Practice 2013: Well-Made: Back to Black Mesa

(by Robert Yang)

·         Tinyurl.com/backtoblackmesa

·         Writes about the art of FPS levels on his blog

·         Luigi was cut from Mario 64 because of hardware limitations and they needed it for more elaborate landforms.

·         Most of teaching game development is about teaching attitude. It’s not about being a great coder or artist, but being a great thinker, connector of fields, etc.

·         Half-Life = a new frontier in interactive drama, interactive storytelling, innovative deep amazing art, but Robert doesn’t really care about this. 95% of the game is about shooting things and jumping into small spaces.

·         The narrative in Half-Life is really an afterthought. The game was rebooted in 1997, a year before it released. Before the reboot, it was filled with a bunch of random levels. Valve still works like this and did the same thing with Portal.

·         Footnote: mythologizing crunch is gross. Valve crunched for 6 months before the game released, working 16 hour days. Two developers stayed up for 48 hours straight to get a feature in. We praise these developers as heroes, but we should not be encouraging crunch.

·         Half-Life’s Legacy = depth and diversity in environmental storytelling and scripted sequences, you just watched a bunch of people die in scripted sequence, and writings on the wall are not very subtle, the narrative was not subtle at all.

·         Half-Life was considered the Myst of video games, but really it’s just a Stephen King novel mixed with some Outer Limits

·         It’s not a debate about ludology vs. narratology. Half-life is 100% schlup.

·         How to love a game’s guts and you can too. Read through Half-Life’s source code, it’s beautiful poetry, Robert’s programming style is based a lot onHalf-Life’s code, the way he names variables and files, are curly braces on the same line or new line? is art center-aligned or top-left aligned? File structure is absolutely important.

·         Should the next-gen dumpster get two 1024x1024 flats? There’s a hundred decisions that goes into making one dumpster art. Fetishizing this process is gross, it’s amazing that we are even able to make games when we are faced with so many decisions.

·         Art history to games = AAA sandbox / open world = large sweeping pastorals even with post-apocalypse or urban setting, function and values are the same, awe and manifest destiny, the landscape is big and beautiful and it is yours, almost everything looks like Thomas Kinkade paintings.

·         Game development = code + asset + content + concept + design + workflow + politics = transcendence.

·         Black Mesa Inbound (the first level) and its legacy = work commute, nothing happens, slow foreshadowing, mindblowing, revolutionary, brave, there’s no shooting. In the beginning, you are on a tram and you just witness the facility going on. It’s also meant to be a tech demo (color lighting, character animations, size of the space, color palettes per texture).

·         func_tracktrains = have a platform, you lay out the path track, you have to manually drag them all out and tell each one which the next one was. The level was also made up of many different levels strung together (due to texture limitations).

·         The object ontology was by far the worst component. Half-Life had two sorts of objects, static brushes and dynamic entities, and you could not parent one object to another one.

·         Magic in motion = how did they glue a moving door to the moving train without parenting objects? When the train reaches the end of the track, it loads a new level, swapping out the old train with a new train.

·         Rachet & Clank – an online game that shipped without a patching mechanism, they sent an oversized EULA, you grab an EULA from the server which held important stuff and handler pointers, it exploited code executes and unpacked main code, this is how they patched the game.

·         There’s a set piece in Half-Life where you are attacked by a giant shark. The game didn’t have physics simulation, so the cage is actually a “train” using the func_tracktains.

·         Shark Cage behavior and scripting = the shark was named Ichthyosaur, added a trigger point to tell the shark to come eat you, has another sensor to tell the shark to not eat you (the level design made up for the lack of AI), the shark was technically a flying monster (by code inheritance), the shark moved based on node paths (simple pathfinding)

·         Valve’s design philosophy is that you should be able to see what is about to kill you, then see it kill you, and see it after it kills you. Team Fortress 2popularized the kill-cam.

·         Shark Cage health, damage, and tuning workflow = these variables were externalized to skill.cfg (a text file), but some things were also hardcoded like how long you can hold your breath underwater and the number of crossbow ammo you get. It’s a good idea to hardcode some stuff and softcode others. Underwater time is a good thing to hardcode because tons of puzzles probably are designed around it and it shouldn’t be changed so easily.

·         Smells are a type of sound. Monsters can smell your sounds.

·         Furniture in Half-Life is a type of monster, just so it can react to the player attacking it.

·         Well Made (instead of Well Played) = learn from the code of games.

·         “The technical” is relevant to everyone and you are wrong if you disagree and here is why = game development killed Luigi, game development affects game design so much

·         QGcon, a lot of children’s animations were hand-animated, they kept the cast small so they didn’t have to draw as much, created a lot of “loopy narratives.” Now with new technology, we have so many characters, wars, accumulation, instancing, mobs, etc.

·         Dead Island was a painfully mediocre zombie game. Looked at scripting files and one of the skill abilities was named “FeministWhore”, developer released a response where they said it was just a private joke for an obscure debug function, but this is a lie

·         “a computer language is not just a way of getting a computer to perform operations… programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.”

·         Pay a lot of attention to the things you’re making. Don’t be a jerk.

·         10 Print and Criminal Code: Procedural Logic and Rhetorical Excess in Videogames.

·         “Screen Essentialism” – there’s so much of a game that’s invisible on the screen

·         There are apolitical games that are actually not apolitical when you look at the code.

·         This is game development – cultural, political, social, technical, scientific, artistic, creative, diverse, relevant

·         Press Select

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

·         The tension between “crunch is terrible” and the horrible workflow of Half-Life being beautiful. Crunch usually happens because the producer didn’t do a good job. Do not hold people as heroes just because they can work late and long hours. This is also a concern for indies, and we should all be concerned about our work-life balance.

·         The finished water towers were really boring compared to the untextured surreal ones.

·         Code is so proprietary now. Robert is interested in open-sourced game code.

·         Well Made should be really great engine overviews.

Practice 2013: Creating a Nordic Style LARP

(by Cecilia Dolk & Martin Ericsson, Celestra LARP)

·         Martin has one Emmy win and nomination, and Cecilia has one Emmy nomination.

·         Created a LARP for Battlestar Galactica called the Monitor Celestra. Takes place in a real cold war destroyer.

·         Immersive live action role playing in the ragtag fleet of BSG. There were no actors in the game.

·         It was a massive undertaking. Different forms of culture all acting together.

·         Participatory Culture book. “Who controls the production of cultural stimuli?”

·         Audience culture = We perceive culture as a single author who produces a work, and then the audience sits down and consumes it.

·         Interactive culture = The author creates the productive stimuli and the illusion of or actual agency, there is some interactivity from the audience but the production is mostly scripted.

·         Participatory culture = People create the cultural stimuli for each other and there’s no grand author (ie. tabletop role-playing, BDSM party)

·         “Lightning Bolt” video clip has done a lot of damage to LARP’s image.

·         The IP of BSG and the fact that it takes place in a real destroyer drew a lot of players who were not traditional LARP players.

·         LARP continuum – Game/Structure vs. Story/Freeform. American LARPs tend to focus on game and structure, while Nordic LARPs tend to focus on story and freeform. The Monitor Celestra falls about 60% towards the story side.

·         Mainstream Nordic LARP has very strong ideologies

o   The Warriors Heart = 24/7 immersive, socialist dictatorship vs. rebels, steampunk theme

o   No Man’s Land = uses real airplane

o   Just a Little Lovin = beautiful memorial, very sad and emotional

o   A Quiet Evening With the Family, Europa, Carolus Rex

o   Till Death Do Us Part = middle eastern man and a western woman

·         Commonalities (pillars of classic “nordic style”) = participatory, physical, what you see if what you get, immersive, light rules, dramatic systems, socially conscious, meta-techniques and blackboxing, arthaus (modern day) and mainstream styles (fantasy, classical)

·         Nordic LARP design is the exploratory creation of frameworks for collective player co-creation. The players are the authors. Game engines, players, and stories are motivated by a well designed framework. LARP auteurs are impossible and destructive to the experience.

·         “I have stopped being an artist and have become a prostitute of the audience.”

·         Franchise framework = known clichés are a designer’s best friend, you are not Tolkien so don’t write your own lore, adaption strategy (canon until it’s not, new characters, new situations), new main allegory.

·         All this has happened before and all this will happen again. BSG is a great allegory about cultural intolerance in Europe.

·         Culture framework = taken from Caprica, took the Tauron and Caprican values, “Caprica” as a primary source for culture. Explored collective vs. individual, privileged vs. minority

·         Story framework = Minos City, Tauron turned into a skeleton ship, starts from the end of the pilot episode so the audience can have context after one episode, starts from the Battle of Ragnar Anchorage,  after some jumps they end up in Sector GCS-2998362, players have the power to steer the ship anywhere they want

·         Character framework = writing process, crews (groups, subgroups, vertical groups), contact suggestions, character arcs, casting and costume, 5000 post-its

·         LARP design and production loop = vision, reality bites and test, compromise, realization, how can physical and legal problems coincide?

·         Producing a mad weekend = mid Friday to Monday morning, tasks (distribute costumes, props, signing wavers, cleaning the boat, fire drills, in-game food, feeding GM’s and phantoms, limitations on number of people onboard, etc.), four 6-8 hour episodes, include hotel and meals

·         Construction of the Celestra = took the museum and closed off some of the rooms

·         Physical framework = make players believe they are elsewhere, give time for players to learn each others’ characters

·         Costumes = looks vs. price, Celestra (reinvented the colonial warriors plus soviets in space), Vergis (jumpsuits), civilians (lab gear)

·         Dramatic systems framework = what are the rules, four episode structure, no guns fired in first act, no killing before second episode, and then anything goes

·         Standoffs and conflict systems (what rules are used to enable safe violent conflict), fist < knife < gun < bigger gun.

·         Color red was the next mechanic, none of the players were allowed to wear red, phantom actors wore red and spoke to individual players secretly, two of the phantoms happen to be twins so they confused many of the players.

·         Safewords = “cut”, “frak”

·         Play to lose = always submit to the demands of the other player

·         Simulation systems = hard-core space sub simulator based on Silent Hunter type of PC games, internal power struggle, external locations, exploration and endings, designed by Dr. Karl Bergstrom (iterative design in progress). Later on, the engineers in the game became the kingmakers of the game. There is actual agency and a lot of content so that people don’t actually get to see it all.

·         Technical Framework = 10 cased networked PC’s, 12+ network cables, lots of Arduino boards

·         Game mastering = by an outside group, spawning Cylon ships, 8 run-time game masters on deck who dress up as splinter groups

·         This game was produced with the insane idea that more is more, taking a lot of inspiration from the Nordic LARP scene.

·         Weird observations = rules heavy (on the game master side), is consistency worth it?, emergent gameplay, chaos vs. directed collective flow, genre clashes, hard consequences and impossible choices make players nervous, messy is messy, players will forget to eat but they will always chat

·         Online framework = Youtube Friday features, use interwebs to promote, going viral, mentioned in Ball Blooded Gnome, the IP people found out but didn’t take legal action

·         The creators made this game out of love.

·         Went to Galacticon and met some amazing people from the show.

·         They did not expect to bring this to the US, but the player desire is driving the movement.

·         Bringing Celestra home = challenges (physicality, liability, new crowd and culture, location), opportunities (passionate fans, fan-financed events, props and prices, official possibilities, the perfect fandom event for the US scene).

·         Disney acquired a patent for using costumes in a role-playing scenario for their theme parks two months after they acquired Star Wars.

·         Successes = the universe, visual spectacle, destroyer and consoles were real, crowdfunding, real online presence, all inclusive. Failures = impossible to deliver fully screen accurate LARP, aim for the stars, more is more work, game 1 frakked (tech failures, etc.).

·         www.facebook.com/celestra2.0, #celestra, #celestralarp

o   Cecilia, @frkgeek, cecilia@beratta.org

o   Martin, @elricsson23, martin@ccpgames.com

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

·         Nordic LARP scene brings in a very diverse group of sexual orientation, ages, and genders. But the ethnic diversity is mostly middle-class Caucasians, which they are working on to change.

·         Players don’t need to choose between rules and story. If they feel bored, they can abandon their post at any time to move onto another post that is more interesting to them.

·         Always groups of people who are playing the game and trying to resolve the problems, but other people who are following along the fiction. It’s okay to have these dichotomies exist in the same game.

·         LARPs are just sandboxes for the players. Give the players really fun tools to play with.

·         A lot of off-putting things in LARPs are that people have to put up with tedious tasks like learning to bake bread. Started youth groups to teach people how to do LARPs and acquire skills for the game.

·         LARPs usually require people to come with their own costumes, but many people don’t have the skills to even take the first step. So they are giving costumes at the door to reduce the barrier of entry.

·         Before the LARP, they run several training workshops (trust exercises, improvisation workshops) to get all the players to form a common gaming culture.

·         Dungeons and Dragons is the American Dream essay, reluctance of players to just play what they are. Americans believe that everyone starts out even and levels up together. Nordic LARPs don’t believe in justice, it’s about reveling in what you already are. You can be an elf if you are physically fit.

·         Collective directing / game mastering, use effective episode structure and the players will self-police their actions.

Practice 2013: rogue(like)^n

(by Michael Brough)

·         Zaga 33, Glitch Tank, Vertex Dispenser, O, Corrypt, 868-HACK, Helix, SMESPORT

·         Roguelikes are games that are literally like Rogue.

·         Common properties = randomization (level, monsters, items), permadeath, turn-based grid tactics

·         If you remove the turn-based grid tactics, then they’re usually referred to as roguelike-likes, such as Spelunky.

·         Dungeon Crawl has an auto-explore function, so one mechanic of the game is completely automated.

·         Hyper Rogue = has weird geometry, takes place on a sphere

·         A lot of roguelikes have a wait command because many players don’t like moving towards the enemy to attack them. Michael removed the wait commands from his games because he likes to force the compulsion to move. Maybe an alternative solution to the wait problem is putting in diagonal movement.

·         868-HACK implemented a range attack and also added a wait command that required resources to use. If something is useful, the players should pay a cost to use them.

·         Pillar dancing = run around an obstacle and the enemies can never catch up to you. This is especially bad since your health will regenerate over time, so you can delay any combat to gain back full health. Some solutions involve putting in a time limit or generating more monsters overt time.

·         Roguelikes have a bunch of different types of items (single-use, multiple-use, permanent equipment). Limited use items have interesting choices, but permanent equipment doesn’t because you just choose the one with the higher numbers. Developers usually try to make these numbers difficult to figure out.

·         “Here’s an interesting choice in games… do I quit my PhD to make games? That’s choosing an identity. In games, the interesting choice is that we want to win. It’s not much of an interesting choice. So we try to make the choices as frustrating as possible for the player to make.” – Michael Brough

·         In many roguelikes, players don’t always understand the numbers, so choosing to be the leader of horses or the leader of demons is a role-playing choice.

·         Combos, different resources, varied types of effect, risk and reward

·         In many games, you can ramp up the difficulty but making the game faster. But in a turn-based game, you have to make the decisions harder. One way to do it is to ramp up the use of resources and players have to be more efficient with their resources. Eventually, you have to generate so many enemies to make the game impossible and make the game end.

·         Punch Quest and Mage Gauntlet developer got really into Zaga-33. But he became less interested in high score, and more interesting to survive as long as he can. To get a high score, you have to take risks but to survive as long as possible, you have to get a long streak and be conservative.

·         868-HACK had a scoring system that took a lot longer to get boring, but it’s still quite dependent of luck after a while. He implemented streaks

QUESTIONS & ANSWERS

·         Make your maps smaller so you can show everything on one screen instead of having the player scroll around to see the whole map.

·         There’s no secret formula to balancing a roguelike. Just play it a lot, find the exploits, and fix them.

·         Should developers strive for balance between different classes? Yes, but sometimes there’s no way to achieve fair balance. So the classes can be considered different difficulty settings and some players play the weaker characters for a challenge.

·         Michael’s games are associated with noise and glitches. This is mostly because he develops his games all by himself and there’s no other person there to fix the bugs for him. He’ll see the bugs and get inspired to continue along with them.

·         There’s nothing ethically wrong with killing things in a game because they’re symbols. Players are sociopathic in the game when they go around killing everything, but this doesn’t mean that the behavior bleeds out into the real world.

·         Smiley face chosen as the avatar because he has three hit points and it was a convenient way to show it.

·         Michael has a very bullheaded art style. Everybody thinks his art is ugly right up until the moment that they realize it’s beautiful.

Practice 2013: Designing Narrative Choice

Narrative and simulation in Versu (by Emily Short)

·         Modeling social physics and behaviors (shyness, aggressiveness)

·         Goes through interactive fiction, but without the text adventure missions.

·         With Versu, the author models characters with characteristics and they act appropriately based on their personalities and on consequences that would benefit them.

·         Failure – simulation runs completely off rails

o   During a scene where you’re talking to one character, two NPCs in another room get into a fight and one murders the other. This breaks the story that the author intended.

·         Failure – simulation doesn’t affect narrative

o   Your boss starts assigning you to a task, he gets on your nerves and you punch him, but the scene ends and the boss ends up shaking your hand and telling you you’ve done a great job.

·         Failure – narrative doesn’t affect simulation

o   Character who is kind of a player get dramatically rejected and re-examines his view on life and women. But still has the same hitting-on-people affordances as ever.

o   Solution – when you choose actions, your character’s traits will change and later action options will reflect the new traits.

 (by Sean Vanaman and Jake Rodkin – co-creators of IdleThumbs and Campo Santo)

·         Walking Dead is an adventure game. You make dialogue choices on a timer, you solve puzzles, you explore spaces, you are given choices that you often cannot remake, choices are about exposition

·         Criteria for designing impactful and meaningful choice, choice is the main verb of the game

·         What is the purpose of narrative choice in a game? marketing (you choose what happens!), empowerment (you are powerful and in control!), player agency (how do you feel and what do you want?)

·         What makes a well-designed choice? 1) Allows the player to express herself in the game, 2) fits within production scope, 3) entertain, enlighten, teach, or surprise the player

·         Entertain/Delight/Surprise

o   In a adventure game, choices that surprise the player are the most important. It’s like the shooting in a FPS or the jumping in a platforming game.

o   Telltales inspired by Monkey Island. What players talked about were the choices that they got to say in that game. Walking Dead tries to give the player really delicious dialogue choices and really fun things to do.

o   Choices illuminate things about the characters. What characters could say (but don’t) tells us who they are.

o   Choice is a form of player expression.

o   Gives players the room to determine how they feel, and a way to tell it to the game. Deliberately doesn’t give a value judgment to the game. There’s no light side or dark side.

o   Walking Dead is effectively a corridor you walk down, you decide how you will walk down that corridor, and the game doesn’t give value judgments to any of your choices. It is very similar toDishonored in that way.

·         Production scope

o   If you decide everything that will happen, you will go insane.  You will accidentally produce a simulation instead of a story, or a simulacrum of a simulation.

o   Montage effect – multiple inputs and one outcome, but will produce multiple stories. At the end of the talk, we can applaud, give a standing ovation, walk out, or call bullshit. If the speakers cry to any of the choices, it will create four different stories.

DISCUSSION

·         Story driven games start with characters. Stories can happen devoid of any specific characters.

·         The specificity of characters is something very interesting. The character you embody and how you make him react is game design.

·         People walked out during the development of Walking Dead because they said it wasn’t a game.

·         Does the breadth of options stunt the player? Do not give choices that are not interesting or not relevant to the story. Make the choices have real consequence.

·         Warren Spector doesn’t care about whys and hows people get through a section, but what they do to get there. Walking Dead only cares about the whys and hows.

·         Don’t care about the debate between simulation and emulation. They just want an emotional response in the player.

·         “It’s good for the choices to be surprising, but not surprisingly surprising. The second derivative of that should be zero.” – Emily Short

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

·         Warren Spector’s talk was really about having characters and objects respond naturally to your actions. Walking Dead was a genius piece of work. The game made players embody Lee’s skin and the most powerful choices were the ones that made you contemplate yourself as a human being. The game also illuminated skill from choice and consequences, and the worst parts of the game are the skill parts.

·         The writers of Walking Dead wanted to remove the skill parts of the game every single day, but there was a lot of pushback.

·         There were no zombies in the Walking Dead DLC, but nobody ever noticed besides marketing.

·         Kentucky Route Zero lets you choose what the story will be, and not what the characters do. It feels more intellectual than emotional.

·         In their latest game, you play as a character and form relationships with other characters as you talk to them.

·         Walking Dead felt like a disjointed movie. How do you create enough conflict in the story, yet players are constantly trying to resolve the conflicts as soon as possible? Get the player to feel “I didn’t get everything that I wanted, but I did everything that I could.” Playing lots of tabletop role-playing games (Polaris, Shock) where players do something and the game never fails you for it, but your actions have some other consequence that the player might not have expected.

·         Walking Dead is a polarizing game and many people do not like it. To them, the choices do not matter. Game designers cannot have every action be solutions because it would wrap up the game too nicely and the game ends in 5 minutes. Make people feel like they are working towards something (building a specific relationship).

·         Expressive/reflective choices – do not have systemic consequences but it’s a way for the player to express themselves.

·         Dota, Minecraft, and Day Z are systemic, emergent games. Dishonored is often brought up as the example, but it still starts with a movie and there are several movies within in.

Practice 2013: Designing a Legacy Game

Permanence and Balance (by Rob Daviau)

·         What are the assumptions people have when they play a game?

·         How to spend four times longer designing your game so that your players end thinking the designer is an idiot

·         Heroscape, Betrayal at the House on the Hill, Clue, Risk, Axis & Allies, Risk Legacy, Seafall

·         Legacy game = actions you take in one game has effects on future games (upgrading cards with stickers, destroying cards, writing on the board), everything is permanent, it’s a one way trip

·         Make all the assumptions you can about a game or genre (obvious and unexpected), write them down, then say “what if” and turn them on their heads

·         Assumptions about worker placement (Lords of Waterdeep) = you place your own workers, your workers work for free, workers take one action, there can only be one worker per space, workers automatically come back to you, everyone has workers, your workers do whatever you say, you want to place your workers, your workers like working for you, you don’t work for them, your workers won’t quit, your worker won’t murder anyone, your worker won’t steal cash from you, the game comes with workers, you can see the workers

·         An unexpected idea from Clue = swear Mustard does it about 2/3 of the time, Why do we keep inviting him to the dinner party? Why do games reset each time we play them? What if a game doesn’t fully return to its start state every time? What if one game could affect the next?

·         Legacy game - A way to tell a story, the story of a world as told by the armies fighting on it, a way to get a group to really own their game, a way to codify “remember that time…”, a challenge to Rob himself…

·         Why permanence? If you play board games, you are doing it already. Ups the stakes and makes people care from the beginning. Changes the tone and makes the world real and unique.

·         Cardboard and plastic are not special, the experience and design is special

·         Why Risk? It’s known, it’s solved, it was a Hasbro brand, Rob had done 6Risk games before, Risk already has a metagame

·         How do you design and balance a game with permanence? You don’t. It’s about recognizing it can’t be balanced, at least not by the designer.

·         An incomplete game – legacy games are about 80% done when they ship, let the players finish the last 20% as players (not designers), the rules enable players to complete it by playing, these rules need to also allow them to balance it.

·         “You can’t predict what one person will do, but you can predict what most people will do in the future” – Asimov’s foundation

·         Risk Legacy runs for 15 games (enough to feel epic, but not long enough to feel daunting).

·         Wrong = random permanence (roll to nuke a country), every decision needs to be on the player’s hands. Right = chosen permanence (scar cards), players choose when to nuke, player controlled city locations

·         Wrong = gimmicks without a point (recording winners, naming continents, naming cities). Right = gimmicks with a point (recorded winners get one missile per win, named continents get +1 power, named cities are players starting spot).

·         Wrong = it didn’t change enough (factions didn’t change, there were few board changes that were too powerful), too much too soon. Right = locked up content that players earn by achieving things, this prevented people from using all the permanent changes in the start of the game.

·         Right = using a “solved” game like Risk, players don’t own factions, unpredictability with unlocks, introducing a draft, pulling from non-games (cliffhangers), gimmicks (do not open, ever), unboxing turned into a ritual

·         “Do not open ever” used to be “do not open until instructed” but he realized he would kill some gamers who go through the rulebooks so many times. People came up with house rules to open up the last packet.

·         Unboxing – the box is closed with a sticker (NOTE: what’s done can never be undone), you have to sign the back of the board and say you take responsibility for what’s about to happen, every faction has a choice of two powers (you pick one and tear up the other one), you must sticker the power factions at the start (you can balance the game yourself)

·         How do you balance 15 games? You can’t but players can, but players don’t always do a good job of it, some people mess it up completely.

·         Left Hasbro to start Ironfist Games, working on Seafall: A Legacy Game

·         Based on the unknown, finding islands

·         Design objective = people to find islands but not too quickly, finding islands to be a viable path to victory, more research and preparation to lead to greater but not guaranteed chance of success. Did not want it to be blind luck, to be pure skill, or a big letdown if you don’t find one.

o   Started with a Carcassonne idea where people had tiles and placed their own, but it was too uncontrolled for the designer.

o   Then made a hex based grid with only an island on each column.

o   Made a deck building game, but it was too much card counting.

o   Made a dice pool system.

o   Made a whole separate mini-game, put tokens down to “zoom in” to how the ship is doing. But the rules became so long and complicated.

o   Went back to a dice pool system, but as you go west, it gets harder to hit the number. You can play cards to get a fixed dice roll. So you can rely on luck, or some control. If you fail your roll for an island, you’ll still find something (rock, pirates, etc.)

QUESTION AND ANSWER

·         Designing player experiences vs. systems. It’s not exactly a dichotomy. In a successful game, aesthetics and mechanics are in service of each other and integrate together to become expressive. Board games are narrative toolbox and have inherent randomness to them. Rob wants players to talk about the narrative story the next day instead of the mechanics. Risk Legacy is not an elegant game at all, but it’s meant to be unpredictable narratives with unexpected outcomes.

·         Betrayal at House on the Hill captures the sense of unknown and mystery.Seafall also captures the sense of wonder. Rob starts design from theme, and finds the mechanics to fit the thematic.

·         Legacy games don’t work well if the players swap out between games.

·         Role playing games shouldn’t have rules, they should have guidelines. Board games can’t crash if the rules were played wrong.

·         Written rules should be quick enough to get started, but thorough enough to use while players are playing. It’s very hard to find the balance between the two, and it’s not a solved problem.

·         Bernie Dekoven’s new games movement. He turns the rules explanation into a performance.

·         Digital board games have many problems. The screen is too small, you lose something when it goes completely 2D, private information is hard.

·         Was Risk Legacy playtested with people who never played Risk before? No, because it was assumed this was a hobby market game. Seafall is a much more complicated system so the rules will be introduced very slowly. Creating an advent calendar for what you discover at the island. The gambling and the unknown really engages people.

·         Emergent narrative vs. elegant game design. They’re not opposed. It’s not binary, it’s a continuum.

·         Some board games are just math covered with graphics. They are for people who like the system.

·         The rules to role playing games are nebulous. It’s about the experience.