Interaction
Welcome
to week four of design where we’re going to be talking about interaction and
how that effects the state of the game and the level of fun we need to make a
game popular. We’re also going to talk about the difference between a race and
a competition. Then, finally, we’re going to talk about this project before it
took form.
This
might seem weird, because last week I promised that we’d look at the different
types of card. That’s still on the horizon, don’t worry. But last week we
talked about how the game would play and what the goal was. Keep in mind that I’m
several weeks ahead on design before I post and so we came across a few issues –
this article is meant to address those issues before we go any further.
Let’s Work Together!
Interaction
is simply how two players interact with one another. This happens in a number
of ways through various cards and mechanics. Cards can be broken down into two
categories; personal cards and interpersonal cards.
Personal
cards reflect things that don’t necessarily interact with the opponent the opponent’s
cards, they affect you and your cards in some way. This would be instances of
things like “Draw a card” or a card that boosts one of your cards. They don’t
necessarily affect your opponent – but they help you interact with the opponent
in the long run.
Interpersonal
cards have a direct effect on your
opponent or your opponent’s assets. This would cards with abilities such as destroying
an asset, forcing a player to discard cards, and many, many others.
The key
to any good game is interaction. The players have to be working towards a
common goal, and they have to be able to impede each other from that goal. That’s
where interaction comes in.
Fast but Not so Furious
When
you think about sports and athletics a lot of people lump races and contests
together with “games”, but that’s not really the case. A game is something with
a structure of rules that has some form of player interaction. Even video games
have this in the form of putting commands in to a controller.
Contests
and races are slightly different – but they have significantly less
interaction. In (most) races there’s no way to hinder your opponent, and the
only way to improve yourself is by practicing. It just boils down to “Who got
the better time?”
Competition,
on the other hand, has interaction between players. Sports, like soccer and
basketball, have plenty of interaction and rules that create the parameters of
that interaction. This is what we’re aiming for. We need a structure of rules
as well as player interaction.
What
does this have to do with us? Well, after some more play testing we’ve come to
the conclusion that the rules that we posted previously are more of a “race”
than a competition. This might sound a little weird but I’ll break it down for
you to explain in great detail what we were doing;
You
bring Hunters to the table, each of them have a point value that allows your
opponents to play more Monsters (we bent these points quite a bit trying to
make the math right). You bring a deck to the table (we tried with both 40 and
60 card decks) filled with Monsters and different things Monsters did. The point was to use your Monsters
to kill your Hunters (through combat) or to have your Hunters kill a certain
amount of your opponents Monsters (again we fluctuated a bit with the math on
this one).
But
here’s what it comes down to. My Hunters are fighting against my opponents
Monsters – and my opponents Hunters are playing against my Monsters. If our
decks consist mainly of Monsters and the things that our Monsters do, we strip
away a level of interaction. We can get away with our Monsters interacting with
our Monsters, and our Monsters interacting with the opposing Hunters. Very
rarely will we see our Monsters interacting with your opponents Monsters. But
you’ll almost never see our Monsters interacting with our Hunters.
Those
last two sound a bit weird. My Monsters will rarely interact with my opposing
Monsters? Right. If you have a group of Monsters – and they’re fighting a group
of Hunters, what do you think happens when another group of Monsters comes
along? Most of the time the two
groups of Monsters will put their differences aside, temporarily, to dispose of
their common enemy. That’s why we say “rarely”, because I can imagine some
situations where that might not be the case.
And our
Monsters won’t interact with our Hunters? Why would any sane person want to
sabotage their own Hunters? The point of the Monsters and the Monster deck is
to hinder Hunters. If our Monsters interacted with our Hunters – it would be to
hinder them. From a play perspective, this seems like a silly design flaw – so it
just wouldn’t happen.
It Doesn’t Work
While
the win condition works fine, the fundamental “play” of the game is flawed. The
question we’ve been asking ourselves for the past two weeks is “Is it too flawed?” So we did a variety of
things to try and work around this.
Our
first attempt was to add a second deck, like we had originally pitched. This
creates a level of complexity that most of us didn’t really care for. Games
with two decks can work (look at Legend of the Five Rings) but they
immediately add a sense of complexity to casual players, and can create some
tournament issues with competitive folk.
The
second deck was compromised of the Equipment and stuff for your Hunters and
different Strategies they would use to take down the Monsters. Instead of
having a hand for this deck, you would just flip over and activate the top card
of the new deck every turn. While this helped a little, it seemed too
automated. Without having a separate hand, it was a race with hurdles – still
not providing the level of interaction we needed.
We also
throw around the idea of mixing the Monsters and Hunters together. Instead of
approaching the world in a Supernatural
sort of way, we would approach it in a World
of Darkness sort of way. While this eliminated our interaction problem it
created two new problems; the first, and most important, was that it eliminated
our whole ‘resource management’ system that we had established. If Hunters are
now just a different kind of Monster then you don’t start with them in play –
which means that you don’t have your opponents’ Hunters point value to play off
of. The second new issue is the win-condition. If we’re not playing Hunters vs.
Monsters any more, and you can even choose not to play Hunters, then you can’t
have players trying to kill Hunters to win.
On top
of those two issues it eliminated the original concept we were aiming for. And
while that concept might go through small changes here and there this becomes
less of Hunters against Monsters and more of just a Monster Free-For-All. Which
might not be bad – but it wasn’t what we were looking for.
Now What?
While
this marks the end of the first month of the blog, our team has been working on
this Paranormal game for almost three months. After sharing our concerns with
others, we decided to cut our losses and start again. One of the things about
being a designer is knowing when to call it quits. We tried several fixes and
dedicated almost a whole month to looking these flaws in the eye before
starting on something else.
Join me
next week, when I explain why we decided to pick another game and where it came from.
