Two Roads Diverged...

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.

Rules of the Road

            Now that we’ve settled on what kind of universe we’re going to be in – Paranormal – we have to decide a few other things. First, and most important we need to find a clear and decisive goal. What are our players playing towards? How do you win? How do you lose? The second thing we need to talk about are concepts – how does the game work? How do we get from start to finish? And last, we’ll talk about resource management and card advantage and how we want to approach these two concepts; and what they are.

Brave New Worlds

            The setting of any game is possibly the most important factor. The setting can define your atmosphere, how your mechanics interact, who your characters are and how many people are attracted to your game.

            This article is going to talk about what universe – and therefore the setting – that we’re going to use in our game. We’re going to talk about what works and what doesn’t. Then we’re going to talk about what we want to see, what the setting is, who the characters are and how that setting translates to different mechanics and functions in the game.

The Warm Welcome

                Recently, I’ve been on a kick to design a card game. And not just any card game – but the perfect card game. In order to do that, I’ve been looking at different card games, board games and minis games and see what works and what doesn’t. By sitting down and analyzing each of these different games (and each section individually) I’ve come across some pretty interesting things.

                So, this blog is going to cover the creation of a card game. Sitting down at the table, from scratch, the game has one requirement: the game must appeal to a casual crowd while also catering to a competitive scene. This is one of the hardest things to accomplish in game design, especially since both parties want pretty different things.

                Before I dive anymore into the above division I’d like to define both terms. The “casual crowd” are people who often sit at home. They don’t care about tournament rules, they rarely take notice of errata and the amount of work they put into the game outside of playing it is limited. Casual players focus on the amount of “fun” in the game, they want to big plays, have silly combos and laugh their heads off at interactions they didn’t notice before. Casual players fill the bulk of most card game players. The competitive scene is much more socially aware. Competitive players often spend their time on websites, blogs or forums made available to them by either the publisher, developer or other rabid fans.

                They want two different things. One of the more common of my analogies in this blog is going to be to Magic: The Gathering and to Fantasy Flight Games’ various Living Card Games. These two live on two totally separate planes, but both serve a purpose. Magic is the longest running trading card game that still gets played regularly, and it shows no signs of stopping. The Wizards of the Coast published game just celebrated its 20^th anniversary. The game now has over 13,000 published cards and in June it broke a record by having almost 4500 people attend Grand Prix Las Vegas in June of this year. Magic, as you can see, is incredibly popular and has a massive competitive scene. The Living Card Game is a system (a series of games, really) that change the way that card games like this are approached and handled. Every time a product is released for an LCG, it is released in a package with every card in that publication.

                It’s pretty easy to see, then, why the Living Card Game appeals to casual players. When talking about casual games in particular I’ll be referencing Fantasy Flight’s Lord of the Rings LCG. The reason this is because, beyond the marketing and publishing being more casual friendly, it is not a competitive game. In Lord of the Rings you (and your friends if you want) play against the game. Lord of the Rings can be played solo, and when you do play with your friends you work as a time to beat a particular scenario or enemy.

                Now that we know what the game needs I’m going to tell you a little bit about myself, and then jump into what design involves.

                My name is Liam Sobel and I attend Full Sail University – I’m a Game Design major. My brother introduced me to Magic when I was in Junior High. Though I never owned my own Magic cards then, I got really deep into Pokemon with my classmates. In High School I picked up Magic on my own, and several friends of mine dabbled in Yu Gi Oh!, and I played with them. I tried out Duel Masters when it premiered over here. That’s around the time my friends and I wanted to start branching out – we started playing Dungeons and Dragons and over the next few years we picked up and tested several other games to broaden our horizons.

                Eventually we went back to Magic. We played for years in our early years of college. We kept up with it online, went to some events up to six hours away. After a while, we decided to try branching out again, and that’s when we came across the Living Card Game. We picked up Lord of the Rings and instantly fell in love. We’ve played almost all of the Living Card Games now (except Warhammer and Android).

                So, we’ve played a lot of games. But that’s not enough. I entered the Game Design program almost a year ago, and since then have been subject to many of the tools and concepts that designers use. This will be the blog chronicling an amateur designer trying to make a card game that is playable, fun and even so damn good that there are tournaments for it.

                What Is Design?

Image property of
Wizards of the Coast.

                On paper, design is the creative and imaginative process behind making something. There are designers for everything from clothes to video games. Whenever Bruce Wayne decided to become Batman, he designed the Batsuit. Chances are he sat down and sketched out images of what he wanted to suit to look like, went through the materials available to him and put little notations about what each piece of the suit was made of and what function it did.

                That’s a designers job. In games, designers write rules and create whole cards. A lot of that comes from years of experience with design, playing or whatever property they’re working with. If the property is unique to the game then they might use cards and mechanics to personify the setting, or they might use the setting to create the cards. More on this later.

                Whenever cards are designed, they are proto-played. In bigger companies this happens with two different teams to ensure quality. This development team prints out these cards, makes decks, plays, makes different decks, plays, mixes them in with existing cards, plays, makes another deck, etc. A good development team does this with every card that is published to ensure both consistent power levels, flavor and that nothing breaks the game.

                The development team writes down any problems they see (this doesn’t work how you intended, costs too much, too over powered, etc.) and then gives it back to the design team to fix. Once each card from a set has the stamp of approval from both teams the set is given another walk through from development. Companies often hold their own tournaments for employees using the future cards, Magic is notorious for having what they call “Future Future League” which is what their tournament scene will look in the next year or two.

Image property of
Fantasy Flight Games.

                How Do You Start Design?

                You can tackle design one of two ways. The first is called “top down” design. I first heard this term from Mark Rosewater, who is the lead Designer for Magic right now. Top down design is also called “flavor design”. Top down design begins with a concept or an idea within the universe you’re designing. Imagine designing a science-fiction card game, one of the things you might want to do is make a card about species communicating with one another, which might be hard to do.

                So you start with that idea and you say “How do they communicate with each other?” Based on that idea you make what the card does. Top-down is an essential part of casual play and is an essential part of marketing. You might have a great game, but without knowing anything about what you’re doing or where you’re playing it can get kind of dull.

Image property of
Fantasy Flight Games

                Top-down design allows you to create rich characters and settings that fill your world with interesting back stories and plots that make your world come to life. Having a full world like that means you’re going to have an easier time talking about your cards and bringing logic into the equation.

                The other major design avenue is, appropriately enough, called “bottom up” design, and it works exactly the opposite of top-down. With bottom up design you come up with a mechanic, or a function for a card, and you create it and give it flavor later.

                Most designers understand the necessity of having certain mechanics and cards in each set. For example, every set in Magic has creatures and ways to deal with creatures. Most sets also have ways to draw cards and ways to have you opponents discard cards. These are two major interactions that make the game fun to play.

Image property of
Fantasy Flight Games

                Whenever you begin designing an expansion, it’s not unlikely for a designer to block off a portion of their cards to say “These are going to be staples.” Or “These are going to be creatures.” It’s refreshing to have new designs, for sure, but many mechanics need several different avenues. Look at Lord of the Rings, even in the Core Set there are a handful of cards that do the same or similar things – but in different forms and at different costs.

                Repeating these necessary functions allows players to create decks that maintain a level of consistency. A deck that is considered aggressive (or “aggro”) has a lot of creatures. But on top of that he needs a way to play these creatures, or perhaps to protect his investments.

                A good game doesn’t restrict to one or the other, though. Good games utilize both top-down and bottom-up design and finds places for both to be prominent. Finding where each design type belongs is the label of a great designer.

                What Is It That We’re Designing?

                The rest of this blog is going to be dedicated to finding and designing a great card game. Now that we’ve defined “design” and given the two approaches to design, I’ll be breaking down different mechanics and functions in card games in order to sort out how the game will look.

                So, like any good creation we need to break this down a bit further. Above, I outlined one of the needs of this game. It needs to cater to both casual and competitive audiences. That’s my primary goal – to reach everyone. But there are some other needs and wants that I’m going to outline to give people a more clear idea of my aim in the coming weeks.

                This game also needs to be complex, yet elegant. I know that sounds kind of like an oxymoron but there are a lot of complex concepts that people just “get” nowadays. If you’re familiar with card and board games, you’re likely familiar with the concept of resources and spending to gain cards or abilities. There are also complex concepts like Magic’s “the stack” that, at first, seem daunting but in reality are fairly simple. These are just a few examples of what I’m aiming for.

                Interactivity is also pretty high on my priority list. Games that feel like you’re really effecting your opponent seem to generate the most fun because people often get together to play games for social reasons (apart from the fun). What I want to avoid are games that seem like you’re playing solitaire, and there happens to be another person playing next to you.

                Flavor. Highest on my want list is the integration of flavor into the game. I don’t want this to feel like some generic card game – I want players to understand what they’re doing and what role they play in the world. One of the things I’ve always felt was great was when I had friends playing Legend of the Five Rings. During their tournaments, the victor would determine the outcome of a particular storyline - which would slightly alter the atmosphere and setting for the following year’s releases. That level of immersion is my goal.

                Each of these functions and mechanics will be looked at in depth, and some of them might even have to come out over the course of two or three weeks. This blog will go live every Saturday. Pre-production will last for about six weeks, and we’ll wrap that up with the entry that goes live on October 26^th. During that period we will pick a universe, design the rules, design combat and look at different “types” of cards and how they interact with one another. After that, we’re going to dive into actual production where we begin designing the first “core” set. We’ll develop different card types, look at mechanics and even create individual cards. This section should last for another eight weeks or so and conclude around the time of the entry on December 21^st.

                Then comes the fun part. Around that time I will be looking for play testers. Several people on campus have already agreed to help, and I will be taking the game to two or three of my local game shops to play in earnest. But, I will also be looking for other people that I can send a PDF of the cards to and have them playtest it with their friends.

                Next week, we’ll be looking at the universe that we’ll be designing in. This will set up the future flavor, setting and characters that are involved with our game. I’ll talk about the merits of creating a new IP and using an existing one.