After much deliberation, I finally decided to scrap this game. It just wasn’t viable in my opinion. It had many fun features but it occasionally fell flat on its face. The economy was balanced on a knife edge between scarcity and overabundance. When resources were scarce, the tension was high and the decisions were interesting, and difficult. Then the balance would shift to overabundance, resulting in a very boring game. There was also an obvious dominant strategy of keeping the web clear of Critters, which was often easy to do, since they were randomly generated at a fairly constant rate. Overall, I thing the game was too determinate, lacking the flexibility needed to handle the negative events and the fluctuations in the economy.
What I’ve Learnt
The main take from this experience was that you can’t force it. Like pushing a rope, it simply doesn’t work when you try force a game to be fun, or force it to be like some initial idealistic vision you had for the game. The harder you push, the further you tend to get from your goal. A couple recent games of mine come to mind.
The first is Nova-Raiders. It is a fast paced, dice driven, space game inspired by Backgammon. The first few attempts didn’t work well, but there was definitely a game in there somewhere. Playtesting proved this out. After a few more iterations, the game seemed fairly solid and players enjoyed playing it. I’ve recently tweaked the User Interface, modified the scoring and have tried to mitigate the arbitrary Take-That features of the game. It seems to be humming along very well. This was only possible because my core mechanics were sound and people like playing the game. The game, in a sense, was pulling me along, rather than me trying to push it. This is, I believe, the way a proper game design should work.
There are always surprises, of course. Fried dice is the second game I would like to mention. It is a simple roll and write game with an interesting dice mechanism which I came up with to entertain my young nephews. It turns out that it didn’t interest them but the adults sure had fun with it. A game could take you to unexpected places, but as long as it’s taking you somewhere, it’s probably a viable game.
The Bad, the Good and the Not so Ugly
We’ll start with the Bad:
- The game started out competitive, but I switched it to cooperative because I couldn’t overcome the politics of one player sitting back while the other players duke it, depleting their resources. This was the wrong reason to make a cooperative game.
- The game isn’t going anywhere until the core mechanics are solid and robust.
- Adding more stuff doesn’t fix any problems and tends to make the game worse. I had to take a hatchet to the game and do some serious trimming down more than once.
- Players need interesting choices, not obvious ones.
- Mismatched mechanics that don’t reinforce the theme can cause dissonance and thematic breaks. This can ruin a good game and make a bad one worse.
Now for some Good things:
- The marble based action selection mechanism I came up with in one iteration will make a really good core mechanism in a future game.
- The various card based action selection mechanisms that I experimented with will definitely be useful in other games.
- I’ve worked with many other game designers while developing this game and made a few friends.
The Not so Ugly
- I’ve really honed my digital prototyping skills and have become proficient at designing and desktop publishing.
- I still can’t draw worth a damn, but my graphic design skills have come a long way.
- I worked with a professional printer and managed to have some very nice prototypes made.
Overall, it’s been a good experience, but I have to recognize when a game just isn’t working and pull the plug earlier.
Lesson Learned.
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