most board games out of Germany in the past ten years have theme so thin as to be non-existent.)

But a game with all theme and no mechanics is… bad, and not really a game. Maybe it’s an interactive movie. Or a novel. But it’ll be a bad movie or a bad novel, because games aren’t the proper medium for telling stories in that fashion.

In a perfect world, a game’s theme is wedded so organically to its mechanics, we can’t imagine any other theme that would fit. (“Of course the game of hurling objects at other objects is about birds and pigs! What else could it be possibly be about?”)

But as long as the mechanics are sound, players are surprisingly forgiving when the theme doesn’t quite sync up with the story being told. (“So I can either bid these green blocks to make it rain — but only on my farm — or save them up to pay taxes to the King when he shows up on Round 7? Okay!”)

Mechanics are what the game is really about.

The back of the box says the game is about saving the princess. Mechanics say the game is really about reaching the end of the level without running out of lives… Or collecting 15 victory points before your opponent does. Or leveling up your character until you can defeat the big bad guy at the end.

Theme is why you care.

I Love Living in the Future

We’re living in the future. Don’t give me any guff about flying cars. Or moon bases, either — geez, you people and your moon bases. Just because it’s the future as envisioned by Bruce Sterling and William Gibson, instead of Hugo Gernsback, doesn’t make it any less the future. And I love it here.

What I love most about living in the future is the vast oceans of information. When one of my daughters asks something I don’t know (“How do birds know with way is south? Who invented ice cream? How does cutting taxes on the rich help anybody but the rich?”), I can turn to the Internet and have the answers in seconds. (Magnets. The Chinese. Magic.)

For my own projects, I’ve come to rely on YouTube tutorials. I’ve been teaching myself Unity 3d, and the video tutorials of the Tornado Twins have beyond helpful. This weekend also saw me tear a toilet out of the floor (on purpose) and replace everything in and below it — with the helpful guidance of a half-dozen YouTube plumbers.

Finally, I love living in the future because it brings us all together. We don’t need to get into atomic-powered rocket cars to go see what Grandma’s up to; we can call her on the mini-computer we carry in our pockets and have a video chat. I stay in touch with friends who, even ten years ago, would have been lost or abandoned through the chaos of moving and shifting lifestyles. And I can make friends and contacts from around the world with the click of a mouse — let’s see your moon base do that.

What’s your favorite part of living in the future?

What’s the story with MMOs?

I’m trying to be brief. My inner editor is holding my inner game designer’s dog at gunpoint and nodding meaningfully at his watch. “Keep it short,” he’s saying, “Or find yourself a new bullet-proof chihuahua.” So I’ll be dropping links and a little commentary, and moving on.

First, Ragnar Tornquist posted on the Secret World Blog about the great story they’ve got coming. He says they’re revealing the story slowly, across the virtual and real world, in little pieces for (I assume) the players to piece together. Honestly, I’m a sucker for that type of storytelling, and it sounds very cool (like most everything I’ve heard about TSW).

Then Jef Reahard wrote an opinion piece on Massively that basically boils down to, “It doesn’t matter how awesome your story is, the vast majority of the players don’t care, and you can’t deliver it well anyway. Also, give players the tools to tell their own stories, since those are the only stories that anyone cares about.” It’s a good read if you care about such things, though Jef doesn’t say what those tools might be or what those stories might look like.

(There’s also a good discussion of Tornquist’s post and player interaction in MMOs at Rock Paper Shotgun if you want to hit all the links.)

I’ve said before that games can help players create their own stories. I’ve also said this is a good thing that can sell games. However, as one of my game designer friends pointed out on Facebook, it’s not cost-effective to support player stories in MMOs. Specifically, he writes, “I think providing strong core gameplay, a simple, interesting, exciting, popcorn story, and robust elder games seems like the recipe for success.”

He’s absolutely right. (WoW’s up to how many million players?) And yet, if you could make the game even more successful by adding player-driven storytelling… wouldn’t you?

Richard (“I invented this online RPG thing while you were in diapers!”) Bartle thinks so. In his talk at the Independent MMO Game Developer’s conference, he proposed that the next generation of MMOs accommodate both the majority of players (who care nothing for story or creation) and the minority (who like creating content). Specifically, he suggested a “theme park” inside a “sandbox” in which part of the elder game is creating content in that sandbox for other players.

It’s a brilliant melding of the two worlds, and I hope that someone out there is making that game.

…and with that, now I have to buy my inner game designer a new dog. I think I’ll call this one Lady British.

Has anyone used the City of Heroes or Star Trek Online mission creators? Do they actually add story? Or just DIY grinding?

Zen and the Art of Immersive Gameplay

“The world is nothing but an illusion,” says the stoner mystic. “Reality is all in our own heads, man.” While his very words force me to start flicking his ears and ask, “Is this an illusion? How about this?” his straw-man argument does bring up a good point regarding games and immersion.

I know the world is real because it’s bigger than I am. Farmers are growing corn in Iowa, lawmakers are passing bills, and disasters are wrecking terrible havoc. I won’t see any of these things first-hand, but accept that they are part of the world. Why?

Because of the evidence.

My can of corn says, “Proudly grown by farmers in Iowa.” People are acting differently, in accordance with the new law. News reports are full of disaster stories and images.

It’s all evidence of a larger, more complicated world around me.

Immersion vs. Engagement: Fight!

(Warning: the following is all high-brow theoretical stuff, in which I throw terms into the air like clay pigeons, and shoot each of them with definitions of my own design.)

“Immersive” is one of those buzzword adjectives that folks love to stick onto their games, along with “compelling,” and “fat-free.” It suggestion a certain submerging of the player into the game, such that he is actually breathing the game play, and absorbing the game world through the very pores of his skin.

“Engaging” is another such buzzword. At first glance the two terms seem synonymous, but I’ll argue that they’re not.

When a game is engaging, the player is no longer concerned with its surface attributes (the graphics in a video game, the artwork on a card game, or the innumerable bits of a board game). Rather, he is engaged with the game as its own thing. He’s not thinking about how to play, but simply playing.

For example, once you’ve gotten into Minecraft, you stop seeing the game world as the series of simple bricks it is, but engage with it as an organic realm full of breathtaking terrain and hateful monsters lusting for your blood. On the tabletop, Arkham Horror is intimidating at first, with its forest-worth of cards and cardboard bits, but by the time the Great Old One awakens at the end, the players are so engaged, they’re grabbing the dice and flipping cards without a second thought.

Immersion is not the same as engagement. Rather, it facilitates engagement. Specifically, it helps the player engage with the game by encouraging him to suspend his disbelief.

A player is more likely to engage with a game if he is properly immersed.

The best way to immerse the player is convincing him that the game world is much bigger than it really is. And how do we do that?

We lie.

Falsifying the Evidence

We know the real world is bigger than we are because of all the evidence. Likewise, if we want to convince the player that the game world doesn’t begin and end with him, we need to supply the evidence. For example…

A newspaper tells of the stock market crashing (and there are homeless beggars with signs on the street).
NPCs are talking about the werewolves that attacked the village of Graven’s Mill.
A sign advertises homes for sale, detailing their three-stall garages and indoor anti-grav pools.
The radio DJ warns of heat stroke symptoms on this, the 12th day in a row of temps over 100.

Of course, all this is just evidence. In reality, there is no stock market, Graven’s Mill doesn’t exist, you can’t visit the homes for sale, and the radio DJ is just an MP3 in your headphones.

This is evidence of a larger world that does not exist. It’s all an illusion — an illusion that leads to immersion.

Lord of Illusions

The key to immersion — to use your false evidence to really sell the illusion of the larger world — is continuity. Because, as Stephen King points out in one of his 2000 books, disbelief is heavy, and it takes a lot to suspend it. It doesn’t take much to unbalance the player and make him drop his load of disbelief on his foot, thus disengaging him from the game.

I’ve broken this concept into three categories, listed here in order of importance:

Tangible continuity. This is what we mostly think of when discussing “continuity.” The immersive evidence should support and reinforce the world established through game play. If you have killed the evil warlord, the peasants should not still be complaining about how he beats them. If it’s a modern-day game, there shouldn’t be references to magical spells.
Tonal continuity. If it’s a serious game, the immersive elements should likewise be serious. If it’s a light-hearted game, the elements shouldn’t include bloody corpses or suicide cults.
Thematic continuity. The immersive elements should support the theme of the game play. If the game play doesn’t have a theme, the immersive elements can add one, creating a world where previously there were only mechanics.

The Master of Immersion

Immersion is great, but it is always subject to game play.

Great game play leads to engagement.

Immersion can facilitate that engagement by supporting the game play with elements that make the world seem larger and more complex than it really is.

The key words here are “facilitate” and “support.” Without game play, you’ve got nothing.

And Then?

Am I wrong? Did I overstate? Oversimplify? Misuse terms that other, brighter minds have already defined? Let me know in the comments and let’s discuss.

What did you call me?

It’s good to be back in the playing-God business.

No, I’m not sitting atop a throne of skulls in some third-world hellhole, arbitrarily promoting my friends and executing my rivals. (I don’t have the resume to get that kind of gig. Besides, I hear the hours are murder.)

Rather, I’m doing the fun sort of God-playing, the one that’s all about creating worlds in my own image: New continents, nations, and cities! New rulers, heroes, and scoundrels! New technologies, magic systems, and laws of physics! Conflict! Passion! Exclamation points!

World-building, man. I love this stuff.

I did a ton of it back in the Fantasy Flight days, creating the worlds of Runebound and Vortex. This year, I even got to flesh out my own little slice of Dominaria while working on Magic: the Gathering – Tactics. And now I’m back at it for a brand new project… in which I find myself facing my old nemesis:

Naming things.

I’m traditionally not very good at names – especially when it comes to making them up on the fly. (In my tabletop RPGs, my NPCs often end up named after celebrities – not on purpose, but because those are the first names that spring to mind.) So I came up with some guidelines for myself. These might seem obvious, but they’ve helped me quite a bit over the years, and I hope you’ll find them useful too.

Use unique initial letters. If there are four cities in a region, the name of each of them should start with a different letter. Ditto for the names of the ten regions, or the 12 clans, or the 16 Ascended Masters of Small Engine Repair. A unique initial letter gives the audience an immediate hook to remember it by.
Ensure simple pronunciation. Quick: How do you pronounce “Brujah?” How many other, different ways have you heard it pronounced? I rest my case. (As a corollary, don’t use apostrophes in your names. Just don’t.)
Watch it with the Latin and Greek roots. This is one my pet peeves, and your mileage may vary. But if I’m reading about some fantasy world with no connection to historical Earth, and I see a city called “Smithopolis,” it breaks the illusion for me, since “-opolis” is from the Greek, and there were no Greeks here. Now, if you want have a “Smith Necropolis,” that doesn’t bother me – since “necropolis,” despite its Greek roots, is an actual English word.

Any other suggestions for naming stuff? I’m all ears, people. I’ve just started my mystery project, and I’ve already got a couple hundred people and places crying out for cool-sounding, memorable names.

Past Tension, Future Perfection

A week ago, I decided to do something about the pile of unedited novel manuscripts slumped on my hard drive, staring up at at me with their sad puppy-dog eyes. I publicly proclaimed that I would take one of these neglected beauties out, give it solid re-write, and try to find it a good home.

The first step to rewriting is to do nothing. Just let the text lie fallow for a while so you can gain some distance and come at it as a reader, not as the person who just poured blood into every word on the page.

Since the printout of the manuscript I chose has literally been sitting in a box in the basement for the past year, I think it’s safe to say, in regards to the first step, “Check.”

The second step (for me, at least) is to do pass on the general writing. Yes, we’ll fix a few typos and spelling mistakes here, but it’s mostly about sentence structure and word choice — steps 3 & 4 from the guide I posted last week.

When I pulled the manuscript from its temporary tomb, I was surprised to see that it was already covered in pen marks. Had I already started this step? I thumbed through the whole thing: there was blue ink all the way to the end. Thank you, Past Me!

But when I got to the computer, I realized that Past Me was a lazy editor who had marked up the hard copy, but never actually implemented any of the changes. As it turns out, this is actually a good thing. Instead of moving on to the next step, I have to carefully re-read the manuscript for the first time in a year in order to insert the edits from the printout. This has led to finding things to fix that Past Me overlooked (that incompetent buffoon!), but this time I’m putting them straight into the soft copy.

That’s where I am at the moment. I’m about a quarter of the way through the manuscript, and have been pleasantly surprised at how not-terrible it is. I do fear that I have too many characters (when the text literally says, “…and there were two others, but she couldn’t even get their names” you might have a problem), but that’s what the literary device is for: killing darlings.

But I’m nowhere done yet. Anyone have any good rewriting links? Tips from your own past self? Words of wisdom shared by ethereal beings that came to you in a dream? I’ll take it all!

In Defense of the Niche

“Go big or go home” is great when you’re Donald Trump, rich enough to hire people to grow their hair for your toupee. If you “go big” and lose it all, you just drain one of your money-baths and try it again. But for those who have to grow our own hair and fill our tubs with water, not every swing has to be for the fences.

Success Scales

Success is often a matter of scale. For instance, if I have to pay for ten employees’ salaries, office rent, and weekly visits from Glommo the Clown, I might need my game to bring in $100,000 a month to consider it a success.

“Turbo Monkey Smasher Online only cleared $50,000 last month,” I may wail in despair. “We’re ruined!” (Though if I were working alone in my basement, $50k would be an epic win.)

It’s not uncommon to see movies and games making millions of dollars, and yet still be considered flops. They cost so much to produce, they need to bring in a crazy amount of money to succeed. They need to swing for the fences; anything less than a home run is a failure.

In order to bring in that crazy money, games are often made for the broadest market possible. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s not the only way to work.

Thinking Narrow, Not Small

Rather than aiming for the broadest market, it can sometimes be more efficient to aim for a narrower target, and deliver a more specific experience. I’m not advocating a lower quality product, but a more limited one.

For instance, if I’m making a game that simulates driving a big rig truck, I will focus on the simulation aspects, rather a GTA-style open world with hundreds of NPCs with voice-over dialog. I’m aiming at a small target audience (those interested in truck-driving sims), so I focus on what’s important to that audience.

Other (existing) niches are historical strategy wargames, which eschew high-end graphics for historical accuracy and vicious AIs — since that’s what the audience cares about. Or for a larger example, look at EVE Online. It found its niche (economic space sim) and made that sucker its own. While other MMOs have come and gone, EVE is still growing. It’s a niche market, but since they’re the best in that niche, players attracted to that sort of thing are very loyal once they start playing.

Not Just Indies

“Sure, that’s good for indies working out of their basements,” you might say. “But I’m running a massive studio with vast overhead. I got no room for niches.”

You’re probably right. If you’re investing a ton of resources into a single game, you have to do everything you can to ensure the highest rate of return — and that includes avoiding niches. You could make the world’s finest game about being a sewer rat being eaten by mimes but with such a small niche, you’ll never make your money back.

But…

If you haven’t invested the resources yet, I’d suggesting considering not just one, but multiple niches. Rather that investing a million dollars into a single game, invest a quarter of that into four “nichier” games. Each one has a smaller investment, but has the potential for long-term income. The scale of success is smaller, and you can deliver a more focused experience.

…Not that I’ve ever been in charge of a million-dollar studio. (Nor would I want to be.) But it’s something to consider all the same.

And on a Personal Note

Because several people have asked, yes, I was one of the many SOE employees laid off last week. I was part of the Denver studio where, most recently, I was lead content designer for Magic: the Gathering – Tactics. Yes, I’m looking for a full-time game design position and yes, I’m available for any contract writing or game design assignments you might have coming up. If you think I’d be a good fit for your project, please contact me.