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