Playing like a Designer

I've been watching a lot of Penny Arcade's Extra Credits recently, which are a fantastic resource for anyone interested in design, development, or just musings on the general direction of gaming.

One episode suggests that to become a great designer you must learn to play like a designer. You must participate in the experience while simultaneously examining how the game manipulates you. Examine how the combination of mechanics, aesthetics, or anything else caused some emotional reaction. This is really hard to do because the act of observation often taints your enjoyment.

In practice it's much easier to do this for bad games, or at least obviously flawed ones. When something feels off it pulls you out of the moment. It's relatively simple then to write a list of all the problems which made the experience run aground. No matter how polished, most games will have these moments.

Let's Fix: Masteries

Masteries

What are they?

League of Legends players can edit their Runes and Masteries and Runes to customize any champion as they see fit. They provide maybe a ~5% boost to a champion's early game power, waning to somewhere around 2% later on. Since everyone at level 30 has equal access to masteries (and to a lesser extent the runes) there's not really a problem with balance. If the Offensive page is OP then everybody uses the Offense page and nobody gets a real advantage.

Luckily they are balanced enough that even that is not an issue. Your choice of Masteries is usually a reflection on your personal preference of playstyle. Some champions are a bit limited in their selection: an AD carry for example will run 21/9/0 with little variation. Others however get a bit more choice in the matter. As Warwick, I might run down the Defense tree if I plan to try to outsustain the other guy and transition into a tanky initiator, or I could run a more Offensive build if I plan to gank and go all in for the kill.

Where to Look: Card Layout Quandries

The layout of a card is incredibly important to players new and old. How much thought goes into these initial decisions? How much is random choice and how much is optimization?

Above we have a typical magic card. The first thing a player notices is the picture, covering up the top half of the card. Then, a new player will usually look to the card name, where an experienced one might look first to the mana cost in the top right or its stats in the bottom right. Those stats are then compared to certain base stats we've become accustomed to and you get a gut feeling for the strength of the card on a whole. Meanwhile, the newer player is reading the name and then skipping the mana cost to look at the text.

New players take the card as a whole, where experienced ones understand that you don't need to look at the flavor text, set symbol, or artist name, and only rarely the card type. That information is there when they need it, but it's not immediately relevant.

Don't Watch Jugglers

For at least a month I'd hit a bit of designer's block with Spacefleet. Nothing seemed to work the way I wanted it to and, though I wanted to playtest, I couldn't even get the base mechanics to work to even allow a simple proof of concept game.

Over the past couple days though I've made enormous leaps forward. The current incarnation has enough of a foundation to allow for successful playtesting. Interestingly, it's almost completely unrecognizable from my first (what I thought at the time was a) brilliant vision.

Spaceships and Hand Grenades

I've been designing a game from scratch but have yet to make a crucial decision: Board Game, or Card Game?

The two are similar on the surface, but surprisingly difficult to choose between this early in development. And the choice needs to be made soon because it'll dictate a lot of the future direction.

Spacefleet (it's a super early working title) is a game about building up a fleet of spaceships to explore new worlds, seek out new life, and  to boldly blow up that other guy's spaceships exploring new worlds and seeking out new life.