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.



There's an excellent book by Jesse Schell called "The Art of Game Design". In it he recounts an anecdote about his days as a juggler going to juggler conventions (I know. If it this more interesting you're free to read that as juggalo). He was walking around looking at jugglers when he saw an old man who was amazing. He sat and watched. The man's technique was unlike anything he'd ever seen. He walked up to the man after a while and asked where he learned all these.

"They're not different." He pointed to show there were other jugglers nearby doing the same thing, but theirs didn't seem as impressive. "The trick to juggling is: don't learn from watching jugglers"

He explained that he got the inspiration from his tricks by watching various other things in life. An ice skater on a pond, a group of cheerleaders, etc. His looked so amazing because he was reproducing the spirit of the things he'd seen, whereas the people copying him couldn't know that and so always looked stilted and mechanical.

The point being that good design often comes when you're looking at a completely different area and suddenly see the solutions you've been looking for.

It's not a perfect analogy for me since my inspiration came from other games. But even so!

The first game was FTL: Faster Than Light. It's an indie spaceship rogue-like sim in which you travel from planet to planet and fight other ships. You maintain your crew and upgrade your ship and jump from random event to the next and everything is constantly going wrong.

It's a remarkably frustrating game. After about 5 playthroughs I got to the final boss for the first time. 5 later and I finally killed him...only to find he had a second form which murdered me. About 10 later again I found he had a 3rd form. By the time I beat him for the first time ever I literally stood in my chair and yelled obscenities at his exploding ship. And this was on easy mode.

Anyways, the the mechanics are at the same time simple and unforgiving. Extremely small numbers and judicial uses of dice rolls. Sometimes this means you can get yourself into a situation where you just don't have enough firepower to kill anybody. Over time you learn how to avoid this.

FTL made me realize I had been over thinking Spacefleet. There was enough randomness in the deck and the initial layout that we didn't need to inject it into combat as well. Additionally, FTL let's you shift around power between different ship systems as needed. This inspired my own system of ship movement and combat in which you can choose between movement actions and combat actions for any particular ship.

Netrunner is the other game that helped me out. It was designed by Richard Garfield of MTG fame about 10 years ago, then recently rereleased and tweaked slightly.

Overall I have to say it's just worse than Magic. It has a much higher complexity barrier to entry and it does not seem to have the staying power. It would be very hard to convince a friend to play Netrunner. Also, there are several core design decisions that I question and a lot of non-interactive elements and resources to track. But it's pretty fun as a Magic alternative if you feel like trying something new with a patient friend.

Anyways, it made me realize that I didn't need to shy so strongly away from counters to track things. I'd been stressing over ship health points. Either they get wiped clean every turn (like in Magic) or I'd need to track it somehow. I didn't like the clean slate because it didn't feel right and could create too many "feel bad" moments where you have literally no way to kill the enemy's big ship.

My original plan involved a small energy deck for each ship - this was actually the idea that sparked the entire game. But after a lot of work I realized the mechanic was fundamentally flawed in just too many ways. Later I considered orientations as tracking. Basically, NESW to indicate the damage on a ship, capping ship health at a max of 4. This was just far too restrictive both to ship creation and to using orientations to indicate other status effects.

Netrunner helped me accept that counters could be used for good. And since oftentimes only a few "tall" ships would ever survive longer than one combat it wouldn't populate the board too much as long as I don't force players to track damage on things where it usually won't matter. For example, "deal 1 damage to all ships" can get really annoying to physically perform and should be used carefully.

I don't want to put too many details in such a public place since the game is still in development, but I'm pretty proud of the progress.