You know you’re a game design geek when you have three heavy boxes labeled “Game Prototyping Materials.”
Who else would move game boards, glass beads, cardboard chits, and hundreds of cards from a dozen dead CCGs cross-country?
And here we go…
I’ve been lying low for the past few weeks, partially because I’ve been swamped to never-before seen levels, and partially because I was waiting to make the following announcement:
I’m moving to Denver. I’m going to be helping develop online games for SOE. And yes, I’m pretty thrilled.
But there’s the packing. And the painting. And the endless hoop-jumping necessary to sell a house. So don’t expect a lot of updates here in the next few weeks. I’ll be checking e-mail, but otherwise probably keeping my head down.
Wish me luck!
This was the first time I’ve attended the GAMA Trade Show in five years, the first time that I’ve gone on my own dime, and the first time attending that I haven’t stuck around for the whole thing. Since it was on my own dime, it was most cost-effective to just show up for the two days the exhibit hall was open, flying in the night before and flying out the night after. Quick and dirty, you could call it “drive-by networking,” and you’d be right.
While other reports on the GTS have declared it “sort of a success, I guess,” my experience puts it squarely in the “success” category – at least for me. I brought a half-dozen games to pitch, ran them all past a number of different publishers, and there was interest all around. I have solid leads on some, and possibilities for others, so it’s all good.
I also had the pleasure of not only catching up with the friends I only see at these shows, but met up with some I haven’t seen for years, as well as a handful of new folks who I hope to add to that list of friends.
Not bad for a day and a half.
Sorry for the radio silence.
With the GAMA Trade Show looming on the horizon, I’ve been keeping my head down over a half-dozen prototypes, surfacing maybe once a week to bleat, “Anyone want to help playtest this game? Hello?” then plunging back into it.
And for Easter, I was out of town.
(Not that being out of town provided any reprieve. I brought one prototype to work on, and another to playtest with my father-in-law. Progress was made on both fronts.)
I’ll try to be better with the posting this week.
To start the week off right, I’d like to point out the latest product I’ve uploaded for our friends at Skirmisher: the classic Floor Games by H.G. Wells. I read it while uploading it and found myself laughing as the author rails against the sorry state of toys, the shops that sell them, and the woefully uninformed uncles who purchase them. While the book isn’t as, er, rules heavy as its companion, Little Wars, it’s still an entertaining read and a glimpse into the mind that is credited with creating the modern war game.
Last Thursday, I received an advanced copy of my most recently-published game (and my first non-FFG-published game), Innsmouth Escape.
I took the game out to Con of the North, a local gaming convention, to show it off some friends, and of course they wanted to play. I hadn’t actually played this thing since sending my lone prototype off to the publisher (Twilight Creations) almost a year ago, so I was a little nervous and out of practice.
“How does this rule work?” my friends asked, and I had to confess I didn’t know. But I knew where it should be in the rulebook, and… voila! The answer was there. This happened a couple times during the game, which I found strangely gratifying. It was like a gift from a past version of myself, who had looked into the future and foresaw the most common rules questions.
Thank you, past me, for the gift of a well-written rulebook.
“That’s all very nice,” you say, “But show us the hundred plastic deep ones. That’s what we’re here for.”
Fair enough:
How about some close-ups? Here you go:
And another one:
And here’s the terrified little human, with his four numbered companion cubes:
So what’s the game about? In short, it’s board game for 2-5 players, in which one player controls a lone human who is running around Innsmouth trying to rescue his friends from the Deep Ones and escape out of town. Captives are worth victory points, and once the human has eight victory points, he can escape off the board to win.
The other players each control a horde of Deep Ones, and are trying to kill the Human while collecting resources from the board.
The key mechanic in the game is a card-based hidden-movement mechanic that the human player uses to secretly plot his move each turn. The Deep One players can deduce where the Human is going by the cards has has played and the cards he has left, but the Human is revealed each round, so you’re never left in the dark for long.
You can download a copy of the rules here from Board Game Geek if you like. I’m sure they’ll be posted on the Twilight Creations site soon enough, but this will do for now.
It had to happen.
Instant Action, the new browser-based 3d action game portal from Garage Games, has started showing the games they’ll be running. One of the games features brains… in tanks. And it’s called, of course, “Think Tanks.”
Sigh.
Ah well. I knew the tank/brain concept wasn’t new or unique, but I’d kind of hoped I was the first to make the “think tank” title pun. Guess not.
On the up-side, it’s a fun action shooter game with cute little tanks, and probably the most popular game in the Instant Action beta. If you’d like to play, drop me a line, and I’ll send you a beta invite.
Much to the amusement of my fellow attendees at the local IGDA chapter, I followed up last month’s rant about a board game of “human brains inside tanks” by arriving at the meeting carrying a prototype of just such a game. Here’s the cover:
(Images swiped from the Internet and used without permission or malice, but with a bit of ironic glee. Don’t worry, folks, this is strictly placeholder art. No one’s trying to rip you off.)
After a fun and enlightening presentation on camera-controlled video games (both in Flash and on the PS3) from our super-talented friends at PUNY Entertainment, I asked if anyone wanted to playtest Think Tank.
There was a moment of silence. Sure, it’s fun to talk about a game of brains in tanks. But to actually play it? Then the moment was over and I had two playtesters and enough spectators that my ego was suitably salved.
The game didn’t catch fire and kill us all. (I didn’t expect it to — alpha testing usually catches that sort of terminal meltdown before the game sees the public — but you never know.) It didn’t suck. It was even somewhat fun. And those who played it would be willing to play it again.
In other words, it was pretty good, but not great – and therefore not good enough.
That’s fine. That’s why I do playtesting. And that’s why, after a game of Twilight Imperium on Saturday, I make one of my friends play Think Tank with me.
This time, I was the player getting nailed by the bad cards. My tanks were spinning in circles and running into walls, taking damage with each hit until they died. It didn’t look like that part was fun when Chris at IGDA was suffering through it. And it didn’t feel like fun for me either.
We did away with the random cards, and that made the game more fun. But it also made it more… obvious. Now, “obvious” might not seem like a bad thing. It’s very close to “intuitive,” which is always good. But here’s the difference:
When a game or mechanic is intuitive, players say, “Of course that’s how it plays! Brilliant!” and are surprised that no one has thought of this before.
When a game or mechanic is obvious, players say, “Of course. And… then what?” They’re left waiting for the twist, the innovation, the extra something that says they couldn’t have whipped this up themselves during their lunch break.
I’m mulling some ideas. Maybe a mana-like resource for playing cards. Maybe keeping the card play the same, but add more interaction to the board. Maybe add variable powers to the tanks themselves before or even during the game (mmm… power-ups…).
I’ll try to have something worked out by next month’s meeting. If nothing else, Martin might want a rematch.
Last night, I had the honor of attending the first meeting of the Game Programming advisory board for the Minnesota School of Business. Since I’m neither a game programmer, nor in the position to be hiring game programmers any time soon, I feared that I would be greeted with hisses of “Board gamer! Table-topper! Poseur!” but the assembled group was as gracious as it was intelligent and eclectic.
We had a motion capture specialist, an animator/designer/writer, a physicist who teaches programming, and the head of the Johnson Center for Virtual Reality, as well as a handful of folks from the MSB itself. It was cool just to be in the same room with such a pack of sharp cookies.
And I was able to hold my own. While I couldn’t address whether students would be better served by learning C++ or Flash programming, I was able to contribute to the more general discussion of where games are going, and what kinds of skills will help students get ahead when we get there.
Good stuff. Even when it’s -20 windchill, it’s nice to get out and chat with others in the field.
Welcome back to the Think Tank log. I’ve been meaning to return to this since about a week ago, but any spare time I had was spent doing battle with a plugged floor drain in the basement. When I broke down and hired a professional, he spent five hours pulling something like five pounds of tree roots out of my sewer pipe.
One the one hand, it cost me over $400. On the other, I no longer felt like a loser for being unable to clear the clog myself.
Anyway… Brains in Tanks!
After the first iteration let me a little cold, I decided to change the card part of the game:
- You have a hand of 7 cards.
- At the beginning of the round, you may play as many as you want. Again, you can assign multiple cards to a single tank if you wish. And again, any tank left unassigned is given a random card from the deck.
- You don’t draw cards automatically. Instead, you have to skip your turn (and not activate any tanks) to discard whatever you want from your hand, then draw back up to 7 cards.
In order to make it matter, in my little one-player prototype, that you’re skipping a turn, I put three enemy tanks on the board and moved them each one space closer to my side each round. If they reached my side of the board, I would lose.
And while I had been able to mostly keep track of which tank corresponded to which card slot, for this iteration I cut up some labels, and labeled the tanks 1-5. That made things easier.
The results? The game was much more satisfying to play. Working from a larger hand, I was able to better guide my tanks, while paying the price (with random moves) for ignoring some of them. Now I just had to try it with two players.
Iteration Three: Doubling the Number of Players
For a two-player game, I set up both sides of the board symmetrically. Each side got five tanks and one HQ; the object of the game is destroy your opponent’s HQ (since that’s where the master brain lives, of course). And I threw some terrain in the middle, so the tanks have something to steer around.
An HQ takes 5 damage to kill. And I figured out what the “three stars showing on your cards” does: it causes “brain strain” and gives your HQ a damage. Suddenly, you really don’t want to be playing random cards if you don’t have to.
With two players, it now matters who goes first. And it matters when you allocate your cards, since the other players will know which of your tanks are on random auto-pilot.
To keep it as simple and fair as I could, I came up with this initiative system and turn sequence:
- Randomly choose a first player at the beginning of the game.
- At the beginning of the round, the first player allocates all his cards (including the random ones from the deck).
- Going clockwise, each player does the same.
- Once the cards are allocated, the game round begins. The first player chooses and activates one of his tanks, revealing and executing the tank’s card or cards.
- Going clockwise, each player does the same.
- Play continues until all players have activated all their tanks.
- The round is over, the activated cards are discarded, and a new round begins. The role of first player passes clockwise to the next player.
I’m not thrilled with this. For one thing, having players take turns allocating cards means there can be downtime. You sit there twiddling your thumbs, waiting for me to decide whether to play two cards on Tank 3, or three cards on Tank 2.
For another, I’m not sure when or how to declare that you’re skipping your turn to draw cards. If you do it during the allocation phase, then your opponents can take advantage of that knowledge by either attacking or skipping their own turns. (This is how I played it.) A better idea might be to declare it at your first activation – just discard all your cards from the board and announce you’re refreshing.
But it works. It worked, when I played it. And even though I was just playing by myself, it was still pretty fun.
What’s next? I think it’s time to test it out with another player. Because as brilliant as I am, I’m as blind to my design flaws as the next guy, and I need someone else to help point them out.
I’ll let you know how it goes.
I finally got a chance this weekend to prototype and playtest the core mechanics for Think Tank.
This would be a good time to mention something I hinted at during the IGDA meeting, namely:
Hardy’s First Law of Prototypes: If it looks good, you’ve spent too much time on it.
The theory here is that your first prototype is going to be bad, so there’s no sense it making it pretty; you’re just going to scrap it and redo it anyway.
There are a couple exceptions:
Exception 1: Unless your client needs it pretty before he’ll look at it.
Exception 2: Unless you’re making a game about tanks, and you have a copy of Memoir ‘44 lying around, begging to be put to use.
Making the Prototype
Since I had a copy of Memoir lying around, full of tanks and featuring an attractive board full of hexes, I pulled that out to provide tanks and a board. It also provided terrain for the map, which I hadn’t thought of before, but was pretty obvious once all the pieces were laid out.
I decided to follow the First Law when it came to the control panel, and just play the cards on the table. I could keep track of which “slot” corresponded to which tank in my head.
As for the 100 cards, I just whipped up 20 of them, and printed them twice. I put them into a table in Word, then used the Mail Merge function to output them to a custom label (2″ x 2.5″), which let me put 20 on a page. I printed them on pink paper because I thought it would be more opaque thank white, so I couldn’t see through the “back of the card.” I was wrong, but realized it didn’t matter since I could just draw from the bottom of the deck. Mechanically, I kept the cards super-simple, with just a word or two on each telling what they did.
Grabbed a tin of dice from the game closet, and a notepad for taking notes, and I was all set up.
The First Iteration
The core rules I was testing were these:
- You have a hand of 5 cards.
- At the beginning of your turn, draw up to fill your hand.
- During your turn, assign up to three cards from your hand to up to three tanks. You may assign multiple cards to a single tank. (The multiple cards on a tank was a suggestion from Ryan on Saturday night. Thanks, Ryan!)
- Any tank without cards assigned to it is assigned a random card from the deck.
- You can activate your tanks in any order.
- When a tank is activated, it will Move (straight ahead one space) and Attack (straight ahead) by default. Depending on the card it gets, it might Move, Turn (one hex side) or Attack again – the player decides in which order to do these actions.
- Move and Turn actions are required to be executed, but the tank doesn’t have to Attack unless there is any enemy in range. (I might change my mind on this, but while “trying to control my chaotic tanks” is fun, “shooting my own tanks because I got unlucky” is not.)
- Some of the cards have stars on them. If you have three stars showing on your control panel, Something Bad happens. (Not sure what yet.) The idea is that the stars are mostly on the really good cards, so you don’t want to play too many of them, since you don’t know what stars the random cards may have.
- Tanks have 5 armor; 5 damage will kill them.
- To attack, roll a d6. If the total is equal to or greater than the range from the shooter to the target, give the target 1 damage. A roll of a “1″ is always a miss. Tanks can only shoot straight ahead. Terrain and other tanks block line of sight.
Not that I had written any of this stuff down (the First Law refers to rules-writing too), but this is what I had in mind as I set up the playtest. Because I was focusing on the core mechanics, I decided to just do a one-player game. For an opponent, I tossed three enemy tanks on the far side of the board, and decided that destroying them was the goal of the playtest.
I played it for about 10 minutes. It was okay.
Remember, I was testing the core mechanic of playing cards to control tanks, with the added twist that some of the cards are random. The rest of mechanics hanging off that core (attacking, number of tanks, what actions are on the cards) didn’t really matter (though they seemed to be working fine).
I found that playing three of the five cards in my hand each turn felt a little unsatisfying. I didn’t want to play all five, since that would mean playing everything in your hand (not a lot of tactics there), and if you can hold cards back for a future turn, you can plan a little long-term strategy. And playing just one of the five would remove too much player control. I’d hoped that playing three would be a middle ground, but it still felt like I was playing everything I drew each turn. Meh.
Okay. Scrap it. Next iteration!
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