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.

Diplomatic Immunity

I've recently started playing Diplomacy again.

It's fun, but you have to overthink it way too much to properly play.

For those who don't know, Diplomacy is like Risk except without dice. Also everyone hates each other by the end.

Units (Armies and Fleets) are all equal strength and can can either move to an adjacent territory, stay still, or support another unit's movement. An army attempting to move into an occupied area will fail to move unless the amount of support to move is greater than the support of the defending unit. Players submit orders in secret, then all movements are calculated and carried out simultaneously.

Controlling a Supply Center (the red dots on the above map) allows the country to build additional units. Winning is achieved by controlling the majority of the supply centers on the map or, more often, by all surviving players agreeing to a draw. A turn can last days and a game can stretch over months. I've heard tell of single-night games involving lots of arguing and secret conferences in private rooms, but have never seen one in the flesh.


In order to get anything done you must cooperate with another player to get the supports you need for a proper invasion. But orders are secret. Now you see the fun part, because the only guarantee you'll ever have in a strategy is your ally's word. Players spend hours staring at the map, planning for all potential outcomes and weighing those against the touchy-feely notion of trust.

Player personalities have developed because of this. Here's a brief rundown of those I've encountered, complete with made up names!

Trickle Down Balance

Gamers (and unfortunately developers) too often submit to this fallacy:

"Game balance is best achieved by looking at the pro/tournament level. Any balance there must necessarily trickle down to all elo tiers"

This is, quite frankly, false.

That Guy from Dresden Codak apparently rocks

I was recently linked to Aaron Diaz' blog Indistinguishable from Magic, specifically his reboots of X-Men and the Justice League (there's a search bar, be proactive if you like).

Frankly, dude's really smart. I always liked his comic and apparently I had good reason to because he understands the ins and outs of both art and writing better than most humans.

He's also working on a personal project Star Wars: 1999 which would re-envision the Star Wars prequels to be more...not a gaping wound in the continuity which later authors must work like platelets to bridge to.

Point is: go read his words, then head over to ye olde Topatoco and toss some money his way (he's self-supporting).

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The Devil is in the Details

(I'd like to first state that Diablo III is very fun. While there are certain design decisions I disagree with, the game on the whole is fantastic. This is not a critique, it is only thought experiment for my own amusement)

Each of the 5 classes in Diablo III has its own (theoretically) unique resource to manage. However, more could be done to distinguish them. I'd like to go through how the classes currently play, then propose some alternate resources. I'll be paying closest attention to providing each class with its own unique play experience.

Avacyn Restored Bugs Me

This is not to cry that Magic is dead, or that Wizards has ruined the game, or any other such nonsense. I loved Innistrad's flavor AVR hit a lot of those notes perfectly. Soulbond and the "lone monster" mechanics mirror nicely. "Miracle", while awkward, creatres some fun gameplay moments which, when it comes down to it, is why we play the game.

I've played some AVR limited and toyed with the cards in other formats. Here are my concerns:

A Metric for Success

One of my greatest regrets is that I still think in feet, cups, and Fahrenheit. Yes, I am a huge nerd.

Even after realizing how awesome metric is I still maintained that it wasn't worthwhile to switch. It didn't seem to matter what units people learned All the science that matters is done in metric anyways. I swore to raise my children to think in metric just because it's so logical but there seemed no reason to inconvenience the rest of America.

I recently had a change of heart. The metric system is not only logical, it is conducive to the development of scientific thought.

Faithful Looting

We're coming up on the future.

During MTG's second Great Designer Search,entrants answered ten short response questions to see how well they understood WotC's current design philosophy. The following question was posed:

You are instructed to move an ability from one color to another. This ability must be something used in every set (i.e. discard, direct damage, card drawing etc.). You may not choose an ability that has already been color shifted by R&D. What ability do you shift and to what color do you shift it? Explain why you would make that shift.

Apparently an overwhelming majority of finalists argued to move looting (draw a card, then discard a card, a la Merfolk Looter) should be moved from blue to red. R&D listened. Magic sets are made a few years in advance so we wouldn't see the results of that change surface until...well, about now I suppose.

Promote Synergy

MY TOP 3 VIDEO GAME BOSSES

My 5-Year Plan

I had something of a life-altering epiphanizing event recently. Lots of fallout, but the relevant upside is a restructuring of my work ethic. Namely, while I am unemployed and searching out work, I will pretend like I am employed. This means working 40 hours a week, every week.


Here are things which count as work:

Tom Francis, on how to explain a Video Game to an asshole

Tom Francis explains how to explain a game to someone

If you're like me you constantly have issues with this. I know I've fallen into the traps in the first half of his speech more times than I can count. And I can tell you that I am going to refer to this in the future. Hopefully it'll help me to be a better writer.

A Patent on Fun

The video game industry is unique. Where other areas of entertainment, such as film or music, have developed an oligarchy of Big Companies to control most of the flow, there hasn't been enough time for power to centralize in gaming. Sure, there's Valve and Blizzard and other big names, but compare this to the RIAA or MPAA.

The law has been sculpted by those in power for those other arenas. He who holds the first copyright on a property holds complete control over its development. I can't go do a mix of Lady Gaga without her permission except under specific circumstances.

IPs are protected in gaming, too. As much as I'd like to, I can't go make a game about Mario fighting Master Chief for control of Aperture Science. But those names aren't the core part of the game. I can go make a game in which I use a gun to shoot portals and solve puzzles. Characters are pretty cool, but unlike in movies they're just the set dressing to the meat of the game.

It would be enforce to oversee any copyright law that attempted to restrict these things. That would be like outlawing films which use Pulp Fiction-esque narrative jumps, or songs with accordions. But where in film and music these are just tools. In games, mechanics are the skeleton around which everything revolves.

We live in a world where the best games are not those which come first, but those that are done best. We don't care if there was some shitty platformer before Mario, because Mario was just so damn fun. And even if Nintendo refuses to allow any games starring Mario, we don't care because we can play Spyro or whatever the kids are doing these days.

I guess I don't really have a point here, except to marvel at how this system works for the consumer instead of for the big companies. And as a result, any independent developer gets a shot at making his mark without needing to slog through any pre-existing frameworks.

What a wonderful world.

Me and Riot, sitting in a tree

So I've been applying to be a Game Designer at Riot for the past several months now. They have a very extensive screening process which makes sense since most prospective designers, at least from what I've seen on internet forums, are not very good. Also, even as LoL expands and Riot needs more personnel for servers and computer-bops, the core design team is more of an intensive property and doesn't need to grow as much.

I'd love to tell you about all the design tests they've been giving me, but unfortunately I've sworn the Unbreakable Vow and will literally die if I say a word. But it's going well methinks.

Let's Fix: Stealth

 Stealth

Several champions in League of Legends have the ability to stealth. These champions are often very divisive, usually powerful and often pushing the limits of “frustrating to play against”. Champions like Twitch of Shaco can engage and disengage with unmatched ease and can kill quickly after a sudden appearance. This can frustrate summoners at all levels, but is particularly disheartening to new players. Such “feel-bad” moments are necessary to any game with a learning curve, but only in moderation. Else the player may decide it is easier to just quit.

Is Last-Hitting Outdated?

This article has been making the rounds, as a proposed LoL change

Basically, the guy wants to abolish last-hitting as a mechanic by modifying the gold-reward schema. It's an interesting read.

Does he have something here? Go read it before you continue, I'm not gonna summarize it here.