Warning Signs: Design Diary Part 1

My primary creative outlet for most of my life has been drawing. Preparing for a drawing comes easy to me. I can sit down, sketch out some ideas, and generally work efficiently towards an end. The process from start to finish is an active one and you could track my progress from early sketches to final drawing by looking at what is being produced in between.

Game design is less familiar territory and I don't really have a good work flow established. The result of this is that I have frequent "design sessions" that look like this:



I can spend a good chunk of time in this state and it feels like time wasted. In these moments I am spending energy working through problems and trying to figure out what direction I might take a project in. On the other hand, my mind is also prone to wandering. I go into a "default" mode where I just start doodling and filling my paper with unrelated sketches.

I can fill hours of time with this routine and come away with very little measurable progress. I actually found that my "design sessions" seemed to break down so often into seated meditation, that I started combining "design time" with things like "Steam Room Time". Despite all that, I have just finished the first draft of a new card game and I've learned a few techniques along the way, that seem to help keep me focused and generate more tangible development.

"Warning Signs" (working title), was created for the monthly contest over at the Boardgame Design Forum: http://www.bgdf.com/node/3092. This is the second time I have attempted to put something together for one of these challenges. The first one I gave up on after a few days of effort (mostly because I wasn't really excited about that particular contest). This second one was much more interesting to me.

I still wasn't able to finish it in time to submit, but I'd like to continue working on it anyway just because it's a fun concept. The contest was to design a game that used all of the following symbols:




If you have time you should check out the submissions via the link above. There are some pretty surprising designs -- most of which feature some sort of deadly factory floor, or crazy industrial scenario. My design also takes place in such a location. The first thing I thought of when I looked at those symbols was the game Lemmings:



I took that bit of inspiration and decided to create a board game with a similar experience -- where players had to guide their people through a series of hazards in order to win. Because there are so many symbols, it made sense to me to that this would be primarily a card game. In my notes under "Player Experience" it reads: "Frantic, managed chaos".

The most important thing I learned while working on this project is that when it comes to writing surfaces, bigger is better. I used to like to use a standard sketch book when I was getting down to design business, but on this project I decided to use a large newsprint pad instead. The extra space meant I had more room to explore ideas. I could branch off of and organize thoughts with more freedom this way.



I also decided to employ the tried and true "brain map" technique for brain storming. I really needed some way to sketch ideas out as simply and easily as I do for drawing. I don't know how innovative or effective the brain map is, but it was familiar and it made me feel like I was getting somewhere and that alone made it worth while.



I should be able to get a play-test for "Warning Signs" in during the next week or so and I'll post the results here.

Doomsday Design Diary part 1

I've had a lot of false starts and half finished ideas as far as game design goes. My history is littered with character sketches, simple design docs, and meetings that ended up going nowhere. "Doomsday Device" is the first game that I've designed and taken to an actual playable state. As of this writing it is still a work in progress, but it has come a long way since its inception and this would be a good time to look back on its evolution.

I had a couple design goals with "Doomsday Device" but the primary one was to finish. While I don't consider the game done, I have taken it to a point that I'm pretty happy with. I've got a rule set, a decent prototype. Everything seems to work. People seem to at least tolerate it. If nothing else, it's the furthest I've ever taken a project. So even if the game is ultimately terrible, I'd still have to call it a success based on the modest goals I had set for myself at the beginning.

When I look back at the beginning of the project I realize that "Doomsday" was really an iteration of one of my previous attempts at game design called "Cults and Conspiracies". In my notes for this earlier game, I have a basic description that reads:

"Players must guide their secret society from its inception in ancient times up through the modern age in an effort to attain total control of the world's governments, culture, and economies. "

It was a pretty ambitious start -- combining aspects of civilization, bluffing mechanics, secret information, and semi-cooperative game play. It never made it to prototype but the early mock-ups had players moving pawns around a world map, trying to force certain pawns together and others apart. Frankly there was a lot of cool concepts in there that never really worked together but there are things I think I'll look into more in future projects. Players could move any piece on the board (rather than having ownership of a specific color or faction), and players would have to work together in some situations and compete in others. In order to accomplish their ultimate goals, players endeavored to complete secret "projects" (which represented things like currency control, or assassinations, or any sort of cool conspiracy thing). The game got more and more bloated as I threw more and more ideas at it. Part of this was because I never really had a formal design document or solid design goals to guide me. "Cults and Conspiracies" essentially became a complicated and lengthy brain storming session.

(an early mock-up of "Cults and Conspiracies):



Eventually "Cults" lost steam and I abandoned it. When I started Doomsday Device I began with some more specific ideas. I had a better and more streamlined design doc, and had clearer goals. There were some important similarities between "Cults" and "Doomsday" that make me feel like the earlier led to the latter. I'll get to those specifics in a bit.

As I stated earlier, my primary goal for "Doomsday" was to finish. To that end I wanted to make a simpler game, and I wanted to base it off something I was familiar with. I didn't want to re-invent the wheel, just put my own spin on it. I initially decided that this design would borrow heavily from a game called "San Juan". "San Juan" is essentially a card game where players are trying to build up their own part of a colonial city. In "Doomsday Device" the players are attempting to build up cartoon-style machines of devastation (Giant Robots and Super Lasers and such). As my goal was to design a new game (and not simply re-theme and older one) I also added an element of maneuver. Players would basically attain the cards (or parts) that they needed to build their devices via their maneuvers on the board -- and the devices they built would allow them to do new and more powerful things with their maneuvers.

Now we go back to "Cults and Conspiracies". In C&C, players were typically not able to maneuver pawns entirely on their own to achieve desired results. They would have to temporarily join forces with their opponents in order to get things done. My early versions of "Doomsday Device" had a similar idea: In "Doomsday Device", much of the game play revolves around the Black Market: Spaces on the map which (when occupied) allow players to draw the cards (or components) that they need to build their devices. These market places were divided by regions (Europe has its own set of market spaces, as does Africa, as does Asia, etc), and in order for one region's market to work, ALL the spaces in that region had to be filled. This typically meant that players had to work together to fill the market in order to activate it.

I also saw reflections of the C&C's "projects" in the different device types the "Doomsday" players would build. Pawns of different factions in C&C became Agents and Thugs in "Doomsday". In the end, it seemed to me that, rather than design an entirely new game, I had stripped down "Cults and Conspiracies" and tweaked the theme a bit.

I suppose the lesson here is that no work is wasted work, and that even something that ends up looking like a failure can lead to something better.

-ER

Introduction

"All play moves and has its being within a play-ground marked off beforehand either materially or ideally, deliberately or as a matter of course. Just as there is no formal difference between play and ritual, so the ‘consecrated spot’ cannot be formally distinguished from the play-ground. The arena, the card-table, the magic circle, the temple, the stage, the screen, the tennis court, the court of justice, etc, are all in form and function play-grounds, i.e. forbidden spots, isolated, hedged round, hallowed, within which special rules obtain. All are temporary worlds within the ordinary world, dedicated to the performance of an act apart" -Johan Huizinga (1872–1945)."[4] In Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture,

Welcome to "The Magic Circle Blog" -- a blog about games and game design. This is the first entry, so welcome to the beginning! I should start off with an introduction and some sort of broad description of what this blog is all about. This is about exploration. When I said, "welcome to the beginning", I meant it in more ways than one. I am not a published designer. I am not an expert in the field of game design. I am a wanna-be. I am a hobbyist. I'm at the beginning. I am reading, practicing, and now writing about game design with the goal of getting better at it. I'm hoping that if you take the time to read what I write here, that you will participate in the conversations and we can explore this stuff together.

My interest in games has been with me many years. I was always intensely fascinated by video games in particular. If my family was out and about and we were by an arcade I'd beg for quarters and a chance at some time with those machines. Even at Disneyland, I was more interested in Space Invaders at the "Starcade" than I was in Space Mountain in Futureland. By the time I hit 6th grade I had discovered Dungeons and Dragons which took hold of my imagination for many years. I'd also play a fair amount of games like Risk and Axis and Allies thrown in with the occasional Monopoly experience that most of us know. In college I was also introduced to Magic: The Gathering and other Collectible Card Games (or CCGs as they became known as) and later I was caught up in the Poker craze that swept across the country.

Games continue to play a big part in my life. I still enjoy video games and I am recently fascinated by boardgames, having been re-introduced to the hobby through the explosion of "Family Strategy Games" that come to us from Europe. While I'm not a professional designer I have worked in the video game industry (on the production side) for 10 years now. Of course production is one thing, but design has the real allure. It's hard to play a great game and not deconstruct it a little. It's hard not to wonder how the creators came to certain decisions and how they manufactured these systems, these enviroments, and these play-grounds that come together to produce such memorable experiences. It's also hard to let these thoughts just tumble around in my head and still do something productive with them. So this blog will be a way to organize and investigate them a little further.

Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoy The Magic Circle Blog.

-ER

coming soon.