Back in the dark days of December, the lovely Michael Fox, game designer, Twitch streamer and generally Good Guy, hosted a two day game jam called IDLEcon, during which time a bunch of us created something-and-write games and then played them live with participation of the audience of his stream. I collaborated with Chris O'Regan to make a game we called The Village on the River, which we have continued to work on since.
Back in the not-so-dark days of late June, Michael hosted a follow-up event, IDLEcon 2.
This time the format was different. While the original took place in the "dead time" between Christmas and new year, with most of us in some form of a lockdown, the second run acknowledged that most of us had work or other commitments, so the idea was to spend one weekend creating games, and the next weekend playing them; the intervening time allowed for more development or design, or just getting on with your life. The challenge this time was to make a game that could be played on-stream, with Michael, as host, playing with or against the people in the chat.
Once again, the dual focus of the event was Michael's Twitch stream and his Discord server, where folk could chat, discuss ideas, team up, and so on. I put a half-formed idea of a game into a channel and ended up talking with Bez (she of Yogi fame, as well as much else), throwing together a very rough virtual prototype (actually using a shared Google Drawing to work as board and counters) and spending the afternoon experimenting, testing and iterating until we felt we had something that was decent enough fun but needed "proper" playtesting. I didn't have much available time over the following week, so we pretty much left it there, other than making sure that there was a usable virtual prototype on Screentop.gg and the rules were written up.
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| Michael attempts to avoid the robots on stream. |
The basics of the game are that one player (intended to be the host of the stream) has the task of moving their character from one corner of a gridded board to the opposite corner. This is complicated by the five robots which move around pre-set routes, the distance each of them moves being tied to the results of a poll that is run for viewers to vote on. We have some general ideas about how this could translate to a tabletop version, and may work on that later, but for now it was just a game aimed at the specific challenge of the day.
The following weekend was set aside for playing the games on stream. I, however, was camping in a field, half way across the country so my daughter could take part in a folk music related activity, so couldn't really take part properly. I did get good enough mobile signal to be able to watch a bit of the stream live, and then caught up on the rest using Twitch's video-on-demand facility a couple of days later, though Bez was able to take part on the day.
So the game actually worked. There were a good few people taking part in the chat submitting their votes, so the polls actually looked like they had meaningful results, and there were points when the voters were trying to make sure that certain results occurred. It got interesting when Michael observed that the rules did not prohibit him from taking part in the votes, which mean that in some circumstances, he was able to force, or prevent, certain results.
It turns out that the way polls are implemented in Twitch, the tallies are shown while voting is taking place, which made it both easier for the chatters to know what was going on, and for Michael to throw his spanner into the works. This, combined with the predictability of the robot movements made things a little less than ideal, particularly in the second play of the game -- though the fact that everyone elected to play a second time was hugely gratifying in itself. There was a lot of discussion though about ways to introduce more chaos and unpredictability, as well as generally strengthening the game, so I think this went really well for a first "proper" play.
We've not returned to this design in the weeks since, but I think it could be interesting to have another look at it some time and see what we can make of it. Michael suggested that it could be good as a mass-play convention game, with people as playing pieces and some form of crowd voting, and that sounds like it could be great if we found the right people to partner with to make it happen. My thoughts are that it could be a one-versus-many tabletop game, with the "many" having cards with varying numbers of votes or moves for multiple robots, and everyone selects what they will play at the same time, hoping that they can coordinate without discussing the actual cards they have in hand.
Anyway, this was another enjoyable exercise, both from the angle of working with another game designer (a friend for years, but whom I had never created anything with) and of working with interesting restrictions and requirements. It's entirely possible that we'll never be able to make a commercial product out of this, but the creation can often be worthwhile on its own.
