Scotland Yard / Letters from Whitechapel – These two are effectively the same, and they are the classic “hidden position” games that are definitive of the genre. While they may be a little dry for this modern era, the mechanics are still sound and worth checking out.
Fury of Dracula – If you want to take the concept of Dead by Daylight and see it from the other side—a team of hunters chasing down one evil monster—then Fury of Dracula is a great game. It’s a little on the long side, and a little complex at points, but it could still be considered a modern classic.
Mall of Horror – Mall of Horror was a big inspiration for the final board shape and movement of Dead by Daylight: The Board Game. In this game, you control a group of Survivors trying to escape from automated zombies by working with and against other Survivors. It’s a great game and definitely one worth playing. There’s also a sequel, City of Horror, but the original is still my personal preference.
Escape from the Aliens in Outer Space – Escape from the Aliens in Outer Space is a secret-movement game taken to its extreme conclusion. Playing this was actually a big factor in deciding not to use secret positioning mechanics in the game. The game is good—don’t get me wrong—but it really shows how much overhead and focus is required to make this mechanic meaningful. We didn’t feel that level of complexity was a good fit for Dead by Daylight, which is a much more confrontational experience.]]>These two factors make building interesting Survivors a lot tougher. However, players will be Survivors four times as often as they’ll be playing Killers, so making the Survivors interesting and thematic is a big deal.
A Survivor’s most important feature, in terms of mechanics, is their signature perk. This usually encompasses their main strategic identity. The other two perks provide options that support this game plan.
For example, Dwight’s signature perk, Prove Thyself, lets him give bonus actions to his nearby allies. This puts him firmly in the camp of support characters (specifically, generator repair support, because that’s where 90% of those bonus actions are going). His other perks build on this theme by giving him extra movement options and luck mitigation based on other characters.
One of the most fun ways to play Dead by Daylight™: The Board Game, is Devout mode. This is where you get a handful of perks and can customize your characters. Survivors and the Killer can customize their characters by covering some of the printed perks with these cards, and leaving others exposed. Of course, the signature perk is often the one you want to keep available, but the thematic cohesion of a Survivor’s kit means that a Survivor is still going to retain a significant portion of their identity even with one or two perks covered.
You might even discover a build that lets you use those supporting perks in a brand new way!
Are you curious to see how some of the Survivor identities translated into board game form? Here are a few of my favorites:
Yui Kimura is a high-risk, high-reward character who can sacrifice her health to take extra turns with Any Means Necessary. Her signature perk, Breakout lets her move any wounded Survivor, which can be useful both to herself and allies for escaping chases and clearing generators. Lucky Break lets her instantly recover when a Great Success is rolled by anyone, preparing her to take more bonus turns in the future.
Jane Romero is a powerful support character, based on her signature perk, Poised. This perk gives players bonus turns when they roll a critical success. She can also use Solidarity to heal at range. Her third perk, Head On, synergizes with these, because the ranged nature of her other perks allows her to stick close to lockers and focus her personal attention on confounding the Killer’s efforts.
David King’s aggressive play style took a lot of work to get right. All of his perks interact with and disrupt the Killer, and they’re also very BP-intensive. This means David is going to spend a lot of time cleansing hex totems to keep his abilities online. David’s abilities force the Killer to focus on him. He is very good at protecting others and upsetting the Killer’s movement, so he forces himself to become a primary target. As you might imagine, he synergizes well with Survivors like Claudette and Jane who can reliably keep him healthy.
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The key challenge of designing Killer mechanics comes from the limited objectives of the Killers and Survivors. Killers want to sacrifice Survivors, and Survivors want to finish generators and escape the trial. So all Killer Powers must either support, thwart, or subvert these objectives in some unique way. With 16 Killers in the game, this requires a bit of ingenuity and a lot of testing!
When building a Killer, we have to devise a Killer Power, as well as three unique perks that support that gameplan. Those also need to all be at least thematically related to what the Killer is doing in the original video game as well.
For Killers appearing in the retail edition of the game, we went with a fairly straightforward translation of mechanics. The Nurse can teleport from room to room, the Trapper has bear traps that catch moving Survivors, and the Hillbilly has a chainsaw that lets him move and attack at the same time.
For those appearing in the collector’s edition, we took more liberties. For example, Trickster, Huntress, Plague, and Deathslinger all have fundamentally the same ability—to attack at range. So how do we make them feel unique while still capturing the essential thematics of the video game? We introduce some more traditional board game mechanics into the mix.
The Huntress got the ranged attack you would expect—force a Survivor to roll the die, and on a bad roll they get wounded.
Deathslinger got something a bit trickier—a secret selection game that gets tougher the less he has moved during the turn. Redeemer (Deathslinger’s weapon) also functions to secure sacrifices instead of wounds, setting a nice contrast to Huntress’s hatchets.
Plague ended up becoming an area control character more like Trapper or Hag, with the focus being on infecting the area around her. Plague’s Vile Purge goes onto a Survivor’s perks when they pick it up, blocking access to those abilities.
As for Trickster, we gave his knives the power to reduce a Survivor’s maximum Bloodpoints. This shuts off access to many perks. Trickster’s own perks punish Survivors who don’t have or can’t spend Bloodpoints, making him an economy-focused Killer.
Designing Killer perks was a tough balancing act as well. Killers typically have a steady stream of Bloodpoints available to them, and so can use their perks quite often. The challenge is to design perks that are meaningful, able to be used regularly, but not so oppressive that they completely shut down Survivors. The ideal Killer perk is one that changes Survivor behavior and forces them to adapt.
I’m really proud of the design team’s work on each of the Killer’s signature perks (the one in purple on their boards). These perks actually contain a significant portion of the Killer’s identity and power budget, and really bring that Killer to life.
My personal favorite Killer perk is Legion’s signature perk: Mad Grit. This perk allows you to attack while carrying a Survivor, and adds a really interesting risk-reward to the normal carry sequence in the game.
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Last week, I shared some mechanics that made it into the final game. This week, I’ll talk about the ones that didn’t.
These mechanics were “sacrificed in the basement,” so that a better, faster, and more focused game could fill the space they left behind.
In the video game, there’s a concept of individual victory or defeat for Survivors, and a sort of graduated victory for Killers. If two Survivors escape and two are sacrificed, the Killer gets a rating that effectively reads “2 out of 4 ain’t bad”, but they have to decide for themselves if they really ‘won’ or ‘lost’.
In the board game, however, The Trial is a much tighter and closed system. We don’t have out-of-game rewards like the Bloodweb or The Archives to give meaning to a defeat. Similarly, any secondary objectives would throw the balance of the game—the Survivors and Killer in the board game are on very tight schedules, and any kind of meaningful diversion (say, “hide in a locker 4 times”) is effectively throwing the game to the other side.
Last but not least, the players of the board game are together in real life. They can’t just jump in another queue after dying, or start up a side game. It was important to keep each player invested and engaged through the whole experience. That meant that we had to make a much more stark victory condition. Either the Killer succeeds and summons The Entity, or all of the Survivors win together by opening the doors.
Earlier on, we had the opportunity for Survivors to escape through the door once it was opened. We also had hatches where some Survivors could escape early. But in the end, we decided to end the game at the opening of the doors. At that moment, it’s very clear whether the Killer is going to get a Survivor before they reach the door or not, and it’s just not very interesting for the other Survivors to watch that last chase play out.
I mentioned in an earlier blog that The Archives and Charms were imagined as a sort of legacy mechanic for the game, and that Survivors and Killers could gain access to more skills and items as they played.
As noted above though, the game turned out to be very tight. If one side or the other had meaningful material advantages (such as extra perks, extra starting bloodpoints, etc), it just wasn’t fun to go up against them. If the advantages weren’t meaningful, they would just be needless complexity.
Offerings were considered briefly as a way to create scenarios by modifying the setup of the board. Ultimately, however, the board setup wasn’t really meaningful—it matters whether you choose to look for Generators or Lockers, but it doesn’t matter much whether those props are in one space or another. In the end, we didn’t feel that setup options made the game significantly more fun than playing a randomized board—they just added another layer of complication to an otherwise clean setup.
Killer Items (specifically Iridescent items) were designed as alternate Killer Powers for each of the 16 Killers. However, there wasn’t enough time to properly test all of this content and still hit our target release date. As I mentioned earlier, if we’re not confident that a component will be good and balanced in 19 out of 20 plays, we cut it. So this was one of those unfortunate cuts. If we do ever do an expansion for the game, this is one of the first things I’ll lobby to put into that box.
Originally, we planned for a 2-player mode to go into the box. However, the final game supports only 3–5 players. After numerous tests, we found that operating all four Survivors at once was just not very fun. Very skilled gamers could handle it, but even for them it was stressful and they were likely to have a sub-par experience. Because of that, we decided to cut the mode entirely.
Putting a wider player count on the box is nice for sales, but when you put that on the box, people expect to be able to open the box, play it at that player count, and get the best experience the game has to offer. We felt that 2-player wasn’t consistently delivering, so we cut it. Of course, experienced players can still house-rule it back in quite easily.
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So there you have it! It feels like a lot, doesn't it? In designing a game, what's left out is just as important as what's left in. While a lot of this stuff seems cool (and it was cool!), it's hard to imagine teaching all these details before a first game, or sharing them with casual players.
We had to make a lot of tough decisions to create a game that would be right for players of all types. In the end, the game is better for these omissions, because it remains a fast, focused experience that you can play again and again.
]]>In this blog post, I’ll reveal how some of those mechanics evolved. I already talked in the previous blog about Hidden Information. Some other key mechanics that underwent vast changes were Perks, Generators, Carrying, and Hooking.
Early versions of perks were based exclusively on the Prop System. These perks gave you new ways to interact with the existing props. Way back, boards had 30 or so spaces, and each space held one prop, so the ability to interact with a prop in two ways rather than just one was a pretty big deal. However, as the map became more condensed and abstract, the props became consolidated into a few large spaces, and players had plenty of choices to make each turn.
Beyond that, having to wait until you found the right prop to use a perk was a bit lame. You might go a whole game and not get to see your character’s special powers. So to better fit with the ubiquity of perks in the video game, we decided to transform these one-off abilities into persistent combo pieces that formed the character’s strategic identity.
The decision to power perks with Bloodpoints came fairly late, and we actually resisted a currency like this for a long time. However, too many interesting opportunities were hedged out by having not enough balancing levers. Using Bloodpoints allowed a larger and more interesting range of perks to make it into the game.
Generators persisted pretty much the same throughout the development. What changed was that Survivors became required to move in order to interact with them.
While working a generator until it’s finished is a tactic in the video game, sitting still and working a gen for 3 rounds doesn’t make for very entertaining play (or very smart play) in a game that is only 8-12 rounds long on average.
However, if you’re an objective-oriented person, it always looks like the right move. We found that game after game, players would stand still for several turns, get hooked, and then have a poor experience because they didn’t get to really interact with the game.
For this reason, we decided to force Survivors to move every turn before interacting. Though it’s got no basis in the video game, the constant movement makes play much more satisfying as a Survivor and more interesting as a Killer.
Often in board games, we find that directly preventing players from making bad or uninteresting moves dramatically improves the experience. You don’t want to tell a player “hey, you can move or not, it’s up to you,” when in almost every situation moving is the correct answer and the other option is just a trap.
Bloodlust is a mechanic in the video game where Killers begin to run faster if they’ve been focused on a Survivor long enough. This helps chases to end and helps close out games. In the board game, we played around with various incarnations of this mechanic, but it reached its final form as Killer Bonus Turns. If the Survivors have made enough noise (rolling skulls on skill checks or disturbing crows), or the Killer has used certain perks or props, they build up Bloodpoints. With enough, they can take a third turn, effectively mirroring how bloodlust speeds up their movement.
Carrying underwent significant changes through development. In early versions, the round could end with a player in the Killer’s grip. While it was fun to let them play a card and influence the Killer’s movement, or to let the Killer go around and continue attacking while searching for a hook, the situation didn’t really serve either side—Killers weren’t advancing their goals, and Survivors were getting taken out of the action and missing turns. It also put a very large focus (and a similarly large section of rules) related to a single Survivor’s situation that wasn’t really all that common or relevant compared to the other activities Killers and Survivors were doing.
In many older versions, there was also the concept of slugging (wounding a Survivor a second time so they have to crawl along the ground). But having 5 statuses (healthy, wounded, slugged, carried, hooked) was just too much detail for the scope of the game we were going for.
In the final game, we settled on just 3 states: Healthy, Wounded, and Hooked. When a wounded character is attacked again, they enter a ‘pick up sequence’ which either resolves with the Survivor getting hooked or getting away, all in just a single roll of the dice. This kept the game moving at a brisk pace, while greatly reducing rules associated with one of the most complex aspects of the source material.
I hope that this look at what made it into the game has been interesting! Next week, I’ll share with you some of the mechanics that got left in the basement.
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One of the biggest aspects of building Dead by Daylight: The Board Game was information control. In the original video game, individual Survivors and Killers have their positions hidden. Due to perks or innate abilities, each side may also have some knowledge of the secret layout of the trial grounds as well.
In this game of “High Stakes Hide and Seek”, what information do we give out, and what information do we need to hide? That was the biggest question to be answered over most of the game’s early versions.
Initial versions were much like Scotland Yard or Battleship. Players each kept their small map of the trial ground hidden, and would call out their moves to share with one another. Players would gain opportunities to look at the map and to discover or reveal information in specific spaces. The downside is that these kinds of hidden information games are long and a bit obtuse. If you go over to the wrong side of the map hunting for Survivors or Generators, the game might be over before you get back. And the game is only really delivering on its promise when the Killer is right on the heels of the Survivors.
Having the board in multiple places was also complex and required a lot of extra components (one for the Survivors to track their position, and one for the Killer to track their position, and more to track what they knew and didn’t know). Besides that, small boards didn’t create the table presence that we were looking for.
In the end, we found that the Killer needed to see Survivors’ positions every turn in order to make the plays that would keep the game moving smoothly forward and keep the mood tense. The only uncertainty that we really needed for this was to obscure the very next move, and so this became the basis for the secret movement selection in the final game.
There’s another dimension to hidden movement as well, and that is that hidden movement is only interesting if you have the tools to speculate on what the other side is going to do. This is how we eventually came to put Props into different categories.
The intention was always that the game’s maps would be randomized, but this created some difficulties. The most obvious was that generators and hooks need to be evenly distributed around the field. The not so obvious is that players need direction early on. Am I going to pursue my objective, look for survival tools, try to interfere with the Killer’s goals, etc. That’s a question that Survivors can’t wait until the mid-game (when most of the map is revealed) to start answering.
With the props in categories, Survivors are able to reliably find what they’re looking for, but they still have to do the legwork. And with only a few props revealed each turn, the best way to guarantee that you’ll get a prop you need is to go to one that’s already revealed. Thus, the Killer can predict Survivors’ movements by looking at their immediate objectives and play style, and by considering the revealed props in each space.
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At Level 99 Games, we build games in two phases.
Design is where we do the planning and the concept testing. We make sure the rules and the big ideas of the game are just right.
Development is where we fill in the contents of the game and smooth out rough edges in the rules.
Throughout this process, we try to think about the game as a product that people are going to use. One of the interesting features of board games is that they have to be operated by players. In a video game, the platform (a computer, console, or phone) is separate from the player, but in a board game, the player is also in charge of understanding and enforcing all of the game’s rules.
Because of this, one of the most important tasks in design is ensuring accessibility. The game must not be overly complicated, nor should it be difficult to set up, teach, or learn. Furthermore, the game’s components must also follow this rule. It is always good to use fewer components, each with a clear purpose, and to organize them into fewer boxes. It was understood from the very start that the core game rules would need to fit on one page, though the form of that page changed a lot over the course of the design.
This goal is complicated by the aspect of marketing, because much of the value proposition of a board game is tied up in its components. As much as we are willing to pay top dollar for a great novel, movie ticket, or video game, most buyers in our market don’t recognize great board game design alone as being worth the price of admission the way they do in other media. A board game’s price is determined by the size of its box and the components therein more than any other factor.
Thus, we must build ‘the product’—the game as it is on shelves—by balancing the three competing dimensions of accessibility, material cost, and apparent value.
The catch phrase we pitched to Behaviour Interactive was a “Functional Collector’s Item,” and that became a guiding principle in design. Early on in design, we had initial plans for legacy modes and character growth, like what exists in the video game. However, we decided not to pursue these options because anything that would alter the game would go against the idea of the game as a collector’s item.
There’s a certain evil tendency in the tabletop industry to make more and more—even when more is less from a player perspective. Indeed, the prospect of making every DBD chapter into a separate small box was floated and eventually scrapped as an idea. There were similar talks for legacy, fully cooperative, and solo modes.
“Too big to play”, otherwise known as “Kickstarter bloat” is a common problem that plagues modern board games. With Dead by Daylight, we decided that making the best possible game meant making a game of the right size—one box with everything, at a reasonable price, without a ton of modes, variants, and options.
Our rule of thumb for cutting content is pretty strict. If 80% of tables won’t ever use this component/mode/character, then we’re not going to include it. Furthermore, if this component/mode/character doesn’t lead to a fun game experience 95% of the time, we’re not going to include it.
All of these considerations and more came together as we designed not just a game, but the product that would encapsulate it and deliver that game to your tabletop. I’m really proud of the final product the team has put together. It’s a great game, at a great price. But it’s also just the right amount of game–tons of replayability without excessive bloat.
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In April of 2021, our team at Level 99 Games was getting into Dead by Daylight. The All-Kill chapter had just been released, and it was the video game that we talked about at board game nights. The gameplay sounded interesting, and I too got sucked into the game. Between matches, I started writing the first notes on what would become the official Dead by Daylight board game.
That game looks very different than what we would eventually create. The path we took to get there was an interesting one.
In designing a game, the first thing to nail down is the experience you’re going to create. A good place to start is to reverse the question you’re asking: If Dead by Daylight the video game were based on a board game, what kind of game would that be? That’s the game we set out to design.
I imagine that this primordial Dead by Daylight board game must be something like the horror version of Jumanji. Clearly a board game, but one with a dark tone and with somewhat old-fashioned mechanics which are familiar to anyone who has participated in a board game before. It has cards that are weathered and feature simple icons, dice with a slightly odd design, and figures that inspire a bit of unnerving terror.
We also needed to think about who was going to play this game. There are a lot of very large board games out there, and all the best video games especially seem to spawn large board game adaptations.
However, having participated in a few of these big projects from the outside, I felt that playability was more important than spectacle. We wanted a game that could hit the table. Something you could teach, play, and clean-up in under an hour. A game that would become a staple of late October nights, rather than a spectacle that collects dust on the shelf.
So rather than design a gigantic game for a select group of collectors, we set out to build Dead by Daylight™: The Board Game as something the average Dead by Daylight player would be interested in owning and playing with their friends. Furthermore, we wanted it to be something light-to-medium weight in terms of complexity—deep enough for players who enjoy the video game, but approachable even if your only board game experiences are Monopoly and Risk.
Early versions of the game were pitched as “Cooperative Murder Battleship”, in which Survivors and Killers used hidden information and false cues to confuse the other side while they pursued their objectives. After many trials and errors, these prototypes evolved into the final game that you see today.
Here’s a look at how some of the original components measure up to their final counterparts.
As you can see, some things changed quite a bit, while others remained quite a bit the same. Because we had a clear vision of the game’s experience and play style right at the start, many of the groundwork designs were able to carry all the way to production, despite changing mechanics.
]]>Within a game, players have many actions at their disposal. These actions may be small or large, but each one is a single part of a player’s strategy.
But what is strategy?
Strategy is the imagined path between the player’s current state and their goal. More simply even, strategy is the player’s intention.
If laying a railroad track is an action, then building a route from Paris to Madrid is a strategy.
Within large games with many interconnected systems, strategies can be nested within one another.
I have to build from Paris to Madrid so I can take advantage of a supply-demand imbalance between the cities, so I can make money faster than everyone else and outbid them on rocket parts, so I can be first to the moon.
This chain of strategy charts the player’s course to victory (hopefully). There may be adjustments to deal with different players, new information, or course correction that drives a change in strategy. However, it is important that at any given moment within the game, the player can and should have a strategy in mind.
There are three major uses for Strategy-Centered thinking as you design.
The first is directly related to player experience. Given the player’s knowledge of the game state, systems, and game goal, are they able to form and articulate a cohesive strategy? If the game is too complex or obtuse for players to form a strategy, the game won’t be able to deliver on its target experience. The formation and execution of strategy is an important benchmark for testing.
The second is to help you understand what the ‘game’ really is. Connected strategies form links of logic, and this is the way players will ultimately come to understand your game. Just start with “I want to win,” then ask “How?” List out those answers, and for each of those, ask again “How?” Very soon you’ll have a web of interconnected links that encompass all the strategic options within your game. Each possible traversal of this web forms a model of how your game might play out.
The third is related to game development. When refining a completed design, the developer can utilize strategy compression to streamline the game in an intuitive way, cutting out useless or mundane activities in order to hone in on the experience.
It is important that players be able to form and articulate a strategy. Once that is done, they must also be able to execute on it.
As much as possible, we want the game to get out of the way and let the players play.
For this reasons, actions should reflect the strategies behind them.
In the train game example, I already know that I want to build a railway from Paris to Madrid. Placing each individual bit of track isn’t a key part of my strategy, it’s just a means to an end. Unless some critical element of experience is tied up in placing those tracks, let’s just build them all as a single action, rather than piece by piece. Now three or four turns have been condensed into one, and the player can spend more time in strategy.
When a game feels tedious or is taking longer than its target play time, strategy compression is a great tool to iron out the experience. Look for opportunities to think like your players, and try to let them pursue their goals in as straightforward a manner as possible.
Another situation for strategy compression is when one action always follows another. Once I build that track and drop a locomotive on it, regardless of what else happens, I’m going to ship things along it every turn.
In this case, we can compress by removing the activity of shipping (which is a given) and just offer the player a lump payout that approximates what they might earn over the course of trading (or perhaps adjust their turn-by-turn income) and avoid the tedium of shipping each turn.
These are just a few ways that building your game around strategies can help to improve game experience, which after all, is the ultimate goal of the designer.
]]>These days, we often hear a lot about game mechanics. Some designers choose to start with mechanics, and then consider theme and experience later. This style of “bottom up design” tends to create games which feel ‘mechanical’ or ‘math-y’.
Not to say that inventing mechanics is a bad idea. When you get a great idea for a mechanic, you should absolutely write it down, and look for a game to use it in.
Rather than talking about mechanics as the fundamental component of gameplay, it’s much more useful to consider systems.
A system is a set of interlinking rules, resources, mechanics, and components that work together to create functionality in a game.
Said more simply, the system is everything that’s in between the player’s strategy (input) and its results upon the game state (output). Systems might be complex or simple, but the game lies in those black boxes. Picking them apart is the fundamental joy of gaming.
In the example above, you can see that Bullet's Pattern system is implemented to achieve specific features. Many components and rules combine together to support this system. Many of those components and rules are re-used by other systems, but this example considers only the context of the Pattern system.
A system can be used to implement the game’s features. A well-built set of systems implementing the features will reliably create the target experience of the game.
The best way to start with a system is to think about how a thing works in the real life. If you’re building an economy for your game, start with real money and think about how it moves in the context of your game. Then go back to your mental list of mechanics, and ask “what mechanics will implement a system like this?”
When prototyping, you can build a prototype that just answers questions about an isolated system, rather than building the whole game.
The place where I like to draw the line between Simple and Complex in terms of systems is when multiple players get involved.
In a Simple system, there is only a single strategy acting on the system. The player should clearly understand the outcome or possible outcomes of their actions.
A system like inventory management or a fixed-price market to exchange resources could be considered Simple. A game like roulette is also a simple system.
Once you have two or more strategies inputting on a system, each trying to achieve different outputs, and largely agnostic of the other inputs, then the system has become Complex. In a Complex system, the output is not so certain, because the interaction of multiple strategies creates the outcome.
In the example with Exceed, no one player understands what outcome their attack will create, because there are multiple inputs working on the system simultaneously. This means that there is a chance for a player to fail, depending on the conditions of the other strategy.
Contrast this with Bullet's Patterns above—when a player wants to use a pattern, the outcome of the action is very clear. When a player wants to strike in Exceed, the outcome is less certain. That uncertainty is a hallmark of complex game systems.
The system fulfills the target experience if both the inputs and outputs map logically according to their real-world experience or understanding.
For example, I know that in the real world, when someone else gets in line first for a haircut, I have to wait for them to finish before I get my haircut. If there was a second barber, I could also step in and fill their slot. Then the third player would be forced to wait until either barber is free.
Sounds like a game mechanic, right? Worker-Placement mirrors this situation very closely. And that’s where Worker-Placement works—it simulates a real-world problem of a service-commodity with limited supply and competing customers.
When used in systems mirroring this situation, it creates a seamless experience. When used out of place, it feels mechanical.
The barriers between systems are a useful abstraction, but there are no rules or limits on the game designer. You can link systems in any way, so which ways should you?
Said another way, you could make the purchase of a haircut affect the market price of wood if you want to, but it’s probably not a good idea.
Whenever a system uses the game state to determine its output, it becomes linked with any system which can affect that state.
The advantage of using systems is that they remain atomic and are not tightly coupled. Limiting the interconnectedness of the systems will make the game easier to design and easier for your players to understand.
Ideally, it’s good to have multiple different links to keep systems distinct. If buying lumber is only linked to wildlife conservation, the two are effectively one system. If lumber buying is linked to both conservation and to the ability to build dams (which is itself linked to conservation), the systems start to feel more distinct, each one pushing and pulling on the others to create a web of points where the players can apply force.
When linking, try to make the links clean and intuitive. Links between systems should be logical results of the experience you’re creating.
Here's a look at how Millennium Blades links together various game systems into a cohesive whole.
In this article, we talked a lot about inputs and strategies. Next time, we’ll learn about Strategy-Centered Design, and how to wrap your systems around the goals of players.
]]>In designing a game, it’s important to focus on experience.
Why experience? Why not mechanics? Why not theme?
Because players who sit down at the table are sitting down to an experience, and they’re going to judge your work based on whether it delivers the promised experience.
If you pitch an action-packed game about swashbuckling pirates, but your actual gameplay is picking up and delivering treasure chests while upgrading your ship, you might make a great game, but it’s not going to deliver the experience. People will just say “I expected more action-packed swashbuckling.”
Experience is the fusion of everything—does the combination of theme and systems, weighed against complexity and accessibility—deliver a net positive outcome for each player at the table?
That’s our goal—maximize the percentage of plays that deliver a great experience fulfilling our promise. The higher we can push this number, the better the game.
This is good news for the designer.
It doesn’t matter what the trends and fads are.
It doesn’t matter what mechanics you choose or invent.
It doesn’t matter if your design is extremely complex or dead simple.
All you need to do is make a promise to your players and keep it.
Experiences can be tricky things to describe, but the best way to start is the classic elevator pitch.
Describe your game in thirty seconds. Avoid game-specific terms like mechanics and genre, and instead focus on the feeling that the game is going to create. For example:
Once you’ve got the experience, you can proceed with supporting features. What activities are critical to achieving the experience that you proposed up above?
For the survival horror game, we might need a system for brutal, disabling wounds, a system for limiting ammunition, a system for crafting things from scavenged resources, etc.
For the colony game, we would probably need a way to build the base, a method for trading with the other players and an open market, and a way to score your total economic output. These and other activities comprise the feature list for the game.
This is a time to brainstorm. List out all the possible activities, then go through your list and put a mark by the ones that are absolutely critical to the game, and cross out any that just don’t seem that important. The rest will be take-it-or-leave it, depending on the size of your game.
Now the next critical question: What will the actual product look like? Is this a big table-hog, or a lightweight card game? Does it play 4–5 players, or 2–10? Will it be complex and crunchy, or streamlined?
A few questions to answer:
And keep in mind as you develop your own process that you may want to add more questions of your own!
Those Metrics will help you figure out how many of the discretionary features you can afford to pack in. If you’re making a big box, you can have a lot. A smaller game should try to be as spartan as possible.
You may even decide that some of the features are exciting enough, but also tangential enough, that they ought to be placed in an expansion rather than a base game.
The Metrics will also help to guide your next big task, which is assigning systems to implement each of the selected Features. I’ll be covering the details of that process in my next post!
]]>But that answer is kind of deceptive and in some ways even destructive. You may spend any amount of time working on games, but if you don’t have a clear process or goal in mind, the end result will be unfocused. If you spend all your time making games, and not observing and improving your process from the outside in, you don’t improve.
It is one thing to hone a skill, which you can do by playing and designing. It is another thing to master a craft, which requires deliberate observation, planning, and refinement. Ultimately, you must become two people: one who performs the design work, and another who observes the work process and endeavors to improve it.
Making a game without a process is like building the walls of a house without blueprints or a foundation. Time is just wasted. No amount of doing that can make you a good architect.
And that’s what being a designer is really about. You are the architect that is planning and executing a complex game—or a whole line of games. Your craft is not the games themselves, but the process that you create to consistently produce great games.
There are three major parts to the Design Process.
One part is planning the game. This is where you create the concept, experience, and systems.
The second part is design. This is where you prove that the systems you’ve imagined can deliver the experience you’ve promised.
The third part of the process is development, where the finished design is refined so that it creates a consistently great experience.
It’s useful to complete as much of each of these steps as possible before you move on to the next, as revisions become significantly tougher and more involved at each layer.
Before anything else, it’s useful to gather ideas and organize them. Collect ideas from everywhere you go and anything that inspires you. Consider how these might be arranged together to create a game experience.
Try to play out the game in your mind, or do a “white prototype” with blank index cards and simple rules (also called “calvin-balling”). It only takes a little work to understand if the majority of the game is going to be successful once it hits the table.
Creation is the process of hypothesis, observation, integration, and repetition. It is an iterative, scientific process.
Create your prototypes as quickly and simply as possible, and most importantly, create them with a goal in mind.
Many designers create a game and bring it to the table without a goal. The assumption is that they’ll “know when it’s ready” by the fun they’re having. However, fun is a finicky thing. The right group will have fun with a deck of playing cards, and the wrong group won’t find fun in a masterpiece of game design.
Temper a trust of your gut instincts with a bit of scientific hypothesis and testing.
“What do I need to prove to know that this game is ready for press?”—That’s the starting question to ask yourself. Write out a big list of everything you need to know or prove before you assume a game is done.
Build your prototypes to answer these questions quickly and efficiently, and you’ll be on your way to building a great process. In future games, you’ll begin to see patterns emerge in the most important questions and their outcomes.
This process is sound in both design and development. Though your goals will differ, the method of hypothesis, testing, observation, and fine-tuning will serve you well in both phases.
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