IDLEcon 2: Clockwise Boogaloo

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.

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.

Who delivered all the pies?

Following on from the "IDLEcon" game jam at the end of last year, Bez (of Yogi and Wibbell++ fame) organised another game jam, this time spread over a week, with more participants and a load of "live jamming" with various designers appearing on her Twitch stream to take part during that time.

If you are not familiar with game jams, they are events where game designers have a limited amount of time to create some sort of a game, typically with a set of constraints or requirements announced at the start of the period. I gather these are semi-regular occurrences in the videogame world, but seem to be becoming more popular in the tabletop sphere as well, especially with recent online collaboration capabilities getting so much more advanced and a lot of game designers being isolated due to Covid-19 measures.

The requirements this time were essentially for a game that could be played on a Twitch stream and include players interacting through the stream's chat channel, with regular players needing nothing more customised than a printed sheet (though it was OK for the stream host to need custom components) and games had to, at least, be suitable for 3 to 7 players. There was also a list of optional challenges that could be used to inspire designs, including pies, something nautical, dinosaurs, miming, and so on. 

The first board image Rory shared with me for discussion.
If we were working in the same room, this would probably
have been scribbled on a bit of paper, but this is so much nicer.

Collaboration in this game jam was entirely optional, but it is a major attraction for me, and I was able to team up with Rory Muldoon, probably best known at the moment as the designer, artist and graphic designer of Skora, a recent release from Inside The Box. I had been getting to know Rory a little bit through Twitch stream chats, Twitter, and IDLEcon, and we were both keen to do something together, so had a chat over Discord to see what we could come up with.

We quickly realised that neither of us would be able to put in a vast amount of work on creating a game over the week due to other life commitments, so we would work on something with modest scope. From the prompts, we fixated on pies and nautical elements, and were soon talking about having a ship delivering pies to a chain of islands. This then developed into the idea of players voting for the course of a shared ship, and then making pies and selling them according to the demands of islanders along the way, recording decisions on a piece of paper while the voyage of the ship is tracked on a central board that everyone can see.

Over the next week we put bits of work in on the project as we were able, and had a couple of chats over Discord to play the work-in-progress. I put together a project on Screentop.gg to provide a board and a boat token which could then either be screen shared, or players could visit Screentop to watch the game directly. Rory designed the board using his magical skills and software, while I used a Google document to create the playsheet and written rules. 

Over the week the main change that was brought in was to introduce special abilities that you could buy when the result of the vote went against your choice, meaning that there are some additional choices to be made, and planning your preferred route and voting strategy started getting a little more interestiing.

Eventually, on the Saturday, we were able to play our newly minted game live on Bez's stream, with me joining on camera and Rory taking part from the chat. It went well, I think, but it turns out that managing voting in this sort of situation can be tricky. Still, we were very happy with how things went.

Playing the Nautical Pie Delivery Co. Ltd. game on
Bez's stream with Rory playing from the chat.

As a little bonus, I took part in an online board game session with some old friends that evening, and they agreed to play. The game didn't fall apart and seemed to provide a reasonable experience for seven of us on a Zoom call, though again the voting was a bit awkward. We could set up an online tool to allow for votes to be tallied, but I think that is a minor issue. 

I'm not sure what we will do with this game next. It works well for something that was quickly thrown together and not yet extensively tested, but obviously there are issues, largely related to numbers, to be looked at. I think the game could work well around a table, collecting and exchanging tokens rather than writing things down, or just sticking with the something-and-write system could go well too. I think we will be discussing this again and seeing what we fancy doing before too much longer. It was certainly fun to work on so far.

An Idle Village

One last post for the year...

Over the last couple of months I have been an occasional visitor to the Twitch stream run by Michael Fox of Hub Games, probably best known as one of the designers of Holding On: the Troubled Life of Billy Kerr. His stream is a mixture of live working on board game designs and playing stuff, with some really nice chat and banter alongside. He's a very warm and inclusive host, and has some very interesting thoughts and insights about game design.

Anyway, a few weeks ago he announced that he was planning an event in the week after Christmas, which was intended to be a game design jam and online community gathering to support anyone who just wanted some company and a distraction with fellow board gamers - and mostly designers. I cleared some time with the family and joined in.

Breathe in... Breathe out... Welcome to IDLEcon

The format was centred around a Discord server and Michael's stream. He would give everyone a challenge, then we would have about 24 hours to produce something playable, and everyone would then gather around the stream to play or watch the products of everyone's labours.

The challenge was three points...

1. Create a "something"-and-write game.

2. Include a second component in the game - something that  we could assume is easily available to anyone likely to play the game.

3. Must be playable solo, and also suitable for playing on the stream.

So basically, we were looking for a game where some component or set of components could be used to create input for player choices, and the players could write the results of their choices on some medium, and it shouldn't be necessary for everyone to be in the same location.

I ended up in the event's Discord chatting with Chris O'Regan, and we decided to work on something together, and after a bit of discussion we got working on a village building game (not the most original theme, but originality isn't always necessary) based on making use of cards from a regular deck of playing cards. 

The style of game was conducive to quick, online collaboration. We had a voice conversation over Discord, while tinkering about drawing things in a Google Drawings file where we could edit simultaneously. It was like using a whiteboard initially to sketch things out, but then we were able to refine this into a usable playsheet (which Chris then was able to add some shinier elements to in Photoshop).

My first ever play of The Village on the River,
on the first iteration of the playsheet.

While all this was happening, Michael himself was running a screen in which he was working on his own game to the same specification as the rest of us. I popped in there a few times for a bit to exchange a bit of banter. It was also lovely that people who were not actually working on games themselves were popping in to chat and support, both on the stream and the Discord. Also some other people were even streaming some parts of their work via Discord. It all made for a really enjoyable space to hang out with a heap of other very lovely designer people.

I managed to get a couple of tests of the game in the evening, including with another designer in the jam, whose really interesting game I also played. Based on that and a bit more play and discussion with Chris the next morning, we did a bit more revision and posted our files on the Discord channel set aside for the purpose, with several variant playsheets (all functionally the same, but cosmetically different).

The second afternoon of the event basically consisted of Michael leading a play of most of the games on his stream (this expanded onto the next day to cover the games that didn't fit in), with him doing the generation of random inputs as appropriate, so the rest of us could play along. I played along with a few, and played another on my own later.

Michael builds Upper Idleton live on stream while 
others of us play along.

The creativity and variety of games shown was really impressive, using dice and cards in various configurations, and also one memorable game using flipping through a book to generate some random inputs. Every game had something interesting and admirable about it, and I think they all stand a chance of becoming really solid with some more work on them. I think I was most taken by the clever dice usage and tricky decisions of the game about filming and releasing a science fiction TV series, and the elegant simplicity of the one about sailing around islands looking for treasure, but there was so much great stuff.

In the end we got some really positive feedback and a few helpful suggestions for our game, so we're delighted with what we achieved in the time. In the past I have done a number of 24 hour game design challenges, but they differed from this largely in that those challenges were to be done individually and that you could have some time to think about the "restriction" beforehand.  But the additional big difference was that this jam resulted in (almost) all of the games being played by multiple people right away, and feedback being given. That is a golden opportunity right there.

Chris and I have decided that we will do some more work on our game and see where we can take it. We'll probably switch to a custom card deck to make the game easier to understand, and I'm sure there will be tweaks to the buildings that can be constructed and so on. But that is all something for the coming weeks and months.

If you would like a look at the game, here is the set of rules we submitted and here is one of the playsheet variants.

In the meantime, it is New Year's Eve, so I'll sign off by saying that I hope that whatever sort of year 2020 was for you, 2021 is brighter and more positive for you. I know I am really hoping to see more people in person, as I am really missing all that. But big thanks are due to Michael for helping some of us to finish the year on a high.

Peace.