Most of my games and prototypes lately are very board gamey and almost always involve dealing random “cards” to create a hand of cards. For example, in Subterfuge players have the choice of one of three specialists every few hours, which is similar to dealing 3 random cards and having the player pick one.
You would think that dealing cards at random would be trivially easy to implement. You would also be wrong.
As a game developer, working on a project for years just to have it cancelled can be devastating. I’ve been lucky enough that it has never happened to me, but it’s an occurrence all to common in the games industry. However, having to cancel your own game after years of work is even harder. So it is with a heavy heart that I announce that I’m stopping development on Lasting Legacy.
There’s nothing like writing down all the rules for a game to keep yourself honest. You can quickly see if complexity is spiraling out of control, and, most importantly, you get to see if your expectations of the design match the reality of the game.
So I decided to write a “rulebook” for Lasting Legacy. I put rulebook in quotes because Lasting Legacy isn’t 100% a board game. There’s a light simulation component behind the scenes that is opaque to the player, but everything else can be treated like a board game. I figured it would be a good exercise for me, and maybe a good reference for early testers so they know what’s going on without a fancy tutorial.
I’m happy with the final result. It’s about three pages of generously-spaced rules without any images, which beats a lot of board games out there.
A word of caution: This is not trying to be a funny, engaging rulebook. It’s a dry, to the point, description of all the rules in the game, arranged in the best way to understand all the concepts in a single read. It’s also not a “How to play” document. I think that could be another interesting exercise for down the line, where I just focus on the bare minimum to get a player playing. Continue reading
In the early stages of developing a game, once I have the idea and the feelings of the game down solid, my approach is to throw everything I can think of at the game and see what sticks.
My early-in-development creative process.
During this phase I need to generate lots of different ideas because only some of them are going to stick. The more varied the better, so I like to approach my idea generation from different angles. The two most common approaches are starting from the theme, and starting from the mechanics
For example, in Lasting Legacy, we quickly came up with occupations like Family Doctor or Ball Organizer from the theme, and figured out what useful things they could do in the game (heal people, and attract new friends respectively).
We also came up with several occupations starting from a mechanics point of view. For example, we knew we wanted someone to increase the income of other people, so we came up with the Savvy Businessman occupation.
This time around I also used a third approach to generate ideas: Isomorphism.
Here’s a new video showing the UI improvements and how the characters feel more alive.
Apologies for the less than ideal sound and video quality. We’re working on fixing that for next time.
