Here is the problem with game design: It is ridiculously easy to come up with an idea for a game, but also, monstrously hard to figure out how to implement that idea. This is made only more complicated if you want your game to be fun for anyone besides you.
I was recently asked to come up with potential game ideas for production over the course of the next couple of years. Fortunately, I was given a couple days to do this, but only ended up needing one hour.
Here is some of the list:
As you can see, ideas are easy. I maintain that any one of these ideas can be turned into a successful game given the right set of rules and mechanics. The problem is, which mechanics do you use?
Would your Dewey Decimal system game rely on a random reveal of numbered book chits that must then be fit on their proper shelf space but can only do so if no other book occupies that section of shelf first? Would you also have little blocks representing patrons that can be influenced by the action cards of your Librarian to remove blocking books from the shelves?
Maybe you'd rather have all the books already on the shelves but in the wrong order. The task would then become using your Librarian and special ability cards to force the rearrangement of those books until you have successfully sorted them properly. Complications could be had by patrons coming in and randomly re-shelving books improperly, or new acquisitions being introduced at intervals that must be sorted in from the new release section. Why not both?
The choice of mechanics can make otherwise mundane games shine, or kill games that were potentially brilliant.
Would you believe there is a game about amoeba poop? How do you make that interesting and compelling game play? By setting it in the Primordial Soup and making it all about the evolution of life. Amoebas eat and poop and those two elements drive the whole of the game. Based on your amoebas success at those two things they will either die or thrive and go on to create the next generation. It is an off beat concept made brilliant by good mechanics and rules.
On the other hand, you have a game that has players travelling around a map of Europe. One of them is an assassin and attempts to kill one of the other players. No one knows who the assassin is or who his intended victim will be. People love this stuff with it's secret roles and hidden agendas and traitors and all of that. Except this game sucks. It is one of the lowest rated games on BoardGameGeek, and with good reason. Horrible, horrible design decisions were made with its rules and mechanics. Assassin is the kind of game that feels as if it was designed by a committee with rules that are at once boring and completely counter to having any actual fun in the game at all. Mostly the game is an endless series of card draws that achieve nothing of any consequence and result in the game becoming a card game version of keep away.
Good game design is less about what sort of theme you have and much more about an endless series of tests. Any game designer worth his salt will tell you that designing a game that people want to play is first about testing every idea and every rule coming from that idea over and over and over.
Game designers use a variety of processes to create their games. Dr. Knizia's is a detailed and very thorough approach and has resulted in more than 200 game designs to his name. Some designers use a less meticulous, but no less important process. As long as it represents an intense desire to make the game as good as they possibly can, there isn't really a way to go about it incorrectly.
Unless you don't test at all. Or refuse to accept negative feedback. Or are so blinded by what you think the game is like that you never fully realize just how it plays and just how people are reacting to it. If those apply, then why are you even bothering to create a game for anyone but yourself? No one else is going to enjoy playing it.
Kickstarter is a favorite place for folks who don't like testing things. While there are certainly many good games that come through Kickstarter - games that have been thoroughly playtested and examined rigorously from every angle to make sure they are fun and enjoyable games to play - there are many, many more that are merely a concept for a game at worst, or a set of rules that no one is really sure about at best.
One of the key things I look for when evaluating a game concept on Kickstarter is whether or not the designer can explain what his game is about and how it is played in less than three or four sentences. If he can't do those two things, then he does not understand his own game and has no idea if it works or not. Components and theme do not matter. Many gorgeous looking games are hideously unplayable. Conversely, many ugly games are really hiding some amazing game play.
Take, for instance, the game Falsch FuFFziger (or, to give it an approximate English translation Fake Money). Falsch FuFFziger is a game that, if it had been made in these Kickstarter days, would never have funded just based on the art work along. Even by the pre-Kickstarter standards of 1994, when the game was actually made, it looks pretty bad. The money in the game looks worse than Monopoly money and is printed on the thinnest of papers. The box art is reminiscent of a 5th graders refrigerator art and the included chits and pieces give the impression that the whole thing was cut out of scrap cardboard the designer had laying around his basement. You'd pay people NOT to play it.
And you would miss out. Hiding behind all that apparent veneer of worthlessness is a game that will challenge you and your decision making processes. Yes, it is about counterfeiting money, but it is really an economic game with crucial decision points about upgrading your machinery and turning the biggest profit you can before your equipment breaks down. You will, at mid-game, be burning brain cells so violently that by the end, win or lose, you sit back and heave a sigh of relief just for having survived it.
It would fail on Kickstarter. Absolutely. Unless you knew it was designed by Friedmann Friese and that, among his other contributions to gaming, he designed Power Grid.
I could, reasonably, take any of those ideas I mentioned up there and throw them up on Kickstarter with a bunch of text about how amazing the game is and how it's the next big thing and how it is all incredibly brilliant and some mock ups of the potential components and amazing stretch goals and add-ons and promise a gold coin for everyone who pledges and whatever else I think might work, but, if I can't tell you what the game is about, how it plays and what makes it work and show you how it plays, you shouldn't give me any money.
And that might be the point of Emperor's New Clothes.
I was recently asked to come up with potential game ideas for production over the course of the next couple of years. Fortunately, I was given a couple days to do this, but only ended up needing one hour.
Here is some of the list:
- Some sort of semi-cooperative game about two teams of players launching rockets into space and trying to successfully navigate them to the moon.
- An RPG set in a future where corporate sponsorship has been the driving force for space colonization.
- A cooperative card game about Superheroes with sucky individual powers, but, when combined, the cumulative effects are useful.
- A sports game for a completely made up sport with rules that change as you play (Calvinball + Fluxx).
- A game based on knowledge of the Dewey decimal system of book cataloging.
- A Civ style game in which a given players technological developments negatively effect the other players for a number of turns until it is stolen/developed by everyone else.
- A game where the object is to develop time travel then go back and give it to yourself at an earlier point in the game to prevent you having to develop it at all. Call it Paradox.
- A short, 15 minute or less, game in which players try to kill one of several different dinosaurs using primitive, ineffectual technology.
- A storytelling game in which players are given a set of story elements that they have to incorporate into their story, but each element has a special ability of some sort that effects either their own or someone elses story.
- A game about electing Popes. Perhaps where you actually have to burn the cards and determine the final winner by the color of smoke. (Or maybe not)
- A trick taking game involving the seven deadly sins.
- A worker placement game set in the ancient city of Petra. Players would be trying to build petra before it is swallowed up by the sands of time.
- A game where players are tasked with eating food covered in hot sauce of varying styles. The game would include small sample packets of various specialty hot sauces with more orderable from our online store.
- A game consisting mostly of the moving of random wooden pawns around an abstract board while blindfolded. At the end of three rounds of movement players remove the blindfolds and are awarded points for correctly guessing who moved what pawns where.
- A game in which players are given a bag of letters to draw from. Each player gets 4 letters and then in turn order they lay out one letter at a time each and try to build words off the current letters on the table. Players able to use all their letters get points. Anyone spelling a curse word gets double points.
- A memory style game in which players are given a brief look at a circuit board schematic and then have to replicate the circuit board using cards depicting wires, resistors, capacitors, etc. The first and most accurate players get points in the form of grains of rice. Meant to simulate working in a Chinese Apple factory.
- A game in which players have to rebuild the city of Tokyo immediately after Godzilla has struck. Players race to complete it before Godzilla comes back in the 7th round. Points awarded on a per building basis.
- A Pirate racing game in which the players are pirates running from the British navy through the Caribbean. Naval ship is controlled by random card movement.
- A solitaire deck building game that has the players trying to out drink bar patrons in a Mexican Cantina. The more successful the player is the worse his subsequent cards are. Alcohol poisoning death is the surprise ending.
- Combat rules for Monopoly.
- A game called Run DMZ. Players attempt to dig tunnels into and out of North Korea while the North Korean army does their best to stop them.
- A game called Witch Finder. Players are presented with a tableau of 10 characters. Each player has a handful of clues that can be used to implicate any one of the tableau characters as being a witch. The object is to convict one of the witches conclusively while secretly protecting one of them as your secret goal.
- A racing game called The Earls of Danger County. A two player game where one player is the county sheriff and the other is the Earl Boys. The Earl boys try to run moonshine assisted by cards representing other members of the poor, but noble Earl Family. The Sheriff has cards representing his earnest but corrupt deputies and government officials.
- A Game called Hop Scotch. Players attempt to locate a mythical bottle of 500 year old scotch which can be found at any one of 10 different bars in the city. Players must visit bars they think the scotch is at, order and imbibe drinks in an effort to determine if THIS drink is the scotch in question. Players have limited funds and each round a drink must be taken. You must by drinks for all players at your current bar. Drinking the wrong drink means you suffer ill effects and have to spend more time at your current bar before moving on. First one to find the scotch wins.
- A dexterity/action game in which players sit around a table and attempt to blow a ping pong ball into each other players goal. The first one to score three points on each other player wins. Hyperventilation is fun.
As you can see, ideas are easy. I maintain that any one of these ideas can be turned into a successful game given the right set of rules and mechanics. The problem is, which mechanics do you use?
Would your Dewey Decimal system game rely on a random reveal of numbered book chits that must then be fit on their proper shelf space but can only do so if no other book occupies that section of shelf first? Would you also have little blocks representing patrons that can be influenced by the action cards of your Librarian to remove blocking books from the shelves?
Maybe you'd rather have all the books already on the shelves but in the wrong order. The task would then become using your Librarian and special ability cards to force the rearrangement of those books until you have successfully sorted them properly. Complications could be had by patrons coming in and randomly re-shelving books improperly, or new acquisitions being introduced at intervals that must be sorted in from the new release section. Why not both?
The choice of mechanics can make otherwise mundane games shine, or kill games that were potentially brilliant.
Would you believe there is a game about amoeba poop? How do you make that interesting and compelling game play? By setting it in the Primordial Soup and making it all about the evolution of life. Amoebas eat and poop and those two elements drive the whole of the game. Based on your amoebas success at those two things they will either die or thrive and go on to create the next generation. It is an off beat concept made brilliant by good mechanics and rules.
On the other hand, you have a game that has players travelling around a map of Europe. One of them is an assassin and attempts to kill one of the other players. No one knows who the assassin is or who his intended victim will be. People love this stuff with it's secret roles and hidden agendas and traitors and all of that. Except this game sucks. It is one of the lowest rated games on BoardGameGeek, and with good reason. Horrible, horrible design decisions were made with its rules and mechanics. Assassin is the kind of game that feels as if it was designed by a committee with rules that are at once boring and completely counter to having any actual fun in the game at all. Mostly the game is an endless series of card draws that achieve nothing of any consequence and result in the game becoming a card game version of keep away.
Good game design is less about what sort of theme you have and much more about an endless series of tests. Any game designer worth his salt will tell you that designing a game that people want to play is first about testing every idea and every rule coming from that idea over and over and over.
"Once the initial concept is properly elaborated, playtesting becomes the core activity of game development. The fun and excitement of playing cannot be calculated in an abstract fashion: it must be experienced. I prepare each of my playtest sessions in great detail - I plan the exact issues I want to monitor and test. During play, I record relevant data about the game flow. Afterwards, I analyse the results and then make necessary or exploratory changes. This becomes the preparation for the next playtest session, during which I can find out how the changes will affect the game. The revolving process usually continues over many months, sometimes years. With experienced playtesters, we spend much time after each test discussing how it went - what worked and what didn't. Often we make changes on the spot and play again."
-Reiner Knizia "The Design and Testing of the Board Game - Lord of the Rings" pg. 3 (PDF)
Game designers use a variety of processes to create their games. Dr. Knizia's is a detailed and very thorough approach and has resulted in more than 200 game designs to his name. Some designers use a less meticulous, but no less important process. As long as it represents an intense desire to make the game as good as they possibly can, there isn't really a way to go about it incorrectly.
Unless you don't test at all. Or refuse to accept negative feedback. Or are so blinded by what you think the game is like that you never fully realize just how it plays and just how people are reacting to it. If those apply, then why are you even bothering to create a game for anyone but yourself? No one else is going to enjoy playing it.
Kickstarter is a favorite place for folks who don't like testing things. While there are certainly many good games that come through Kickstarter - games that have been thoroughly playtested and examined rigorously from every angle to make sure they are fun and enjoyable games to play - there are many, many more that are merely a concept for a game at worst, or a set of rules that no one is really sure about at best.
One of the key things I look for when evaluating a game concept on Kickstarter is whether or not the designer can explain what his game is about and how it is played in less than three or four sentences. If he can't do those two things, then he does not understand his own game and has no idea if it works or not. Components and theme do not matter. Many gorgeous looking games are hideously unplayable. Conversely, many ugly games are really hiding some amazing game play.
Take, for instance, the game Falsch FuFFziger (or, to give it an approximate English translation Fake Money). Falsch FuFFziger is a game that, if it had been made in these Kickstarter days, would never have funded just based on the art work along. Even by the pre-Kickstarter standards of 1994, when the game was actually made, it looks pretty bad. The money in the game looks worse than Monopoly money and is printed on the thinnest of papers. The box art is reminiscent of a 5th graders refrigerator art and the included chits and pieces give the impression that the whole thing was cut out of scrap cardboard the designer had laying around his basement. You'd pay people NOT to play it.
And you would miss out. Hiding behind all that apparent veneer of worthlessness is a game that will challenge you and your decision making processes. Yes, it is about counterfeiting money, but it is really an economic game with crucial decision points about upgrading your machinery and turning the biggest profit you can before your equipment breaks down. You will, at mid-game, be burning brain cells so violently that by the end, win or lose, you sit back and heave a sigh of relief just for having survived it.
It would fail on Kickstarter. Absolutely. Unless you knew it was designed by Friedmann Friese and that, among his other contributions to gaming, he designed Power Grid.
I could, reasonably, take any of those ideas I mentioned up there and throw them up on Kickstarter with a bunch of text about how amazing the game is and how it's the next big thing and how it is all incredibly brilliant and some mock ups of the potential components and amazing stretch goals and add-ons and promise a gold coin for everyone who pledges and whatever else I think might work, but, if I can't tell you what the game is about, how it plays and what makes it work and show you how it plays, you shouldn't give me any money.
And that might be the point of Emperor's New Clothes.
