Alone in the Dungeon

I've been tinkering around with yet another project, and one that is very different from others that I have worked on in recent years, and is one that I don't expect to ever pitch to a publisher, or even try to monetise. This is just something to play with and use as a learning experience. 

But I'll build in to that... First a little background...

As a teenager I played quite a lot of roleplaying games; mostly Middle-earth Role Playing, D&D, or AD&D (yes, at that time, Dungeons and Dragons and Advanced Dungeons and Dragons were separate products), but a few others here and there, including homebrews. One of the things that really interested me at that time was a few pages in the AD&D (1st edition) Dungeon Masters Guide: the first few appendices were for generating random dungeons, wilderness areas, monster encounters, etc., enabling you to play a D&D-based adventure game as a solo. It was kinda like a pencil-and-paper "Roguelike" game, and it was a fun thing to do when not playing "properly". 

There were also choose-your-own-adventure style books, like the Fighting Fantasy line, for your solo adventuring needs, if that fit your requirements.

Anyway, time passed and my engagement with roleplaying games varied. I've relatively recently been catching up a bit with developments (and playing a little), and one of the things that has been growing in popularity is "journaling RPGs". Whereas my old solo AD&D games involved drawing a map and then rolling dice for fights against monsters, and then rolling for loot acquired, this newer style is more about randomly generating events and writing prompts, which allow you to write a story about your character's exploits and develop their life through a series of journal entries. This was absolutely possible to do with the AD&D rules, but it didn't occur to me at the time, and the system was way more complicated that is necessary to provide the appropriate prompts.

A few solo dungeon delves and journaling RPGs: Notequest, 
Zimo's Getting Up, Apothecaria, 2D6 Dungeon, and Four Against Darkness

I was spurred into looking into this sort of gaming partly by my wife discovering them over the last couple of years or so, and then a bit more by a friend creating one about being a graffiti artist earlier this year, and as a result I developed an urge to try making a dungeon crawl game that leans into the journaling RPG form a bit more. 

I've done a little looking around for comparable games, and posted about the idea on Mastodon (my main is on tabletop.social, if you want to come and say hello) and got a few suggestions for things to look at too. Most of the clearly dungeon crawl games that I have seen (e.g. Notequest and Four Against Darkness) are effectively smoother versions of the solo AD&D: draw maps, battle monsters, acquire loot. There are some others (of those I have seen, Colostle is probably closest) that do something dungeon-crawl-adjacent, while being a proper journaling game. I've seen a few other games that are more or less adjacent to what I want to do, but nothing quite in the same zone - not that that would be a problem anyway. My searching hasn't been exhaustive though, so if you know of something that sounds a bit similar, please do let me know in the comments (or elsewhere).

So what am I planning and what have I done so far?

This is very much a background/side project for me to tinker with when I have any inspiration, and it is currently a document with some section headings and I am starting to fill in text and tables for randomly generating stuff. I've not got enough to actually play with yet, but there are odd bits and pieces that I'll start connecting up soon.

I'm not trying to come up with a flexible game system or a full campaign yet, instead creating a single adventure to play through, albeit one with some variation in how it can play out. The idea is that you, the player, are the companion and chronicler of a great protagonist or hero (think Watson to Holmes, or Ukko to Sláine), and you arrive together in a village and get sent to a nearby dungeon to deal with the evil wizard. You journey to the dungeon, work your way through a few levels of challenges, and eventually confront the wizard to, hopefully, save the day. All this time, you are creating a map to show the path of your adventure, and keeping a journal to record the daring deeds done in the dungeon. If the hero dies, maybe you escape to recount the tale; if you die, maybe the hero finishes the journal on your behalf.

I was originally planning to have a relatively lightweight combat/encounter system that would allow for some detail in how things work out, but on reflection I have decided to abstract out a load more, so that effectively there is a single die roll, applied to the situation, after which the hero and companion can apply special abilities to improve the result. This should effectively result in an outcome that could either simply be written down (if you aren't wanting to do creative writing), or could be used as a writing prompt. So, an example outcome could be: "3 orcs attack in the passageway. The hero uses her great axe to fight them but it looks like she will be seriously injured and have to retreat. The companion uses his stealth to help, and the hero uses her acrobatics skills. As a result, the orcs are slain and the hero only takes a minor wound." It's not exactly Shakespeare, but it's a basis to build a journal entry around, detailing how those skills are used to affect the outcome.

Remember how I said that I'm planning some variation in how the game plays out? One aspect of this is that you record certain events and encounters in an area of your character sheet, and some of these things affect the likelihood of other things happening. So, for instance, if you start encountering undead creatures, that increases the chances of meeting more undead, and makes it more likely that the wizard at the end is a necromancer or some sort of undead spellcaster. Again, this isn't crazy clever stuff, but it would be nice if things link together in some sort of a thematic way as it all plays out.

There will be a load of tables to roll dice against. This is a thing I used to love making, so we'll see if I still have the chops to do this sort of thing. In the meantime, I figure that at least writing a bit of this stuff down should solidify some of it in my head. 

Challenge to self: make some more progress and make another post on the subject next month.

Backs to Fronts

I have a prototype production pipeline (inadvertent but pleasing - to me - alliteration there) that I use for a lot of projects, that involves data in a Google sheet, pulled in to a nanDECK script which sets up cards or tiles, and that script then outputs a PNG file with a grid of card images that I can import into Screentop for a digital prototype, as well as a PDF that I can print out for physical components. 

Some of the games I make have multiple decks (in this context I'm meaning groups of cards with a common back), which I generally build with the same script, and the sizes of those decks can change from time to time. In the case of Sympolis (formerly the City State Co-op Game), there is currently a set of eight starter cards, and two other decks with 20-odd cards each, the relative sizes of these two decks varying as I tweak the card sets.

When making the physical versions of the cards, I just put the cards into colour-backed sleeves according to which deck they are meant to be in. My data spreadsheet has a column in it for which deck a card belongs in and I use that information to adjust the front (e.g. using a coloured border or shaded background) to make it easy to spot how to divide the cards. 

In the case of my virtual prototypes on Screentop, I need to tweak a field for each card to indicate which of a set of possible card backs is required. I can do bulk updates, so this task isn't too onerous, but it is still a little fiddly and can lead to mistakes.

After doing this for, like, a couple of years, it occurred to me that I could get nanDECK to do this fiddly bit for me.

The way nanDECK generates cards is, if left to its own devices, it just reads through the data file and generates that many cards, which seems logical to me. If, however, you reference a card in the script beyond that "natural" range of cards, it loops back of the data. So, for instance, if you have data for 10 cards, but you ask nanDECK to output an image file of 20, the system will loop through the data twice.

With that in mind, and the fact that I have been working with sheets of 55 cards (generally ignoring the last slot in order to have a convenient 54 cards for printing, which is 6 sheets of 9), I had a plan. 

Bits of nanDECK code.
The first bit defines stuff that is useful later.
The second bit creates card backs and creates image files.

I defined two ranges, cards 1 to 55, and cards 56 to 110. Then for cards in the first range I defined layouts for the card faces, and for cards in the second range we have a distinctive coloured background and a character printed in the middle to reinforce the information, based on the contents of the "[Deck]" variable, which comes from a column in the spreadsheet. It's not a sexy, final version, but it is neat and clear enough for prototype usage. Then I used DISPLAY directives in my script to output the two files.

Not good enough resolution for you to really see what's going on,
but hopefully you'll get the gist

Then, all that I needed to do was upload the two image files to Screentop as assets and tell the card components to use the same index number for front and back and take their image from the correct asset. As long as I always update the two assets at the same time, the card fronts and backs will always stay in sync.

Of course, when all that is uploaded I still need to sort the cards into the correct files, but that's straightforward enough, especially as I have some "deck holder" containers to help with stuff like that - but that is another story.

Cities Together at the Expo

So that was UK Games Expo 2023, and another great weekend it was. I worked at the Playtest Zone for most of my time there (at least during the days, anyway), met fine people new and old (in relationship terms, at least!), talked a lot, playtested my City State Co-op Game, ate mostly overpriced burgers and pasties, bought a bit of stuff, and played very few games. I'll talk about my playtest first and then move on to some more about other things, though still mostly about the playtesting.

While I was spending most of my time helping other folk at the Playtest Zone, I also had a 90 minute slot booked for testing one of my own games. As it turned out I didn't need to wait for players as I had been talking to a few people about the game through the day, and a couple of them turned up specifically to play, each bringingong a friend to make up a perfect table of four.

As an aside, my opening line when asked about the game was, "It's a cooperative game where you have to attack each other", which is probably the strongest hook I have ever had for a prototype, as it always resulted in some sort of a "tell me more" response. Well worth remembering.

A few turns into the game, showing cities developing very differently.

I wasn't sure about how long the game would run, but guessed about 45 minutes, and it actually came in at almost exactly 50 minutes, which was pretty good, and the players commented that it didn't feel that long, which is definitely a very good sign. I think I took over 10 minutes to teach the game though, which I feel was probably a bit long. I think this was partly because I am not yet used to explaining the game, but may also be a sign that the game is a bit fiddly.

The dynamic was interesting. One of the players quickly took to being a sort of MC, stepping through the turn order and starting discussion. This could have turned into an "alpha player" problem (where one player effectively dominates a cooperative game), but there was definitely discussion with input from all players, and when we talked about this afterwards, nobody seemed to feel that they were being railroaded or anything. I think that this game could easily suffer from having a dominant player, so I will need to consider whether I will address this or not.

My biggest problem with this game is now, I think, trying to get a meaningfully "difficulty arc", as you might call it. In this play through, the players had a fairly gentle start, then in the mid-game they felt that they were under serious pressure, before the last round or so eased off and allowed them to cruise home. From my position of just observing, and knowing what was likely to happen, I could see that the mid-game pressure was illusory, but it was amazing to watch (they felt that they were about to be punished for earlier decisions), and something I would really like to see happening in the game. Basically, what I would like to see is a tense ending, with a few points of tension, with partial release, through the rest of the game. 

We had a good discussion after the game, and I think that one of the biggest points to address is that it turned out to be way too easy to defend against each others' attacks, and the most obvious fix for that is to greatly limit - or maybe even remove - the supply of buildable defences. Without the city wall cards, there would be a lot more pressure and more difficult decisions to make. I might try that on its own (with tweaks to rebalance the decks to compensate) and see how that goes. There was also a turn-by-turn reveal of cards from an additional "wrath deck", which kinda worked, but was an extra thing that needed to remember an additional (simple) action each round, which was easy to forget, and I have a couple of thoughts about how to address this, though I may leave that until later.

After playing, the players asked for a reminder of what the game is called. I told them my working title, which of course is not exactly evocative of its theme. One of the players I had is actually a Greek speaker, and as the setting of the game is currently based on a mythical view of classical Greece, she had a suggestion for a title that we all liked.

As a result, the City State Co-op Game now has the new working title of "Sympolis", which apparently can translate as "cities together", which seems a great option. Thank you so much, Vilma!

Anyway, that was part of my Saturday afternoon; there was a lot more to the weekend.

I arrived on Thursday afternoon to help with the setup of the Playtest Zone. This is actually pretty light work, the hardest bit being deciding how to lay out the tables and chairs, and the rest being largely putting the trademark red cloths on the tables and sorting out the various bits of stationery we have. Other than that it's a good opportunity to say hello to a load of people - although many of them are busy setting up their own stands.

The rest of the days were spent working, mostly welcoming designers and players and trying to put them together, alongside a core team (five of us in total) plus a small army of volunteers turning up to do shorter shifts, and an extra who came to help whenever he had spare time. There were a few quiet spells (largely Sunday lunchtime, but a few other periods too) where we had to work to bring in potential players, but a lot of the time we were finding people just coming up and asking to play something, and far too often there was no space at that point. It's a shame when we can't seat people who are keen to playtest, but I guess it's a good problem to have.

Its-a me, standing by the Playtest Zone.

The way things work is that most of the tables are booked in advance for a period of either 3 hours or 90 minutes, but there are a few tables available to be booked on the day for designers who haven't been able to sort things out beforehand. It turned out that demand for tables greatly outstripped availability. A note for anyone who is considering joining us for playtesting at future events: seriously, book in advance if you can.

On the Friday evening was the designer-publisher networking event. This is an event that typically involves having a drink or two with fellow designers (my experience is minimum publisher attendance) and listening to a couple of talks, generally one from the event sponsor (Panda Game Manufacturing this year) and one from some other industry insider (past years have included luminaries like Alex Yeager and James Wallis). This year it was straight to the drinks and no talks. There was a point when someone was speaking over the PA, but the noise of conversation was so loud that most people didn't even seem to notice, let alone hear what was being said.

Other than that, my evenings were largely catching up with people and very little actual game playing. I can play games at other events, I guess. I managed to spend my breaks looking around the trade halls, and even managed to get out to watch the vikings telling a story, complete with illustrative acting, throwing of water at each other, and bad jokes.

For all the lack of game playing, and the fact that I always leave with aching feet and a befuddled brain, UK Games Expo is one of the big highlights of my year. Attendance at this year's event comfortably surpassed the biggest pre-Covid year (and Saturday seemed ridiculously busy), and I heard really happy noises from a lot of small traders. I'm already looking forward to the next one.