Solitude, in need of

Last night Wendy was worried about me.  She asked why I had been so distant lately and wondered if something was wrong with me.  Thankfully I had an answer and it was one that she can readily accept:  I really needed time alone.  I enjoy the holidays and I do like getting to see old friends and family but by the time the first day back to school and work rolled around today I was going a wee bit barmy.  Normally after my yearly trek to the great white north there is a fair bit of chillaxing going on and some quiet time but this year we had a good half dozen special occasions and events scheduled in the week following our flight home and they really got to be too much at once.  In particular I really need a good stretch of time where my concentration is entirely my own and this is a hard thing to do when there is a five year old running around.  At any time I can be seized upon to be a horsey, create food or clean up a mess and that necessity for being on call wears me down more than I like to admit.

I know it is getting bad when I look forward to vacuuming.  Not that vacuuming is fun, mind, but I do it when I am home alone and I can do it exactly how I want to, exactly when I want to, and nobody interrupts me.  It might make a lot more sense to long for computer game time but my subconscious has evidently latched onto vacuuming as the thing that signifies solitude and so I long for it.  My fantasies clearly need some work.

The most amusing thing came today when Wendy called me to tell me that The Banker was coming over to visit me to learn and play the new game I invented called Dot.  My immediate response was to be extremely bitter and feel terribly put upon, which is quite ridiculous because I *love* playing the games I build and I look forward to having really clever gamers like The Banker test them with me.  I know when I am mad that someone is coming over to play board games because I won't be able to vacuum that I need to sit alone in my condo for a few days!  The Banker actually did a great job and handed me my first loss in Dot and came within one point of toppling me in FMB on his very first game so it was a good time and I got some valuable testing in.  The endless party that is vacuuming will need to wait for another day.

I wonder how I managed to be a salesman for so long.  How did I spend every day talking with total strangers or passing time by chatting with fellow salespeople without going completely bonkers?  I have such a desperate need to escape the world and just be alone with my thoughts and my computer that I just can't figure out how I lived that life.  Who am I, really?

Below:  The new game, Dot.

Big swings

It has been a long time since I have talked about FMB because I pretty much felt like the game was in a finished state - aside from marketing and large scale production there wasn't much to do.  I had an idea this week though that seemed like it would make the game better by removing big swings.  Right now the way things work is that you draw 1 spell each turn; some of them buff your units and some smash your opponent's units.  The way it used to work is that the buff spells were reasonably balanced on their own but some of them multiplied together in very powerful ways so if they were combined they could be extremely devastating.  Example:

Flaming Swords:  Pick two units to get + 3 to attack this turn.
Berserk:  Pick one unit to attack 2 extra times this turn.

Each one individually worked fine but when both were played on the same unit at once that unit attacked 3 times with + 3 which was extremely overpowered.  It was even possible to Berserk both of the units that received Flaming Swords with two Berserk spells and end up with an absolutely outrageous turn.  There are two problems with this.  The first is that if you draw these spells together and your opponent has no answers you probably win the game with such a combo, assuming the game was close at the time.  The second problem is that some of the spells just flat out prevented a unit from acting for a turn so you could end up using multiple spells to power up your units and then have your opponent negate everything with a single spell.  Example:

Wave of Force:  Pick one unit to not get any actions this turn.

If you managed to get your combo off it would be absolutely dominating and if you failed to get it off you probably just lost the game.  There was an element of skill in figuring out when to try for combos and when to wait it out but in the end there were definitely games where you just got wrecked and there was little to be done about it.  The bigger problem was that buff spells didn't feel very fun.  Knowing that you stand a good chance of using your spell and getting wrecked takes a lot out of the enjoyment of it, especially since you simply can't know what your opponent has.  I came up with a solution, which is that any unit targetted by a spell cannot be targetted by another spell this turn.  This accomplishes two things.  Firstly it completely removes the super combo possibilities from the buff spell and secondly it prevents your opponent from using a spell to stop a unit you have just powered up.  This means that you never have to worry about getting completely blown out by a lucky spell draw from your opponent and you also can cast spells to power up your units strategically to prevent a spell being used against them later.  I am confident that some strange things will come of this and I will probably have to rewrite some spells a little but I think it will give me a lot more flexibility in designing effects since I don't have to worry about them conflicting with each other nearly so much.

Don't call it a comeback

I played a new 4 player game today.  Strangely enough I am not confident of the exact name of the game but I believe it was called factory manager, and if not then at least factory manager is an apt name for it!  In the first 2 turns I wasn't exactly sure how things would play and I ended up being about 6-10 dollars behind Ziggyny in points and was fairly sure there was no way to make up the difference unless he did something really foolish.  When the game ended at the end of turn 5 I lost to him by 8 points (276-284).  The game was quite enjoyable generally and seemed well put together but it distinctly lacks a way for those who end up at an early disadvantage to come back into the game barring a serious blunder by the person in the lead.  Obviously someone who leads early and plays flawlessly should have at the very least an extremely high chance at victory but it felt bad looking at our respective positions and noting that they were nearly identical except his was just a tad better.

This makes me wonder how much of a comeback mechanism a game needs to be enjoyable.  In Settlers of Catan for example it is absolutely trivial for three players to crush 1 player who gets an early lead; they could simply refuse to trade with him and stuff him at every opportunity or they could just hand all their resources to one guy and watch him win the game in no time.  The problem with those sorts of situations is it becomes all about politics and convincing people that your game position is worse than it is so they spend their time beating down on somebody else.  I have played Settlers games where the entire game boiled down to two loud, stubborn people arguing about which of them was in the lead and the other 2 players refused to play the game again after that.  On the opposite extreme is Dominion, where in many games the players interact in virtually no way and it is often nearly impossible to actually do anything about a person who is running away with the victory.  Clearly some people really like games where they have tremendous flexibility to get together and stomp the leader flat and some people hate it but I think there must be some kind of middle ground where you have some control over other players but you can't simply take them out of the game entirely.

I think the easiest example of that middle ground is Puerto Rico, though I am very biased here since it is one of my favourite games.  You can certainly rain on somebody's parade if you want to and make the game more challenging for them but you absolutely cannot remove their ability to play nor can you guarantee that you both lose on a whim.  If you have 3 strong players and players A and B decide that they are both playing for A to win and C to lose they will certainly succeed but at the very least C will always feel like he is playing the game and getting things done which is much better than Settlers played against a team.

FMB does not achieve this middle ground that I am talking about unfortunately.  Just like Settlers if A and B decide to gangpile C and refuse to back down from that then C won't have much of a game.  I feel like I succeeded in that if everyone is playing to win then C should never be out completely because the A and B should backstab each other as soon as a substantial lead over C is established and C should have an opportunity to come back.  I figure in any freeflowing war game there is no way to prevent an alliance of players from crushing a single player if that is their goal but at least I made comebacks possible and made it optimal to break alliances fairly quickly.  Perhaps it isn't as structurally impregnable as Puerto Rico is but given the genre of the game I think it is excellent in this regard.

Serious games

I wonder how much game creators really think about the future of their games and how the players will view them.  Case in point:  Magic the Gathering, a tremendously successful game that rapidly spawned a worldwide following and large international tournaments with really substantial prizes.  While the game was soon to be analyzed and taken apart meticulously by players all over the creators clearly had no idea this was their future when the game shipped.  Initially it was packaged as a game that was always for ante, that is that you flip over a card from your own play deck when you start a game and you lose that card to your opponent if you lose the game!  This is obviously not suitable for repeated games and tournaments but it works fine if you intend your players to just be random dudes playing for fun against each other at lunch hour.

The opposite case is true for Starcraft 2.  The game came packaged with several features specifically targetted at high end players and those who do substantial game analysis.  Blizzard obviously went to great pains to make a game that would be accessible to the masses of casual players but would have all the tools needed for advanced players to improve their game.  For example, after you play a game you can look at a replay of the entire match so you can see exactly what each player did and when.  The last ranked match I played I had some real issues in that my opponent seemed to be psychic.  Every time a force of mine moved out he had his units in place to avoid or attack at just the right time and I could not seem to do anything he could not handily counter.  Eventually I made an all-in attack at his expansion and took him completely by surprise - in the ensuing battle he played rather badly and I wiped him out easily.  I decided to check the replay to figure out how I could do the early skirmishes better and discovered that he was not psychic or even very good at all; he simply had an observer hidden over my troops the entire match and I accidentally killed it just prior to my final assault.  That knowledge is going to make me a much better player and the ability to go back and understand my mistakes and find those gaps in my game is absolutely key.  Blizzard wants people to take their game very seriously and they programmed it to meet that goal.

I certainly think about the future of FMB a lot, not quite to the extent of creating tournament rules and such but I really have a good idea of what I would do to continue to keep the game fresh and how I would further challenge advanced players.  It seems like a rare thing to have the combination of game creating skill, the drive to publish and the insight to try to appeal to many different demographics that would be required to create a game that can both capture the interest of casual players and challenge the professionals.  It is challenging to manage the expectations of so many very different people since they don't place the same values on things at all and the company that does it is going to make a fortune.  I think if we look at the most successful games out there they often have that component in common - easy to learn, hard to master.

3 is the loneliest number

Today I was doing some testing of various 3 player formats for FMB.  Because I am designing a free flowing wargame it is obviously true that 3 players will be a challenging format as traditionally 2 people simply gangpile one guy and kill him off before going to work on each other.  FMB has some things that tend to weaken that strategy because all units respawn at their controller's base after dying so actually wiping someone's army out isn't possible; you can push him back and take his Mines but you can't actually destroy him so alliances between 2 players cannot be as solid as in many wargames.  The other main thing that discourages gangpiling is the victory condition; cooperating with an opponent is simply foolish once the third player is behind in score so there is a real in game advantage to backstabbing your 'partner' early on.

The simplest rules version I came up with simply has all 3 players accumulating points as fast as they can and the first player to 30 points wins.  (The 2 and 4 player versions require 45 points to win.)  It has the advantage of being very intuitive and the strategies are easy to understand even for a new player.  If one player is particularly bad it shouldn't be a big problem because the other two players will naturally end up fighting each other more as the bad player falls behind in points.  I came up with a much more devious alternative though which was based on around the idea of attacking left.  In big group games of Magic this was regularly used to encourage action - the idea is that you sit in a circle and win by eliminating the opponent on your left.  In FMB I set it up so that the game ends when anyone hits 30 points but that the winner is the person whose left hand opponent has the *smallest* score.  This changes things drastically of course, mainly in the following ways:

1.  Alliances are impossible.  You cannot team up with an opponent to kill the other opponent because either you are hurting yourself by not attacking lefty or your righty is an idiot for attacking someone whose score he wants to maximize.  Everyone is forced to be on their own team.

2.  The game feels much less intuitive.  It feels very natural to defend your territory and attack anyone who is overpowering you and much less so to throw yourself at the throat of a random opponent.  Defending your own territory and preserving your army is of secondary importance which surely has a bizarre feel.  I imagine for new players this might be really hard to get used to.

3.  One poor player can really mess things up.  If a player plays very passively (badly) and simply defends themselves then the player to their left is nearly guaranteed to win.  Being able to constantly attack and not defend is an incredible advantage.  This does require a pretty determinedly stupid player though, as even if they send one fast unit to lefty's home area to put pressure on the game is probably going to work fine.

The question I am mulling is whether or not a loss in intuitive, straightforward play is worth a gain in 'theoretical game perfection' whatever that means.  From far away I really like the idea of attacking left and it certainly feels unique but the motivation of the wizard/general we are roleplaying seems strange indeed.

Bonuses

I find myself wondering how much the phrasing of a particular game effect changes the way people think about it.  In particular there are a few new mechanics in the Cataclysm expansion for WOW that are obviously set up to abuse the perception of a bonus instead of a penalty.  The new guild levelling system has a number of different bonuses you can get for your guild members including bonuses to getting gear with faster Honour and Hero Points as well as other percentage bonuses to gathering, mount speed, etc.

All of these things are phrased as a bonus, never as a penalty.  The idea of course is that we look at all the shiny new things we are going to get and rejoice instead of being frustrated at having to overcome a deficit but any really objective look at the system must conclude that Blizzard will balance around everyone having these bonuses maxed out and anyone not having them is at a disadvantage.  The initial stages will be full of people being excited by getting all these new things but I foresee that very quickly they will change from celebrated bonuses to mandatory requirements.

In particular this is going to be a real mess when starting a new guild.  It will be very difficult to convince anyone to join a guild where they gain gear 9% slower, receive less resources when the mine/herb/skin and even move slower.  That initial perception of 'bonus' is going to rapidly become 'required' and any new guild is going to have a hell of a hard time getting people in since they have to be that much better than an established guild.  There are some bonuses that won't have this effect like the mass resurrect that will be usable in instances but any numeric bonus that directly affects the player's income and gear acquisition is going to be seen as required and guilds without them are going to have a terrible time getting new players.  In my mind this is a very bad thing; players should be encouraged to join whichever guilds suit them socially rather than being very substantially rewarded for sticking with whoever has been around a long time.  It may also lead to people selling guilds that have levelled up to others because of the real value in the guild name now - this might actually prove a dramatic problem when people get hacked.

A similar thing occurred when I played a game of FMB this weekend against a new player.  He seemed to like the game overall but didn't like the fact that every space on the gameboard was either a neutral space or a space with movement penalties associated - no space actually gives bonuses to anything.  I wonder if I should try to incorporate some bonus effects on various spots on the board.  There are certainly many places in the game where I made the decision to phrase things as a bonus instead of a penalty because I find I get very strong negative feedback about effects that penalize opponents instead of providing a boost to the owner.  I don't want to pander to this entirely though since a few 'screw you' effects are fine but I certainly make the vast majority of abilities work to increase the caster instead of disadvantage the opponent.  It is a tricky balance to strike.

I have a minion

One of the defining features of a villain is their minions.  It is hardly appropriate for the first fight the heroes have to be with the final boss himself (unless he gets away, of course) so it is traditional for heroes to tangle with minions of the evil boss first.  Initially the minions are generally of the mindless, weak variety so that the heroes can plausibly gain experience and skill to defeat the more intelligent, dangerous minions and eventually the villain himself.  Yesterday I acquired my first minion, known variously as Gnome or Ziggyny.

I have been testing FMB as much as possible but in the past little while I have been heavily focused on the physical appearance and flow of the game and less on game balance.  Game balance is one of those bizarre things that has a correlation to the success of a game but the correlation isn't especially strong.  Diablo 2 for example was heinously unbalanced and yet was a smash success and War is spectacularly balanced while also being utter rubbish.  Due to this I know that having a balanced game is helpful but by far the most important thing about a game is that it is fun.  That is a tricky balance to strike since my mind so constantly focuses on the numbers behind the effects and not as much the fun factor.

The reason I say I have acquired a minion is that yesterday Ziggyny posted on his blog an analysis of some of the Artifacts in FMB.  He wrote up spreadsheets and built a simulator to iterate the effects of various Artifacts over many turns to develop a baseline for comparison.  The analysis he did was very useful and highlighted the fact that some of my Artifacts were simply out of line with others.  I ended up building my own spreadsheet today to do my own analysis and when I finally saw the numbers in front of me I was pretty shocked at how out of whack they were.  Now it should be noted that my 'way out of whack' is 'balanced on a razor's edge' in most games but my standards are irrationally high.  Based on this I went back and changed at least half of the Artifacts and Spells in the game.  Mostly things were easy to alter to fit my new designs but some of what I had in there had to be scrapped outright.

It feels strange to have someone working for me to forward my plans to take over the world.  I have had lots of people volunteer their expertise in financial or business matters when/if I reach the point of trying to actually sell this thing but only one has gone off on his own and worked on the game itself to a substantial extent.  Note that I am very grateful for the testing and suggestions I receive from all quarters but real minions go and build spreadsheets.  Unfortunately if a group of well meaning adventurers decide to end my evil plans I don't know that I can rely on Ziggyny to protect me though as he is rather small and uninterested in brawling.  Perhaps that will be a benefit as presumably if my enemies come to destroy me without levelling up by beating my minions I can defeat them handily.  I have work to do now:  My irrational overconfidence is already in place but the maniacal cackle needs some practice.

Microsoft is good

Over the past few weeks I have been plugging away at my FMB unit design.  There has been a lot of iteration on the design due to input from people around me and my own creativity but the greatest mover of design changes has been the program used to create the design.  For awhile I have been working with paint.net until I discovered the gradual but noticeable degradation of images I got while using it.  When I saved my work and then reloaded it I found distinct picture quality issues that actually got significantly worse with each save and reload.  It was so bad that I eventually gave up on paint.net and swapped over to Microsoft Office PowerPoint, which at first glance didn't seem like the ideal interface for creating art but in fact worked wonderfully.

Like a lot of geeks I have this idea in my mind that using free software instead of supporting the behemoth Microsoft's (insert Imperial March music here) software is a good thing.  After all, Microsoft has been guilty of economically evil behaviour in the past, should we not shun their products as punishment?  The problem of course is that I don't use software to make a statement so much as I use software to get things done and Office is simply *better*.  It is better because they have massive gobs of money to throw at development, but better nonetheless.  This same sort of effect was present when I swapped to Microsoft Excel from OpenOffice's spreadsheet builder.  The free to use version was okay at first, but after having experienced both I can say definitively that the evil empire makes much better office programs than the collective of unpaid geeks out there.

Now I have a spreadsheet build in Excel and a set of units built in PowerPoint.  It cost me a hundred bucks to buy the home version of Office but I can certainly vouch for the fact that it was worth the price, even for my limited use of it so far.  I have gone from a daring pilot flying a X-wing fighter in a trench on the Death Star to a white clad Stormtrooper standing at attention awaiting orders from the Emperor.  Perhaps I have betrayed my roots and fallen in line with big business, or perhaps I just use whatever it is that actually does the job.  Which it is depends on your point of view.

Below is the picture I created in PowerPoint.  Faster, prettier and easier.  Go Team Evil.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

I put together the pieces for FMB over the past couple days, gluing the paper printouts onto foam board to give them some thickness and strength.  Some of it worked out really well, some of it merely okay and some of it ... not so good.  First, the Good.  The basic board works great.  I had to do some chiselling and chipping and such after I cut it out with an Xactoknife, but now it both looks good and seems functional.  There are 2 pictures to the side that show the game set up and a side shot of the pieces so you can see the thickness.

All this chopping and pasting and such was the reason I failed to post on Wednesday.  I was terribly busy wearing my fingers to nubs on an Xactoknife and trying to poison myself with spray on glue.  The glue works wonderfully, by the way, but if you believe the bottle it will kill everyone who lives in my condo for the next 50 years.  So many warning labels!

The Bad:  This is the game pieces all separated out into plastic baggies as it traditional for these things.  The big pieces worked out well, but the little ones were tricky to cut right because of the thickness vs. the length and width.  They ended up kinda okay but a little bit uneven and not perfectly flat.  The colours also didn't print out correctly so the bits are too similar to the terrain.  The colours I can fix with a new printing, the warping is much harder.  Getting a picture of them that really showed this was tricky though, so you have to take my word on it.



The Ugly:  I don't know why Blogger turns this picture sideways.  I can't seem to make it do otherwise though.  The issue here is that
it is hard to tell at a glance which units are which.  The units with the triangles at the top are ranged units but to know which units are fast or strong you have to be able to make out the numbers.  It turns out this is pretty annoying to do and the units don't work at all as smoothly as I had hoped.  I need to fix this so I came up with some ideas.  My plan is to print out units with symbols on them instead of numbers:  -> for a fast unit, the same triangle for ranged that you see here, and either a sword or a clawed hand for a strong unit.  I have put a random jpeg I was doodling away on below so you can see what I was working on.

Your mission is to look at the two sets of units at the bottom and tell me which looks better, the ones with the clawed hand, or the ones with the sword.  If you have other potentially better ideas feel free to comment also.

Edit:  My latest set of unit pictures is below.

Ideas into Objects

The real world always causes such problems.  I regularly come up with crazy ideas for FMB and then am forced to chop them because they don't work well with the physical limitations of the implementation I have chosen.  I have scrapped more than one great artifact idea simply because the text required to explain the way that it works was so large that it would not fit reasonably onto a single card.  You might suggest that the idea was too complicated to be good anyway, which is fair, but in most cases the mass of text was simply because I needed to cover edge cases and make sure that foolish people could not badly misinterpret how things were supposed to work.

I am often pinned by ideas that work well in abstraction or in a computer game but do not function well in a board game or ideas that I could easily work into a final version but don't mesh well with my current implementation.  For example, I have gone through several different kinds of tokens to represent units in the game.  I know how I want them to look at publishing time (if that time ever arrives!) but in the meantime I have to deal with making sure that my hacked together pieces adequately reflect the units properties so I can test the game.  Having ideas that are good when I have a factory cranking out bits isn't much good if I can't convince people to play the test version because it is too complicated or ugly or the learning curve too steep.  It is a very tricky tightrope to walk to make sure that at every stage the game is fun, understandable and as pretty I can make it and yet not lose anything that I want to include in the final version.

I think this whole process has really made it clear how being an iNtuitive (Myers-Briggs personality type) can be challenging.  I find it so hard to give up on my ideas and my grand scheme and get down to the nitty gritty details.  It takes me forever to get to actually building something physical whereas becoming completely absorbed in the ideas and theories behind the game is so easy.  I want to just sit back and discuss the best ways to build things and the optimal modelling of complicated abilities and not so much to actually hold something complete in my hands.  A ditchdigger I am not.

The pictures to the side here are of the new game board after I got my stuff printed out today.  I have a big chunk of foam board that I am going to stick all the paper cutouts on to give them some thickness and stiffness and then commence to mad testing.  I also went back and updated the rules so they would be a lot clearer and added rules for 3 and 4 player versions.  The pictures, rules and information are all posted ->Here<- if you want to take a look.  Obviously feel free to read, play and print out, but no publishing without paying me!  (I am involved in some kind of delusion that people would actually pay me for what I have done so far... I might need professional help.)

Inspiration strikes

I have been working frantically on FMB to get it to a portable, presentable state.  I find that sometimes several days will go by where I think nothing about the game at all and then I will suddenly be seized by the desperate need to create and go on a spree.  I think my life would be drastically different if I didn't have a child (and hence responsibilities) to regulate my time.  I am sure I would end up working halfway through the night when inspiration grabbed me and only putting down my tools when dawn began to light to sky.  As it is I need to get up and get breakfast for my family, take Elli to school and do the various chores that are part of my day so I need to get to sleep at a normal hour.  Doing this breaks up my spurts of insight and activity and ensures that everything takes drastically longer because that intensity simply does not come back as soon as my chores are complete.

My latest innovation is building a game board.  I am using a hex grid in the shape of a hexagon with each side having 10 hexes along it.  I wanted the board to be randomizable, somewhat like a Settlers board is, but I certainly wasn't going to make each hex separately.  I ended up going with a smaller hexagon in the middle with sides 4 hexes long and 6 trapezoidal shapes for the sides, just like you can see in the images on the side.

The colours on the squares represent rivers(blue), hills(green) and mountains(orange) and the letters are for Fortresses and Mines.  I have 8 different side pieces built so the total number of different gameboards is 8 choose 6 * (6*5*4*3*2) = 20160.  While many of the gameboards that would be generated are fairly similar to one another each game should be slightly different, even if the cards and artifacts that are drawn weren't a factor, and they are.

My next step is to get all of these pictures printed out and made into usable game pieces somehow.  Perhaps I will laminate them, perhaps I will glue them to bristol board to give them some stiffness, it isn't entirely clear.  Eventually they will be made of the same sort of cardstock that is used in other board game boards, even if I have to buy cheap board games and chop them up to generate the materials.

The units are going to be wooden bricks with stickers on them in the end, but for now they will also be printed out bits of paper finished in the same way as the board itself is.  Hopefully I can even replace "Wizard" with an actual picture of a wizard, but my limited artistic skills prevent that being an option for now.  The numbers represent Power/Speed and the black triangles in the corner designate a ranged unit.

Lowered expectations

It looks like I will need to lower my expectations for my board game FMB.  The current setup I am using at home for my copy looks like the picture here:

The pieces that currently are matchsticks, beads and plasticine were intended to be replaced with models of fantasy monsters and people.  I wanted mounted horsemen, wizards, swordsmen and ogres.  Unfortunately it seems that this is simply out of reach for production and isn't even especially reasonable for my personal copy.  The cheapest figurines I have been able to locate that are simply plastic and paint go for $1.50 - $10.00 each so unless I am willing to shell out quite a lot of cash for a full collection I would be stuck buying whichever pieces happened to be cheap even if they don't work well as game pieces.

I had this wonderful plan of a battleground with all the fantasy archetypes represented but the dream has been dashed on the rocks of reality.  It is something I expect nearly everyone has to deal with when they try to create something with a lot of flexibility in scope - you have to know when to pare back your expectations due to cost. Certainly many an entrepreneur has been sunk by the refusal to compromise and I hope to not be that individual. I absolutely demand that a game I make be as perfect in mechanics as is possible but the appearance is something I can be flexible on.  I know that I have spent many enjoyable hours playing minesweeper, freecell, bridge, poker and old computer games so it is clear that games don't require that sort of beauty to be successful though I am sure it doesn't hurt.


My current updated plan is to use flat pieces of cardboard to represent units.  The idea is to have a picture of the creature in question and 2 numbers in the corners to show its statistics and place the cardboard unit in a frame of sorts to show which team it is on and hold it upright.  I made two little prototypes but you need to imagine that the plasticine is a hard plastic frame and that the cow and bread pictures are an ogre and a wizard.

This setup should have the nice combination of fairly cheap to produce and still allows me to use 'tap' mechanics for the units as well as easily display their stats.  It is a bit sad that my original idea needs to go by the wayside but I must content myself with the beauty of mathematics and not the beauty of artwork.

I have been having a tremendous time inventing new concepts for Artifacts within the game.  I end up approaching new creations in one of two ways:  Either I create a name and then try to figure out what sort of effect could work with that name or I do the reverse and come up with the effect first.  For example, I thought of an Artifact that would just kill a unit as soon as it is hit and decided that it should be associated with a traditional symbol of death - and Scythe of Doom was born.  The other way around occurred with Sack of Wonders - it seems like an amusing idea for a magic item; you reach into the sack and see what you get!  So now the Sack of Wonders makes you generate a random number and awards you things based on which number you got.

Predictably random

I have been mulling over some basic mechanics in FMB trying to figure out if the ways in which I am generating random results are optimal.  The randomness in the game until today was of 3 varieties:

1.  Dice roll.  Just like most classic wargames each player would roll a six sided die (d6) to resolve attacks.  This has the advantages of being quick and easy but the disadvantage that one person can fairly easily miss several key rolls over the course of the game and lose despite outplaying their opponent.

2.  Drawing spells and artifacts.  This is a simple draw from a deck of cards with many possible results.  Unlike the d6 I can actually balance each draw so players have the chance to use any draw to their advantage.

3.  Going first or second.  In many games going first is just flat out better.  I hate that system so I arranged a bidding system where players can try to figure out the value of playing first and bid accordingly.

I talked about this in an earlier post where I was trying to decide between two game systems.  I concluded that I like having random 'rolling' in the game but I have recently concluded that the amount of randomness was just a little too high for my tastes.

Awhile ago I saw a similar sort of debate surrounding the board game Settlers of Catan.  The dice rolling in that game really made it pretty random once everyone was playing reasonably and the difference between 'good play' and 'consummate professional' was extremely small.  The solution was to create a deck of 36 cards that simulates rolling 2 dice (2d6) to dramatically decrease but not eliminate the luck factor.  I have been plugging away at this idea for FMB to see if it could be used effectively.


Today I set it up so to resolve an attack you draw from a deck of 6 cards.  The cards are marked -2, -1, 0, +1, +2, +3 which corresponds to a d6 with a slightly different and more intuitive resolution system.  As soon as you draw the last card you reshuffle the deck.  This creates some interesting situations where you know what the result of your next attack will be when the deck is almost depleted and can work around that.  It adds an additional level of complexity to the game for advanced players but newer players can still basically ignore it and play the game quite reasonably.

This also allows all kinds of other interesting mechanics.  I have cards that remove the +3 from your opponent's deck, cards that remove the -2 from your own deck and cards that let you look at the top few cards of your deck.

The downside of course is that now you have to shuffle a small deck of cards fairly regularly.  I think that tradeoff is worth it though.  It may well be worth me having the cards and rules support both versions of the game - dice rolling as part of the base game and the card stack as part of the advanced game.

Someday I hope to be actually done iterating on my design.  I still have plenty of perfectionist left in me though and the game isn't *quite* to Beautiful Game status yet.  Soon!

Blind to the obvious

Consider if you will Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 2nd Edition.  This roleplaying game is one of the biggest and most influential ones ever created and was by far the one I played most when I was young.  The game started out small with just 2 core books and a binder full of monster stats and eventually expanded to over 50 books of rules. You might think, given the immense amount of time and money that went into this system, that it would be polished and things in it would make sense.  You would be wrong.

I present as evidence:  THAC0.  This stands for To Hit Armour Class Zero.  The system for making an attack in AD&D2 is to roll a twenty sided die, add/subtract any modifiers, add the enemy's Armour Class and then compare the result to your character's THAC0 number.

Example: If I was a 3rd level Fighter my THAC0 would be 18.  So if I roll an attack of 12, add my +1 modifier from Strength and add the enemy armour class of 6 I get a modified result of 19, which is above my THAC0 of 18, so I hit.

Armour class starts at 10 and goes down, so a very heavily armoured target could have an armour class of -10 or lower.  This is a particularly bizarre system when you consider the system of attacking that followed it, which is simply that armour class starts at 10 and goes up.  You roll your die, add your modifier as before and then check to see if you beat the enemy armour class.  This system both feels more intuitive (higher numbers are better) and reduces the number of operations by one (no more need to add armour class in before comparing) but retains the exact mathematical properties of the old.

So why would you have a more complicated, bizarre feeling mechanic when you can have a simple, intuitive one?  Good question.  I think the answer is simply that once a system has been designed the designer is often unable to see alternatives to that system.  We blind ourselves by thinking that since we have solved a problem there can be no better way to solve it.

FMB had a mechanic with the same problem as THAC0.  The way it worked was that each player started with 18 gold and slowly lost gold throughout the game.  The person who ran out of gold first was the loser.  To achieve this I had players constantly acquiring gold but also paying out gold at a higher rate so that eventually someone would run out.  Two days ago Wendy suggested that instead of having people lose when they run out of gold I should simply have people win when they get enough gold.

*blink*

Why didn't I think of that?!?!  I quickly redesigned the system to accommodate this new idea and it works much better.  I lower the number of transactions in the system, make the acquisition of resources more consistent and keep the numbers the same.  I also neatly avoid the issue of people forgetting to pay their gold costs each turn because there is no payment - only acquisition.  Anyone who forgets to take their resources for the turn is just out of luck and the system solves itself instead of requiring policing by the rules.

I find it so strange that even though I played this game a ton, revised the rules a hundred times and more and feel like my understanding of it is tremendous I missed a fundamental, simple change that would make the game better.  Add instead of subtract, nothing more, nothing less.  It certainly shows that there is real value in bringing in a second opinion from an outsider and being open to their suggestions.  Out of the mouths of babes indeed.  ;)

RNG and certainty

How much RNG (Random Number Generator) is a good thing?  I have been debating this back and forth with myself about FMB for awhile now - it has been a difficult thing to nail down.

The classic example of an RNG game is War.  In that most classic and terrible of games there is in fact no skill or player input whatsoever.  The cards come out in a particular order and the winner of the game is predetermined.  Most people find War to be absolutely pointless and suitable only for children.  The best examples of the opposite type of game are Go or Chess, in which there is zero randomness aside from who goes first and yet the games are incredibly complex and not even remotely solved.

My issue has been:  How much randomness do I want in FMB ideally, and more generally how much randomness do I like it my games?  I played an awful lot of Magic:  The Gathering in high school and university and loved that and I am a bit of a fanatical fan of board games with low randomness.  I also enjoy poker which is surely an example of mixed luck and skill.  I suppose a good measure of the randomness of a game is an expression of how often a professional player will lose to some random guy who has only played the game twice before.


Chess/Go - 0%  (The professional *could* lose, but it is far less than 1 in a million)

Magic/Poker - 10%  (No matter how good you are sometimes you get manascrewed or rivered out)

Puerto Rico - 20%  (Games with multiple players are prone to people playing kingmaker, otherwise would be lower)

War - 50%

So what is my ideal number?  I surely don't want the situation of War where the rube beats the pro half the time, but I don't think I actually like the Chess/Go ideal of nearly guaranteed victory for professionals either.  The best player losing to buffoons occasionally is fine as long as they will consistently build up a winning record over time to my mind and that ideal number lies somewhere between 20% and 5%.  While something in the back of my brain insists that a game should be pure and following the right strategy should lead to victory I don't seem to actually love games that embody that philosophy.  I like the possibility of pocket aces, I enjoy comboing my opponent out on turn 3 and I love snagging the Gold Mine with a lucky roll of a 6.

I suspect that everyone has a level of randomness that they are most fond of in games and that they tend to gravitate towards that level in their game choices.  I think I am happiest with games that allow me to rack up a winning record against a rube virtually every time after 10 games but occasionally not after 1 game; I don't mind losing a match to a sucker as long as  I have all of his money by the end of the night.  I experimented with some different rules in FMB  looking at options where no dicerolling occurred at all and ended up deciding that my game needs to fit my game preferences:  You roll some dice, and the better player wins most of the time.

Danger: Resource Conversion Ahead

Designing games right is hard.

I have been spending a huge amount of time lately working on FMB.  Every day when my chores are done (*cough*... certainly not in lieu of doing chores or anything) I sit down at the game board and play games against myself.  Back and forth the plasticine armies go, killing, stealing and conquering.  I learn a lot from these games and have managed to refine FMB in a lot of ways, slowly polishing and tinkering to make it perfect.  There are two things that are making my testing difficult though:

1.  Taking Sides:  When I am testing the red army vs. the green army I just can't force myself to be perfectly dispassionate.  I always end up rooting for one army or the other internally and I know that must affect my play.  For example, I was testing to see if an army with a large number of bad units would be better than an army composed of a small number of powerful units.  For no good reason aside from a hatred of zergling rushes I know I want the team of good units to win, but I need to test this situation without bias to make sure my current costing structure makes sense.

This is something that has always been true for me.  When I play games against myself I get myself into the mental state of supporting one side or the other and that side wins far more often than not.  Usually there is no blatant favourtism but it is hard to come up with devious plans for both sides of a conflict and not somehow favour one over the other.  Particularly when I know what cards both teams hold playing without bias seems like a bit of a stretch.  I wonder if others do the same thing?  Most likely they don't spend enough time playing games against themselves to know.

2.  Resource conversion is both appealing and dangerous.  I have designed many artifacts in the game and some abilities are easy to evaluate and some are not.  The most tricky certainly are ones that allow the player to give up some resources to get other resources because they generally require a very fine understanding of relative resource valuations based on game state to balance.

Example-Lucky Clover:  You get +1 on all your die rolls.

This one is easy to figure out.

Example-Demonic Altar:  Each turn you must kill one of your units.  That unit can be redeployed next turn at normal cost.  You gain + 1 Gold, + 1 Relic, + 1 Spell.

This one is complicated to figure out, and its value varies wildly based on game state.

I was testing green army (few powerful units) vs. red army (many cheap units) and green army totally smashed.  Fine I thought, good units win.  No problem.  Then I played again and red army mulched green army.  What is going on?  Turns out that in both cases the winning army got Demonic Altar as its first artifact and cruised to victory.  I guess Demonic Altar needs a serious nerf.  It is very tricky to play games against myself and actually isolate all the variables I need to make sure that I am testing the variable I want to test.  In scientific research it is of extreme importance to hold all variables but the variable being tested constant, and doing so here is monumentally difficult.  Because my games involve dice rolling and card drawing in order to test properly I will need a hundred trials and a ton of statistics to make properly scientific decisions.  Good thing I like playing games.

The Beautiful Game

Or in this case, the game that is fun but ugly as hell.  I am working on that last one though.

For the last 8 years I have been working on a game called FMB  (Fantasy Monster Beatdown).  See Previous Post for more on this topic.  It started out as a project to make a wargame that was simple to learn and quick to resolve.  I began doing this because every wargame I have played ended up taking immense amounts of time and having an incredibly steep learning curve and I felt that it should be possible to make a quick to learn, quick to play, fun wargame.  For 7 years I largely failed.  The game I built was simply not a good game for various reasons.  I regularly hit on mechanics that worked beautifully and some of the game was excellent, but always the cohesiveness was not there.

I think I have finally made it into something that works.  I have some amount of confidence in this because Wendy, who normally takes only minimal interest in learning new board games, actually got very much into it when I finally got her to test it with me.  I have played the game against myself a number of times and it felt like a ton of fun.  The trick is that wargames have complicated pieces.  I need units to move around the battlefield and lots of game components and they need to show a lot of information in a small area.  This isn't too challenging when you have a factory and a designer, but it can be pretty hard when you have low latent artistic talent.  However, here is what I have created so far:

The pieces are made of plasticine with matchsticks for handles.  The beads on the matchsticks tell you how strong the unit is and whether it is a ranged or melee unit.  The flags on the top represent a fast unit, while those without flags are slow.  I also built spells, rules cards and such and made them by printing them out and sliding the paper into my old Magic card protectors.  Production grade it is not, but it seems to work well. I figure I will test the game some more against unwitting friends and see how it pans out.  Once I get it working reasonably I will probably post the rules and such online for anyone else who wants to take a look.

I am getting really excited... almost giddy sometimes.  This version finally feels like a game I could be proud of producing, something that I could point to and say "I did that.  Check that $%?.& out!"  I never really began to consider how I would take the game to others (and potentially make money) until this point, despite encouragement to do so from several sources.  I was always waiting until the game began to feel beautiful to me.  This is, of course, beautiful in the mathematical sense, not the visual sense.  It isn't *quite* beautiful yet, but it is certainly pretty, and feels like it has almost grown into its beauty.  It is go time.

Labour of love or labour of money?

I have spent a good number of years now working on a game somewhat irregularly.  Initially it was called Fantasy Monster Beatdown (hereafter FMB) and was basically a system of combat that allowed several people to duke it out with fantasy armies under their control.  Every player could customize their army to be full of whatever type of unit they wanted from Assassins to Treants, Skeletons to Wizards, Footmen to Vampires.  Each player had 5-12 units that could move around on a hex grid and try to kill off the other person's units.  I was extremely proud of my little creation and roped many of my friends into playing with me.  The mechanics were simple yet fun and the game was full of emergent complexity.

Emergent Complexity:  The ideal game from many standpoints is one that has high Emergent Complexity.  This means that the game is simple to explain and the rules are easy to understand but that the strategy can be incredibly complex, so much so that it is nearly impossible to say with certainty what the best move is.  Chess or Go are classic examples, the rules are simple to explain but playing well is hard and playing perfectly is impossible.  Most wargames are the opposite with byzantine rules and easy choices.


While I very much enjoyed the game from some perspectives, FMB had a serious flaw.  It had no particular reason for the armies to be fighting, and in many cases people ended up in standoffs with both sides taking defensive positions and being unwilling to budge.  Once the units were actually fighting it worked beautifully but there was no good reason to think anyone would actually attack their opponent aside from boredom.  This is clearly not a good design.

The original incarnation of FMB was created in 2002.  For several years I regularly changed and updated the game trying to refine the core mechanics and fix the seemingly insurmountable problem of how to make people fight each other and not just stand at a distance.  There were obviously fairly easy kludges I could use to force people to fight, but in the end they never ended up being very compelling.  I didn't want something like "Player 1 loses the game in 10 turns unless Player 2 is dead" though I did try various permutations like that for awhile.

One of my inspirations for this effort was BloodBowl, which is a fantasy football game that had great ideas combined with many gameplay issues.  That said, once the Comfy crowd in university fixed up the game mechanics a bit we had a huge amount of fun running a BloodBowl league.  The very natural meshing of fighting and scoring touchdowns that BloodBowl achieved is something I quite admire even though much of the rest of the system was pretty miserable in the eyes of a game designer.

Rather recently I finally came up with a way to resolve these issues that I have been having with the game.  The way I did it was to change the win condition away from "Kill the opposing army" to "Force your opponent to starve to death".  The idea now is that each army has to be fed, and there are a number of specific points on the map that they can capture to facilitate that.  Some of those nodes provide food directly (farms), some provide other bonuses to your units (armory, blacksmith, stables). Each player has to feed their army each turn, and if they cannot their own monstrous minions come to eat them alive!  I set up the numbers so that the amount of food both armies require is greater than the amount of food all the farms can create which means that somebody is going to run out of food eventually.

The advantage of this is that now each army has distinct goals aside from fighting each other.  They must capture farms to feed themselves for as long as possible and they also want to capture the other nodes to make themselves better at fighting.  This clearly leads to conflict since both players want the same thing, so the players strategize, the armies clash and somebody wins.  The rules are easy to explain and we have a wargame that doesn't take long to complete but which has an real depth of strategy.

The question of course becomes:  What am I going to do with the game I have created?  The interesting thing to me is that I don't have any particular inclination to rush out and try to make money from it.  This fact is possibly surprising in light of the fact that so many people in my life either try to make money from game creation or insist that I should do so.  The primary argument seems to be that I would be happier if I was getting paid for doing the things I do now on my own time.  One thing that I do find interesting are that the two people who have tried to convince me to sell my games professionally are my father and a friend, Sandbox Lady.  Neither of these people is especially focused on monetary acquisition as a life goal, both are generous with their time and money, and yet both found my total lack of interest in turning my hobby into a business completely baffling.

My father spent his working years on a job he seemed perfectly content to do, though it never really struck me that he had any tremendous passion for it. I know that often he found office politics and bureaucracy infuriating, but I am sure that would be true in a multitude of positions given his temperament.  The impression I always had was that he felt that the security of his job was extremely important given his dedication to his family and that since he found the job perfectly fine there was no reason to go elsewhere.  Just to be clear, I have no issue with the idea of sticking with a job that seems fairly suitable because of the good benefits/security/hours/whatever.  There are people out there who are desperate to follow their dreams and passions and are quite willing to endure whatever deprivation and drudgery might be necessary to do so, but my father never struck me as the kind who is happy to wait tables for years while he waits for his acting career to take off; I am not that sort either.

Sandbox Lady is working at a job she is perfectly content to do, but also does not seem to have particular passion for.  It has excellent conditions and benefits which are a compelling reason to stay.  Her reasons for working where she does make sense to me given her family situation and talents, but she certainly isn't chasing some pie in the sky dream job.  She seems particularly eager to encourage me to go and make money doing what I love to do instead of just whatever job comes along though, which I find interesting.

Another parallel experience I have had is talking about game design with other friends Full Throttle and Butcher Knife.  Both of these individuals are good at games and interested in design, but both take a completely different tack than I do.  Whenever I started working on a game with either of them they inevitably became far more interested in marketing and production details than the game itself.  In several cases we ended up having long discussions about these sorts of topics before we had even played the game!  I always felt like production details could wait until we had played the game 100 times to see if it was truly excellent.

When I was working as a commissioned salesperson I played the game of "Make the most money possible."  I made sure to be truthful about the product I was selling and to make a real attempt to get the customer the information they needed to make a good choice for themselves.  I also took a lot of pride in being the sort of salesperson that people want to deal with.  Thankfully these two goals generally work well together.  In this case I was trying to maximize my income and that provided a good 'score' to determine how well I was doing.

So why do I not feel any inclination to try to sell a game I have made?  My current theory goes like this:  I love my games, much moreso than I ever did selling things.  I want my games to be perfect.  When building a game I don't look at the success of the game as my benchmark.  If I made a fun game that made me $50,000 or a absolutely perfect game that made me nothing I would take much more pride in the perfect game.  Certainly I would like the money, but I would never feel entirely right about having my name stamped on a product I felt wasn't up to the most exacting standards.  When I make games I do it to make something beautiful.  If I had two ways to build a game and one was the popular way that would guarantee big sales and one was the right way, I would build it the right way.

More and more often lately I have been feeling a bit like the stereotype of the starving artist.  Whether that artist is visual, musical or otherwise they (according to stereotype) are poor but refuse to compromise their art to conform to what the public is interested in.  I could spend time and energy trying to make my art form more palatable for the masses or I could labour on in obscurity achieve my own version of perfection.  When I consider these two options there simply isn't a choice at all:  I want my creation to be perfect, not successful.

At this point my best guess at explaining all this behaviour is that the people in my life who encourage me to make money from games really believe in the idea that if you do something for money that you would do for free anyway you will be happy.  While that has some merit, I think in many cases 'starving artists' like me should not pursue their dreams as entrepreneurs.  I would spend all my time pursuing perfection instead of the bottom line, which is a terrible formula for a business.  Far better would be for me to be employed by someone who is willing to accept a little bit of perfectionist neurosis on the part of their employees but insist on deliverables and ship dates.  I am not interested in or suitable for the part of a company head, but I do think I could find a lot of satisfaction in creating games for somebody else.  It would allow me to work on things I enjoy while having someone else change the goalposts from 'unattainable perfection' to 'the best you can have ready by next thursday', and since I always do my best work when dealing with an impossible deadline it might even make me better at what I do.

So until someone walks up offers me a job building games for a living (and these jobs are hilariously hard to get, by the way) I will continue the way I am going.  I fully intend to follow my dreams, but my dreams don't include cash incentives, but rather simply the joy of making something ideal.