The Finesse of Failure

Armies!

You may or may not be aware - I've mentioned it lightly in passing - but we're working on a site overhaul.  Starting early in 2014, iSlaytheDragon will become far more than a straightforward blog.  We'll still have our weekly posting schedule, but everything will be organized much better, easier to find, and easier to discover new things.  With that will also come a fantastic new look.

Part of the process of updating to the new layout has been digging through old posts to categorize and organize them all.  Not surprisingly, digging through written records of your past can bring up memories, it can show you how far you've come, and it can also remind you of your failures.  It's a chance to reflect on such things, and its not always pretty.

You Will Want To Play Armyland After Seeing This

This past couple of days has been a flurry of activity as I finally recieved my latest prototype in the mail for Armyland, and subsequently managed to get a few solid playtestings in.  I'm happy to say that there is much progress, and much fun to be had with the game.  Still a few things to be ironed out, but its definitely to the point where the clothes are pretty much sewn, its only the wrinkles that need to be smoothed out.  (See how i did that with the ironing metaphor?)

Anyhow, without giving away all my game-design secrets, attached are some photos of the game in action.  Taking into account that this is, after all, still an extremely limited prototype... hopefully this sparks your interest.

Without further ado... enjoy.  You can view each image at a large size by, you know, clicking on it and stuff.

Deletion

When you're working on a project, chances are you'll have dozens, if not hundreds, of ideas for pieces of the project.  Especially when that project is a board game.  It's easy to come up with ideas for mechanics - it's not always easy to tell which ideas will work well in play, which ideas will flow with each other and which ideas clash.

In movies or books, its often more challenge to write a good shorter story than a long one.  Its easy to ramble on and on with description (And often redundancy) - it's a lot more challenging to cut out the fat, to build a concise but still clear story in a more limited time or page count.

The same is true of board games.  It can be not too challenging to throw a bunch of rules together with pages of explanation as to how they work.  It's a bit more challenging to simplify those rules down but keep them workable and balanced.  You have to decide which rules really add to the game, which don't, and which need to be cut down.

The real trick is, to really end up with the best possible product, you don't just cut out the bad stuff.  Sometimes you have to cut out good ideas, just because they don't fit with the rest of the game, or they're too complex, or they just don't add anything.  That's probably one of the hardest things to do in designing a board game.  You tend to get attached to your ideas - especially your good ones.  When it comes down to it, though, you have to decide to kill some of those precious little ideas.  (Though you can maybe revisit those ideas in your next game design, perhaps).

I think that concept ends up hurting some games when their designers don't look at every rule and question its value, its purpose, its clarity - relative to the game its in.  A good idea can hurt a game if its in the wrong game.  And it only takes something small to really break an otherwise strong game. (Mansions of Madness, we're looking at you.)

I've been going through all my rules for Armyland lately, with a significant amount of "delete" key being pressed.  It's tough.  Sometimes its sad to see units or rules that I liked head down the drain, but I know in the end it will result in a stronger end product.  Still, it sometimes feels like hurting your own children.

But I guess as they say, what doesn't kill it, only makes it stronger.

Asking the Questions

Have I mentioned I'm working on a board game design?

The other day I ran head-on into a solid wall.  Metaphorically speaking, of course.  The wall in question was a huge roadblock in the continued development of my board game.

But as they say, every obstacle is an opportunity in disguise, and this was a good opportunity to learn something about game design.  And now i'm sharing it with you because I can.  Because that's what I do.  I blog about things.

The design of Armyland has been going very well.  At least recently.  This project that started 9 years ago in Bryan's basement, ground to a complete halt for 2-3 years, resurfaced, re-halted, and then showed up once again has had its fair share of ups and downs, but progress has been moving forward.  Each test run has revealed not only major flaws within the system, but major parts of the game that are actually very fun.

The most recent test run was the last in the first series.  I could make no further progress via testing without updating all the cards in the game, taking into account new rules, new ideas, new fixes for balance and play speed, and adjusting of stats.  But I had also pulled in a significant amount of useful feedback and was incorporating that into the next edition of the rules, while updating the numbers on the cards.  I thought I was to the point of just typing in new stats and running off another set of cards.

Unfortunately, that's when the roadblock jumped out.  With the redefining, reclarification, and streamlining of several major rules, as I was going through the card list again I ran into some special abilities that were blaringly unclear, undefined, and even broken.  This started a domino effect as I ran through several other of these special rules that just didn't seem to be clicking, and I wasn't coming up with answers to the problems I was facing.  I wracked my brain for answers but nothing made sense.

That's when I stopped, I pulled back, and started a new approach.  See, I was standing there punching a solid wall with my bare fists, trying to figure out the specific rule and it was getting me know where, just causing me distress.

I stopped and remembered something important.  I had written a list of core 'philosophies' that I wanted Armyland to be about.  And instead of trying to "solve" the rules in question, I started looking at the concepts of those rules as they related to the core ideas of the game. I ended up writing out a page of questions for each ruleset in limbo - questions such as, "what is the purpose of this rule? What does it add to the game?  What happens to the rest of the game if this rule is removed or changed?  What is required if this rule stays? Does this rule make sense in the context of the rest of the game?  Does it fit within the theme?"

Obviously I'm leaving out specifics here - as far along as Armyland is at this point, I'm not ready to reveal much to the general public (soon, my friends, soon! And it will be totally worth it by the way.) - but the point is, I had to ask those questions.  Once I had the answers written out on paper, I was able to answer the questions.  And through answering those simple questions, I was then easily able to fix the rule (in some cases a complete re-write, in others a slight modification) in a way that seems simpler, more fun, and that is consistent with the core "values" so to speak of the game.  I eliminated a lot of messy 'requirements' by changing certain rules, which will streamline the learning process.  I moved the focus from macguyvering a complex rule into the rest of the system, to a rule that jived with the fun part of the game.

If you yourself are working on a game design of your own, don't forget to ask those important questions.  You may need to come up with some of your own, but certain questions - such as, "what does this add to the game? Does this help make the game more fun?  Does it affect the strategy?  Is it really necessary?  Does it fit in with what the game is supposed to be?" - these questions can help unify all the many parts of your game to ultimately fit into one cohesive, fun, whole.

At least I hope they will.


-wolfie

Bonus! Armyland: Then and Now

As my DnD campaign is nearing it's finale I've found some extra time to work on some other good stuff - namely, my boardgame project, Armyland.  In the spirit of Almost Being Done With Card Design For The First Prototype, here's a fun image for you all: the original card design I made back in high school, when the game sucked, and the current design.  Both missing art, unfortunately.  But still... the times, how they've changed things.

A Two Part Post, Part I: Bloated

One of the challenges of writing a story or creating a film is coming up with enough material - juts being productive enough to complete a story.  A bigger challenge, however, is trimming down that story and making it shorter, because many scripts and stories are filled with a lot of extra lines that the writer is in love with, but the audience doesn't really care about.  One of the first things I learned in my film classes was to cut things out, to make it shorter, shorter, shorter.

So, while a 3-hour movie might be impressive if it has a truly worthy story to fill the time, usually it just means someone couldn't check themselves and cut down on their own self-serving content.  The Lord of the Rings
was really long, but it still had to cut out a lot of the content from it's source material.  King Kong was also really long... and it could have lost about an hour and a half of the film.  Which would have distinctly improved it.  Some films – I’m looking at you, Transformers 2 – are clearly just made for the flashy effects, and those should be even shorter, lacking that they are in a fulfilling storyline with real characters.