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. ...
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. ...
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. I don’t usually bother fleshing individual ideas out in design documents because it usually takes just as long for me to implement those things and see them in the game instead. And who would want to read about an idea when you can see how it works in the game directly? 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. ...
I haven’t written purely about tech in a long time, but this is a particularly interesting intersection of tech and game design, so I thought I would share it with everybody. Be warned though: This is one of those posts that’s just about the thought process I went through for something and the solution I reached. I’m most definitely not advocating this solution for everybody. Think about it and pick the solution that works for you the best. By now you’ve probably heard of Lasting Legacy: you’re managing a family around the 19th century through several generations, socializing, choosing good marrying prospects, and helping family members pick an occupation. Ah, occupations… ...
When I start working on a game, one of the first things I decide is how will the game make the player feel. Different designers have different ways of driving and focusing the design of their games: some will use a short elevator pitch, some will use key pieces of art, some will let the mechanics dictate the rest. I prefer to use the way I want players to feel to anchor the design, and I flesh out the rest of the game around it. Once you have defined that feel, you can run every single design decision by it. Every game feature should support those feelings in some way, if not, they’re a good candidate to cut. And if some contradict them directly, you can veto them right away and not go down that path any further. ...
The amount and type of luck involved in a game has a profound impact on the feel of that game. Some games have no luck whatsoever, and all the variation comes from what the opponent does (chess), some of them are all about luck with not much else (roulette), and most of them fall somewhere in between, creating a wide spectrum of possible experiences. We don’t talk much about the role of luck in video games, probably because it’s hidden away under the black box of the computer simulation, but just like with board games, it can have have a large impact in the type of experience the video game provides. Thinking about luck in these terms was crucial for the game I’m working on (still unannounced!). We made some crucial decisions thinking about how luck was part of the game and kind what kind of experience it created for the player. I’m hoping this post helps people with similar design challenges. ...
No, this is not an announcement of my next game (I wish). Rather, it’s a brain dump of my struggle with the process. It seems that in the game development community we often share the process of making a game and how it did afterwards. But it’s rare having some insight into what goes on before the project gets started. Where do ideas come from? Why do we pick one and not another? These are semi-coherent notes about the things I’m struggling with right now. ...
It’s pretty clear that free-to-play games are the way to go if you care about making money from your games. And don’t give me that line about being indie and not caring about the money. On the contrary, being able to make money from the games we love to make, allows us to keep doing what we’re passionate about. I was having a discussion today about free games with other developers and I thought I would post here some random thoughts and open it up for discussion. ...
Casey’s Contraptions is an iOS game created by the two of us, Noel Llopis and Miguel à ngel Friginal. Noel, an industry veteran for over a decade, turned indie over four years ago and found success with microtransaction-based Flower Garden on iOS. Miguel worked as a graphic designer in the advertising industry for years before becoming a web developer. Casey’s Contraptions is his first published video game, although his first paper role-playing game came out almost 20 years ago. We met through Twitter several years ago, and then finally in person at a 360iDev conference. Even thought we didn’t plan it that way, we ended up working together during a game jam, and that set us in the path to collaborate in a future project. We knew we wanted to target iOS for our next project because we love the platform from a user and a developer point of view, and because it’s a platform where it’s possible for indies to succeed financially. Beyond that, starting a new game is never easy. Even though we have page after page of possible ideas, settling on a specific game idea is always very hard. We wanted something that met three requirements: The game had to be creative in nature as opposed to using destruction as the main gameplay element, it had to be something we were excited about, and it had to be something with the potential to sell reasonably well on the Apple App Store. Easier said than done! ...
Casey’s Contraptions will be available in the US in a few hours! For those of you living in other parts of the world, it’s probably already available on your App Store. Go get it! For the rest of you still twiddling your thumbs, eagerly awaiting for midnight, here’s some insight on what went on in the level creation for Casey’s Contraptions. Built-in editor From the beginning of the project, the idea was to have a level editor built in to the game. The level editor was the very first thing I implemented in the game. Before there were menus, or levels, or anything else, the game was a level editor without any goals. ...
The App Store today is a different beast from the one in early 2009, when iShoot ruled the charts. Look at the top paid games on the App Store today. Actually, don’t worry, I did all the leg work for you. Here they are: What can we tell by looking at those games? I see two clear categories: Games with a strong, established IP (Street Fighter, Sonic), or independent games with a huge amount of polish and style. ...
It pains me to see great games criticized for being too short or not having a lower price point. In a world where everything surrounding us is constantly vying for our attention, time is a premium, and filling it up with mediocre experiences, a waste. I want to have great experiences, not just long ones, and I’m willing to pay for them. Just like other media, each game has an ideal length to develop its ideas fully, and we shouldn’t fall to pressures to make then any longer than they should be. I don’t want endless grinding or backtracing through the level to meet a minimum time quota. Just like every book doesn’t have to be The Lord Of The Rings, there is room for both epic sagas like Dragon Age and Fallout and short experiences like Limbo or Braid. Maybe there’s even room for the equivalent of Italo Calvino’s shortest short story, The Dinosaur. ...