Don't Cross the Streams

 Just a very quick post to say, in case you are interested, that tomorrow (Friday 23rd) I will be joining Alan Paull of Surprised Stare Games (with whom I am working on a couple of projects) at 11am (BST) for a discussion on Twitch.  The title is officially "Ideas Into Mechanisms", and we'll basically be talking about just that, how we implement an idea or theme in a playable way, with reference largely to the two games we are working on together: Snails and Grails, and the Castle War.

SSG on Twitch

So, if you are free, it would be great if you would come along and say hello in the chat and see if I can sound slightly interesting or informed.

Link to Surprised Stare on Twitch.

One Day at a Time

I know a lot of people have had it way worse.

I know it isn't a competition.

I also know that I am struggling, and have been for some time.

It is over six months since I have been to the office where I do my day job, and since then, said day job (which I am able to continue to do reasonable effectively from home), game design work, game playing and playtesting, and get-togethers with friends have almost entirely taken place in the same little room.  I am fortunate that we have a house with a garden and other rooms to sit and do stuff in, but the reality is that most of my waking hours are spent doing things in this room, and almost all of that involves looking at a computer screen.

My wonderful wife made this badger for me.
It makes me smile.

This is an environment that I was pretty positive about at first, with the challenge of creating games that could be tested remotely, and learning about technologies like Tabletopia and Tabletop Simulator was interesting and opened up more opportunities, but the longer we have gone, the more I realise that I really rely on the energy of other people sitting around the table and the physicality of the game, whether playing a published game for fun or working on a new design. 

Most days, by the time I finish work I often have little energy and motivation to do anything more, particularly without the payoff of seeing other people moving components on a table. As a result, my productivity in the last few months has been shocking. 

It's not all down though. A few weeks ago I was able to meet a game designer friend face-to-face for a few hours and as a result I have been managing to get some work done on developing (or butchering) one of his projects to see what happens if we remove a couple of the play elements in an attempt to streamline it. Even this has been moving very slowly, but it is at least something.

I have also been reading a bit more than previously, mostly books about medieval history, so there may be some game inspiration on its way.

This post doesn't really have a point. I don't have any epiphany I can pass on, or advice I can give, it's just me feeling a bit sorry for myself. 

I will say, however, that whoever and wherever you are, I hope that you and your loved ones find a way through the current troubles, however they are affecting you. If you want a chat and have my contact details, please feel free to use them; otherwise, look me up on Twitter (@harperrob).

August catch-up

 I've been letting the blogging slide quite a lot recently but, although I've not been working at high speed on anything, I have been making progress on a number of projects over the last month or so, so here is a quick summary of what has been going on.

Scurvy Crew

There isn't a lot I can say about this right now, as this is being turned from my pirate card game into a product with a load of cool stuff going on in it, but most of that is still not finalised. There are now a couple more, very talented, people involved in the development team (and another incoming), and there are some elements being worked on that I am very excited about. Hopefully in the coming months I'll be able to start sharing some of the details.

Snails and Grails

This collaboration with Alan Paull and Dave Mortimer is chugging along very nicely. We've mostly been playtesting it online, but Dave was able to get a physical prototype to the table with some "new blood" players who were pretty much in the target audience, and it's looking like we're really getting somewhere.

The Castle War

This has been chugging along too, gaining somewhat in complexity but also, I think, in depth. The interface (wordings, iconography, layouts) is causing some trouble though, so I need to spend some time on cleaning that up.

The Castle War mid-game. This play was about the tensest I have had yet.

The Vinyl Age

This is actually a game created by Phil Tootill, which we played together the other day (my first face-to-face playtest with someone not in my family for months), and it's pretty damn good, but I have taken on the challenge to experiment with simplifying the game (we felt it either needs to be a bit lighter or a bit heavier than it is) and see what I can come up with. No guarantee I can improve on what is there, but we can at least try out some options and feed that into the game development.

Grab Bag Zoo

This is another collaboration, this time with Mike Harrison-Wood, and is unfortunately utterly unsuitable for online testing, relying as it does on tactility. We received some really useful feedback from a remote playtester, suggesting that we need to address issues of frustration that can ruin the game, particularly for younger players -- and this is so clearly a family/kids' game that we need to work on that. I think we had been too busy working on this providing a decent challenge for gamers that we had lost track of the heart of the game. We're moving in a slightly different direction now that is looking promising.

UK Games Expo

Finally, last weekend was the rearranged-date-turned-virtual-con for UK Games Expo, which was a bit of a weird experience. At the physical event I would normally spend a good chunk of my time volunteering at the playtest zone, some more running my own playtests, and a bit more having some meetings, with the rest of the time generally prowling and chatting to people I meet, with a little gaming in the evening. This time, I played one demo game and one early prototype (both via Tabletop Simulator), and spent most of the rest of the time watching panels and seminars, something I almost never get to do. I think the event as a whole felt a bit disjointed, with lots of jumping around between different technologies and Discord servers, but it did feel like an actual event with things to see and discover. And the food and beer were cheaper this way, with shorter queues!

Playable Puffins

So this is yet another game project. I'm not going to go into great detail about it as it's basically just a toy I'm playing with. Long story short, last year I drew (on paper) a picture every day, and I got really into drawing puffins, and it was mentioned that a game about puffins might be fun. This jumbled around in my head until, for some reason, I got the idea of puffins in hats stuck there. (I actually wrote about this almost exactly a year ago, as it happens.)  

Some months later I decided to learn how to use a digital paint package (Krita, seeing as you asked), and soon I ended up with a bunch of pictures of puffins wearing hats.

I don't know much about art but I know when it's got puffins in it.

Actually, that's a lie, or the "soon" bit is anyway. It took bloody ages. I have even more respect for jobbing illustrators than I had before.

Anyway, I did actually have the foresight to do the art in such a way that I could separate the hats from the puffins, made some cards (adding in some cats -- this time using stock cat icons as placeholders -- because the game also needed cats, natch), loaded them into Tabletopia along with some coins and stuff, then managed to gull some innocent bystanders into trying the game.

As expected the game wasn't good, but I got some useful feedback and have tried to tern things around a bit.

The mark 2 e-prototype, now with a First Player Puffin.

So far I've just tried this iteration on my own with three other mes across the table, and it's difficult to tell if it is an improvement over the precious one. At least the changes didn't feel too aukward. Hopefully I'll get some friends to give it a go soon and we'll see what shakes out.

A World and Some Roles

This is something that has been bouncing around my head for a number of weeks now and I've been trying to find a way of expressing it. The story goes back to reading "The Well-Played Game" by Bernard de Koven, a book that is mentioned in many texts on game design. It is more a book of philosophy than of game design, and explores the interactions and tensions between "playing" and "games".  Games, in this case, including board games but mostly focusing on social and playground games and their extension, sports.

One of the lines of thought in the book included that a "well-played game" is one where the participants all take part willingly and enthusiastically, and can leave the game if they no longer wish to continue, and may even be able to change the way they play. There are plenty of angles to this well-played game explored in the book, but this is an area that had my mind firing off. Could I make a board game where players could come and go if they wish, and which allowed them to change the way they played?

As an aside, most roleplaying games I know about can be played in this sort of way: the core is the developing character narrative and a gamesmaster and the rest of the group can work together to adapt the play however the group wishes. I am certain there is a lot already written about this sort of thing (the RPG community has spent a lot of time thinking about how games are played), but that's out of my area these days.

After some sleeping on this, I started thinking about a world, growing from nothing, with players building the world, populating it, and guiding its inhabitants as stuff happens.  One player could be creating a map by laying tiles, another could be building villages on the map, and another could be an adventurer exploring the map, and so on.  You would take a role, which would give you a simple set of actions that you can take, and a way that you score points. When you choose, you may discard the role, take a new one and now, instead of being a terraforming deity, you are now a dragon gathering gold for its lair.

I threw together some tiles in nanDECK, going for an arrangement of square tiles, each of which contains four triangles that are put next to other triangles to make squares arranged at 45° to the alignment of the tiles. I'm not sure why I did that, but it seemed fun at the time. After printing and cutting a few of these I decided that I would actually take the opportunity to get some practice in playing with Tabletopia, so shifted my efforts to a digital version that I might actually have a chance at playtesting during the ongoing lockdown.

Printed tiles. You get the general idea

One of the advantages of an online platform is that you can import all sorts of components and just experiment. I have at home a good supply of assorted game components, but for tiles, cards, and so on, there is a load of printing and cutting required, which I have got pretty efficient at, but is still something of a grind. Tabletopia has a decent library of standard components (not covering everything, but good enough for many purposes) that can just be dropped into a game project. Preparing tiles and cards for upload and managing them in the system is a bit of a pain, especially at first, but there are some big advantages. Like, for example, when I decided I wanted twice as many tiles, I could just click on the existing stack and duplicate it.

I fiddled about with my virtual prototype for a while, building up a few of the roles that players could take, putting the instructions for them onto oversized cards that I added to the prototype, meaning that pretty much all of the rules would be within the game itself: each player could just take a role card, read it, and start playing.

Eventually I got to the point where I enlisted a friend to try the game out and see how it held together when I was not playing all the parts.

Testing with another human was very revealing.

As is so often the case, the game didn't play particularly well. The general concept of the game seemed OK, but it was just too damn complicated for the light-and-breezy type of game I was hoping for.  One of the big issues was that there was too much variation between the different roles, and as a player you were more or less having to learn a new game each time you took a new role. And the way that you played a role for as long as you wished before changing just didn't sit right.

At the start of the design process for this game I was wondering if it should be competitive or cooperative in nature, and I went for the former, mostly because it is what I know best and cooperative games can be so much harder to create. After all, not only do you need to make the game mechanisms work properly, but you need something for the players to be working against, and getting that right is hard.

Anyway, at this stage I decided that what the game really wants to be is a series of puzzles, where what one player is trying to achieve can interact with the other players' actions. And with this in mind, cooperative play could be best.  A game of this sort of form could be played against some sort of a timer, so the roles would now have an objective (on completion, or if you decide to give up, you switch to a new role with a new objective) and the aim would be for the players between them to complete a certain number of objectives before time run out.

A literal timer is out of the question for this. Real-time pressure, while exciting in some contexts, just adds stress and I don't want this to be a stressful game.  What I actually decided to go for is to introduce dice. A bunch of (six-sided) dice get rolled, players each take one in turn to use for the movement of their avatar, until there is only one left, and that die gets placed in a "timer" display, and a new fistful of dice are rolled.  When either one of each number (1 to 6) has been accrued, or there is three of a single number, the game ends. This way the players are partly at the whim of fate, but also have some control over how they allow the game to progress.

So building the next iteration of the game was largely about this timing mechanism and the idea that there should be core rules for everyone to learn and the roles just give minor variations, which may accumulate as you move through the game, but at no point should require anyone to absorb a large raft of new options. Getting these changes into Tabletopia can involve a little faffing, but I'm not having to print and cut physical components, so there is something of a trade-off.

I then managed to get a playtest with a couple of friends, who got on pretty well with the general concept of the game and its overall flow, but had plenty to say about it as well. I was left with a feeling that this iteration was definitely an improvement and I liked the game in its cooperative mode. The next thing to do would be to extend the selection of roles and sequence them so that there is something of an arc to their progression. One suggestion was to have three phases of play: one being to build the world, the next to add complexity and cause trouble and strife, and the third to heroically put everything right. Players then have to get through a certain number of roles, or complete some of the "ending" roles before the timer runs out.

A few turns in, working with the first set of "world building" roles.

I would also like to have some more significance to how the timer operates, maybe having events triggering when certain sets of numbers are completed, but I can worry about that later, I think.

As an aside, I have also figured out the "magnetic board" option on Tabletopia, which allows you to have components neatly snapping into position when you drop them, and have a grid board that makes placing tiles much easier.  What I made isn't as big as the potential play area, but it'll do, and you can always add more tiles alongside.

A "magnetic" board can make everything so much smoother and cleaner.

Last up, I need to think of a decent working title for this game. I've been calling it variations of "Role World Thing", which doesn't really have any sort of ring to it. Suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Virtual Invasion

So, Invaded, my old nemesis, are you back to torture me once again?

As you may remember, a couple of years or so ago, a large amount of my game design life was spent working on a "reverse colonialism" game with the working title, Invaded. The conceit is that you are tribes in a comparatively peaceful land, and have been invaded by a powerful colonial army that wants to settle in your lands and take all your stuff. Do you try to resist, keep out of the way, collaborate, or what?

The game has changed a lot from its early days, and works reasonably well, but the experience can be pretty inconsistent, and the game takes longer than I would like to explain, but it has some interesting features, particularly the way that players compete with each other and jointly control the invading force as it pushes forwards.  Eventually I pretty much burned out on the game, and it has been nearly a year since last time I looked at it.

Back in the present day, and after my chat the other day about online game testing, I have decided to buy a subscription to Tabletopia. I don't want to get into religious wars, but right now it seems to be a better fit to me than the main alternative, which I'm sure I will also continue to fiddle with a bit.  Anyway, I now have the capability to have a few games in my workshop, so I decided to start pulling Invaded's assets in to see how I do with setting it up.

Some of the Invaded components set up in Tabletopia.
If nothing else, I think this tool will be great for generating prototype rulebook illustrations.

I've actually been musing on this game for a while now, and a way forward has been bouncing around my brain. At the moment there is a system that ramps up the aggression of the invaders through the game, making them more demanding in trades and more likely to attack. The problem is that this required multi-part cards that needed to be read in conjunction with a score on a track, and this was a bit fiddly and easy for players to get confused.

The idea I am working with is that everything is done with cards, rather than my previous system of having the invaders controlled by card play but player tribe actions coming from a standard menu of options.  Under the new system, each card a player holds involves an invader action and a tribe action, and you do both of these on your turn. The ramping up of the game can come from there being two decks of these cards, the first one being more benign, but as these cards are used, they are discarded from the game and replaced by the second deck which contains more powerful actions for both sides.  This should remove the need to do all sorts of tracking and cross-referencing of status levels and action options, and make the game flow more smoothly. That's the hope, anyway.

It'll take me a little while to get all that set up as it is a massive overhaul of the game at a level that has not happened since its early days, but I think it will be at least worth trying.

Prototyping and Testing, Virtually

I talked in my last post about playtesting online and, in those instances, playing "roll & write" style games, which can be done over a videoconference system if everyone has the wherewithal to make whatever sort of record/play sheet that is required for the game. 

Since then, I have played prototype games (both mine and other people's) using the two most commonly talked about 3D simulators for board games: Tabletop Simulator and Tabletopia.  I don't have enough experience with either system to compare their pro's and con's in any detail, so I'll just discuss my first(ish) impressions. Lots of other people are talking about this stuff in great depth, so I'll just generally hand-wave.

Both systems have a physics engine that allows components to interact with some semblance of reality, but rely on supplying the components and the players knowing what to do with them. This is fine for prototyping: I don't particularly want to code in all the logic for a tabletop game that is still in development.

My implementation of The Castle War in Tabletopia.
This is just a mock-up, but it does work for real, and I've had a couple of very useful test plays.

My overall impression of each is that Tabletopia is more polished (it still has its problems, mind: one prototype I was playing with had a recurring issue with tokens falling through tiles and ending up underneath them!), while Tabletop Simulator is more flexible. I like that TTS allows you to add components on the fly as you are playing, for instance, but I do like the cleanliness of the Tabletopia interface and the really nice library of standard components.

The cost model of both systems is important here. You need to pay to install Tabletop Simulator, as do any people you want to play with, but from then on, you're free as a bird. Tabletopia, on the other hand, allows you to dip your toes in for free, and as a player that may be all you need, but if you want to play in a load of simultaneous games, or create more than one, you need to pay a monthly subscription, but your playtesters can join you for free.

My first experiment in Tabletop Simulator, part of an idea I have just started toying with.

Playing on either system tends to result in games taking a lot longer than the physical version would and, especially at first, everything can feel really fiddly. That improves as you get experience, but I don't think it will ever go away. I also massively miss being able to actually watch how people play and engage with the game, as that usually provides some of the best feedback, but this is so much better than not being able to playtest at all, and maybe it will lead to a faster testing rate than I have managed in the past. Plus it's a good incentive for me to get better at discussing games with testers afterwards.

I think I'm going to tinker with both systems for the time being, partly because people I am collaborating with and otherwise talking to are split between the systems, and partly because I'm not yet sure which is best for me.

It is also worth noting that these two systems are not the only games in town. For instance, if you don't want all the 3D whistles and bells, there is Vassal, a pretty old project that was, I believe, originally set up to run hex-and-counter style wargames, but allows just about anything to be configured if you can put the effort in. I've taken a bit of a look at this, but not got a game running yet. Similarly, but newer, I have recently heard of Screentop, which I have not yet taken a proper look at, but may be useful.

I'll just finish off with a few links to things I have recently seen other people have been saying on the subject...

• An interesting comparison video of TT and TTS from a player's point of view.
• Gil Hova on Twitter about why he likes TTS for prototyping.
• Ian Brocklebank blogging about his growing appreciation of online playtesting.