Administrative Stuff: A Podcast featuring me...

I made a podcast, it's about games, and stuff.  Download it here

http://www.secondary-fire.com/the-unnamed-podcast-march-7th-2013/

It's still untitled at this point, and since it's the first one, there's definitely a lot of uneven spots.  Please send in comments and suggestions, and we'll see what we can do next time.

Administrative Stuff: Backlogged Post? To post or not to post?

Quick question: I've got quite a few drafts that were never completed (Quick impressions of games from last year, of games that I've completed already). Is there any interest in me actually posting any of them?

Analog Games: Rapid Prototyping at BoardGameJam (The PostMortem)

Personally, there's quiet a few interesting post mortem notes that I think is worthwhile to share:

The Good:

• Splitting off to work on an isolated idea - As selfish as it sounds, boardgame mechanics are so closely tied together and condense that having too many cooks in the kitchen can spoil the broth. Somewhere in the middle of the development process, it seems to me that having a more singular voice in the direction seemed to work well.
• Having a group of people to quickly bounce ideas off of - In contrast to the point above, it was just as important to be able to bounce ideas quickly off someone at any given point: The fuel mechanic and the grid size were definitely solutions I would not have landed on in the first try.
• Test, test, test... - I was budgeting the entire Sunday for testing, and while that fell a bit short, I was still able to get more than two rounds of testing in, which help kick out some of the more obvious problems in the first go.

The Bad:

• Time crunch - Not knowing the exact amount of time I had to work on the game was a major downside.  On both days, instead of the planned closing time, the buildings would close before hand, and making my initial planned schedule "pretty off".
• Not fluent in boardgame design language - While I've played my share of boardgames now, it really still feels like I'm barely scraping the surface of what's out there.  It's that much harder to explore a certain playstyle or genre if I've only seen the best two games that represents the genre.

The Ugly:

• Euro-style games are hard in a jam - These games are hard to demo, hard to play within a 15 minute session, and even harder to make/balance in a matter of two days.  I'm not saying I'm going to stay away from this style of game next time, but yeah.  It's hard.

So yeah, that's a wrap for boardgames for now.  Maybe I'll be back next year with a more polished game.  Thanks to Michael, Doug, Duy, Jason and Jon for that weekend of panic-y fun. For more info, check out http://www.boardgamejam.com.

Analog Games: Rapid Prototyping at BoardGameJam (Part 2)

(This is a continuation of the last post about rapid prototyping a board game at Boardgame Jam last week, you can find that post here)

At the start of day two, I had pre-defined a few more additional stats and base game structure: Each player will start the first round with one food truck in hand (the first four food trucks are equal), in order to prevent initial game starvation for players who didn't bid.

The first playtest

After constructing all the parts needed (food and people tokens) it was off to the races.  We quickly discovered the first stumble block merely by just explaining the basic rules:

• When moving, you must choose a position of a street, but then the cost of relocating on the same street is unfairly high
• Since moves cost 1AP, what happens if you move to a street that is filled with cars?  Is that 2AP? Do you execute both AP immediately?
• Can you bid for more than one food truck within a round?

These weren't exactly showstopper problems, so I gave a quick bandaid fix (yes but no fix, ignore the case for now, yes) and reconsider it for the next playtest.  But within two full rounds, we had to stop the game because of numerous issues that had popped up:

• Limiting only two food trucks to be bidded up on turned to be a very limited tool.  The initial intent of this limit was to drive up scarcity for trucks and cause players to compete in bidding.  However, it ended up being a high stakes scenario that quickly spirals out of control (as noted later)
• Allow a player to buy up both trucks available within a round, when combined with the limitation of only two trucks, served to widen the rich/poor gap in the game. Since the number of trucks represents the number of actions, the more trucks a player has, the more actions they can make at a given turn.
• Since movement and serving food both cost 1AP, it was strategically beneficial to idle certain trucks who are controlling a sparsely populated area.  This resulted in the richer players (once with more AP) to spend movement tokens, whereas others were left waiting, further widening the gap
• The Dice Roll mechanic used to spawn customer location (2 sets of D4 rolls, and computing which coordinate needed the spawning) slowed the game down dramatically during each round.  The setup was fairly slow (and would only get worst as more people are spawned on later rounds)

Back to the drawing board...

With the first playtest completed, it's time to address the problems with different solutions:

• Spawning customer was needlessly complicated by dice roll/coordinate matching.  One quick solution that was suggested was to replace it with a small deck of 16 cards, shuffled every round. This gave the intended randomness, but without the long wait and needless calculations.
• Increase the limit of food trucks in bidding phase to four, and restrict only one bid per turn.  I had shied away from these two rules on bidding because they seemed to be aping the template set by PowerGrid (you'll see this becoming a recurring theme), but it was pretty evident that they were in place as a way to "rubber band" progression.
• Create "fuel token" resource - Just like food tokens, a consumable resource that players must buy and have in inventory before using.  This would then be used to layer on top of the action phase, but instead of 1 AP dictating 1 unit of movement, fuel determines how far a player can go within 1AP.   Movement, therefor is now a function of money and action (in contrast to just action before).  This new feature also fixes the problem with area control in the first revision (moving from one position to another on the same street remained unchanged)

The second playtest

With these rules in place, I had around half an hour to run through a second set (it was a tight schedule).      Once again, we stopped within two rounds, with the following observations:

• Using a card deck to generate the spawning position was a drastic improvement in speeding up setup time.
• Fuel token solved overlapping issue, but the cost associated was high enough that it prevented people from moving
• Having more trucks available definitely let more people buy trucks, but...

• ...since the food truck deck was totally random, it was still boiling down to who's got more money: the person in the lead can expand the fastest and use their biggest truck to grow their resources faster
• the turn order made it too powerful for the leader in a given round: they get first rights to bid, placement, and movement.  
• Linearly scaling the amount of actions per truck still means that the more trucks you have, the more powerful you become
• The cost of the food truck purchases and how many people it served were irrelevant: how much each truck paid out heavily influenced each players' purchasing power.
• Since everyone could have had different action counts, it was hard to keep track

Unfortunately, that was all the time we really had, so that was the end of development.

Lessons learned

I think it was interesting that I was able to distill the main problem down to just rubber banding within two playtests.  I knew from the beginning that the numbers were going to be problematic to balance (and at the current state, none of the cost were actually balanced and some were using my first draft of data).  One regret I had was dialling too many knobs between individual rounds: by changing 3 or more variables, it's hard to tell which was the one that really made the most impact.

One nagging concern I had during the entire development process was thinking of ways to distance myself from mechanics found in PowerGrid (and defaulting to their way of approaching how to balance a game).  It's really interesting to have tried out different ways, and seeing why it doesn't work, and why PowerGrid chose it's numbers and methods to balance the game out.  Right now, I have a list of other things that I would like to try next, and since I'm no longer working under a 48 hour deadline, I'll probably take them slowly:

• Play around with reversing turn order
• Some sort of ranking system (and not use the simple "everyone get's a turn")
• a pseudo-sorted system of trucks
• Multiple food types with differnet cost
• Max limit on carrying food/fuel on each truck
• Implementing action tokens to denote turns
• Get away from linearly scaling action points per truck
• etc...

Analog Games: Rapid Prototyping at BoardGameJam (Part 1)

Last week me and a group of friends attended the 3rd annual BoardGame Jam here in Toronto.  I was interested in doing this 48hr jam because it could have been a good way to learn the process of developing an idea.  I've been working on a boardgame idea for a while now, but have been bogged down by all sorts of random delays, content production, and general "learning curve".  With that in mind, the key goals were:

1. Make a game from scratch (or as close to scratch as possible) from start to finish (as in ready for playable)
2. Try out a new idea/mechanic that I haven't written a doc about before (or thought about extensively)
3. Go through at least one loop of play testing, seeing the feedback process, and iterate on it.

Picking the theme/mechanic:

So part of the entire pre-planning process was me talking to the group and thinking about what we want to do for the jam.  More specifically, I had been thinking about how would one actually come up with an idea.  Personally, I am really a mechanics kind of designer, and instinctively I was thinking about what kind of mechanics I wanted to work on.  

For a while, I had been saying I wanted work on something that uses worker/placement rulesets, but I had really struggled with coming up with a compelling theme/idea to use it.  I think partially, I attribute this to the lack of exposure to the genre outside of the few games I've played.  (And more importantly, thematically, most of them dealt with resources and farming).

So, a few of them ended up suggesting the idea of... "Pimps and Hos".  Yeah.  I'll leave it at that... 

...but, mechanically, it was sound.  A quick re-themeing, and a Food Truck game was born:

The theme/mechanic is quite simple: You run a fleet of food trucks, you serve customers on city blocks, you compete for profit.  That's practically the elevator pitch...

...only problem is that it's not actually a worker/placement game at all!  It's an area control game, with other undetermined game mechanics for other components.

There's a valuable lesson here for me: unlike video games, approaching mechanics -> theme doesn't exactly work; you do want to approach from a theme angle and see where the mechanics organically takes you.

Begin Construction:

I was pretty interested in doing an area control game, as the recent play throughs of both Zombicide and RoboRally had me thinking about the mechanics and concepts with re-configurable maps, so designing a food truck game with this mechanic was a natural fit.

I had decided early on that this would have been multi-configerable tile based experience, but defining how many tiles makes up a map, how the roads would be configured was a much harder challenge.  A few things to keep in mind:

• Tiles needs to connect "most" of the time (repeatable)
• Has varied patterns
• Has patterns to allow "rule based" content generation

The last point is pretty awkwardly written, but in plain english: I need a setup that allows me to "make a map playable" with clean rules that govern "the generation of content and conflict".  In map based game, you see Zombicide's definition of zombie spawn zones and movement heuristic.  Intuitively, I went with a 2x2 road configuration grid per tile, which gave me 4 "corners" (you could use a d8 to determine randomness), and a 4x4 tile size to make the entire map.  4x4 map was quickly scaled down to 3x3, then to 2x2 just because it was a)way too big, and b)too much stuff for me to make.  Road shapes were randomly designed on paper, as was the tile configeration.

One of the key conflicts I was hoping to create in the game was the idea of competing food trucks within the same street/corner.  Multiple players would compete for the same space, so it becomes a competition to see who was there first/faster/better.  The difficulty would have been to define where/how people were spawned, and what how adjacency works as far as "serving people food".

Using the 2x2 road configuration, the food trucks would be positioned on the roads.  Each road would always be connected to an "intersection" where people would be spawned.  Food trucks must be adjacent to the street corner where they served food.  Therefore, people can be generated by a series of d8 rolls that determines which intersection to be spawned at.

Designing individual steps:

Sadly, this is where a time crunch really hurts the "design" process, as I started grabbing quick standby mechanics and ideas from games I'm familiar with, and most notably, Power Grid.  I pretty much lifted the key mechanics, but attempted a different approach on the numbers and ordering.  Trucks were first bought with a bidding process, each truck would have a cost value (which is a strength index value), a "serves" value, and a "revenue" value.  A food resource must be purchased (a constant cost) in order to sell food to people.  Ranking is dropped in favour of a turn order token, and turns are assigned in a clockwise ordering.  Action Points are used in the initiative phase to allow each players various actions in their own turn order, and the turn order within the initiative phase switches between in order and reverse order (a-la Catan rules) to balance out turn advantage.

By adopting a turn counter to limit the game to 12 rounds, I also ended up adopting a chart that dictates how many people are spawned per round, and on how many corners they spawned out of.  This "random additional spawning" is on top of the normal spawning of 1 person per street corner.

In Part 2, I'll go through in detail how the game plays at first iteration (as I'm sure this all doesn't make much sense), and the process of playtest/tweaking... Below is the scratch notes I had at the end of first day (not sure if it's of any interest)

Scratch Design Doc (Day 1):

Food Truck Game

Setup

4 players

Random Generated Map Tiles

2x2 grid

each grid has 4 corners

30 food truck cards - shuffle at start

Total of 12 "rounds"

Win condition: at the end of 12th round, most money wins. If tie, most food trucks wins. If tie, food trucks that can serve the most people wins. If tie, all winners.

map features:

trucks must be on streets

people are spawned in corners

each street segment holds 4 trucks

trucks can serve the intersection they are adjacent to (maximum 8 cars faces any intersection)

Init first loop-

Everyone starts with $40

Every Street Corner will have 1 person

Players deploy Trucks in reverse turn order (Turn order determined by last person to recently eat out of a food truck) Give first player Turn Token

game goes as normal game loop

Loop:

Spawn customers

all street corner corner will generate 1 customer by default, additional done by rolling D8, which determines the tile (row,column), then rolling D8 again to determine street corner on tile (row,column)  Reference the spawn number to add people to that location

spawn more sets based on chart below, place additional people:

Turn	1	2	3	4	5	6
Spawn Type	1,1,1,1	1,1,1,2	1,1,2,2	1,1,2,3	1,2,3,4	2,3,3,4

Turn	7	8	9	10	11	12
Spawn Type	1,2,3,4, 5	1,2,3,3, 4,5	1,2,3,4, 5,6	1,1,2,2, 3,4,5,6	1,1,1,2, 2,3,4,5, 6	1,1,2,2, 3,3,4,5, 6

Spawn #	1	2	3	4	5	6
# of People	2	4	6	8	10	12

Bid on Trucks

- Two trucks are revealed. Players can bid in turn order. Bid on value of card displayed. Highest bidder wins.

- Cards are not replaced, so only two trucks are ever available in any turn.

- Players can pass on turn

- if all cards are gone, bidding ends

- if a card remains once all players have passed/cards are placed in discard pile

Buy Food:

Food has a flat cost of $2 per unit. You can store as many as you want. There is no limit on resource board. Each truck will generate one food for free

Initiative turn:

Each player has 2 +(# of food trucks) action points, they can (all cost 1AP):

- Deploy trucks

- Move trucks

- Serve customers in that corner

Players execute this in turn order, then in reverse turn order... until everyone is out of action points. (IE: 1,2,3,4,4,3,2,1,1,2...etc)

(IE: Peter has 4 food trucks, so he has 6 action points to spend)

- Deploy - If you have bought a truck in this turn (or haven't deployed one), you can deploy it on any street.

- Move Trucks - You can move a truck to an adjacent street (as denoted by roads). Each movement cost 1AP

- Serve customers - Point to the food truck you are serving food out of, exchange food token, remove the appropriate amount of people in that corner, and receive payment as indicated on food truck income value.

Administrative Stuff: Analog Games - A Game Designer Look at Boardgames

In the last two years or so, I've begun playing quite a lot of boardgames with a few different groups.  Naturally, this also created a lot of interest in how boardgames are designed, what mechanics are, etc.  I've started working on a few ideas (and all of them taking far too long to make).  However, since I'm really just making these games for fun, I might as well share my work ideas and thought process through anything I'm working on right now.  You can find these articles under the label: Analog Games.

Administrative Stuff: Quest Abandoned: Quitting Professional Game Development

(Note: This is a cross-post from my livejournal account.  It didn't really quite fit a typical post here, but I figured I should post it here anyways as it's somewhat relevant.  As I mentioned near the bottom, I hope to get some more writing back on here soon.)

Hi.

This is a post I sort of knew I was going to write, and for a thought to be stuck in your head for two years, it's going to be a giant mess of rambling paragraphs and ideas. So, to give you the tl;dr version: I'm done with looking for work within gamedev in a professional level now. It's been two years, I have to move on. I don't have a clue what to do next, but whatever this is right now just isn't "working" (yes, pun intended).(Yes, I'm open to options if you can give me any!) I am very thankful for my family and my friends for putting up with me in the last two years, which I had bummed around more than I should have chasing this mythical beast (and I'm well aware that this is a luxury that most can't afford to take). I don't know how I'll pull out of this, but it's time for me to draw the line and cut my losses now.

What follows below, however, is a much longer rambling set of thoughts on what the last two years has been, what's going on now, and what's next.
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I suppose I should start by also mentioning that the irony of posting this today is not lost on me. Today is the last day for the staff at Tecmo Koei Canada, and I sincerely hope you guys who are left have better luck that I did in landing something you want to do.
(Click here for the other wallpapers in 720p. :P )
Roughly this time two years ago, I was part of a group of downsized employees there. At the time, the company actually had offered a position for me to stay, with them refocused on facebook/social games. I had agonized about this for a good two days: job security is always nice, and I'm always interested in looking at all facets of game design from an educational standpoint, but I was never really keen on the idea of making one. More importantly, with the company moving away from console/handheld development, I fell short of what I wanted to do: be in the process of designing a game, from start to finish. With that in mind and knowing the risk of not being able to find something immediate, I had passed on the position.

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Since then, I've had interviewed/test with 10+ core game studios for various positions in design and programming. While all of them have ended in disappointment (or else I won't be here writing this), every one of them were an absolute morale boost, reminding me of why I wanted to do game design in the first place, and how much talent I had worked with each and every day. One test I was scripting AI, another one involved drawing map layouts, and another one had economy balance, weapon balance, etc. It was thinking in the box, out of the box, next to a box, blowing that box up, and it was both scary and exciting to be doing such tests.

In a way, doing these tests had confirmed what I had already known: as much as I'd like to think I know games and how things works, the lack of actual years of experience, along with actual hands-on years in development will always hurt me in the interview process. Having a series of big name studio closures doesn't help either, as every time I hear that on the news, I could picture my resume get shuffled further and further back in the pile behind more qualified candidates. Trying to explain to friends and family about how interviews went was a nightmare of explaining how you could potentially be a good candidate, but your skill set doesn't match the type of designer they're looking for.
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While job hunting within game dev was an ongoing process, I had figured that I should also spend my time making something. It's practically the template you keep on hearing when big studios close: splinter individuals either form teams or go at it alone in the indie market. With all the unpaid vacation days that I never took, I bought myself a Mac and started doing iOS Dev. For me, it was a good excuse to relearn coding of some sort, and it was probably a good way for me to "experiment with iOS" with ideas and test the waters. At the same time, I've developed an unhealthy addiction to Starbucks.

To date, I've shipped 4 apps and 2 games, with 1 still in the works. I'll be honest - I didn't think there was ANY chance I would make any of my money or time back. The odds of your game making it's money back, even if it's well produced is heavily reliant on the right type of marketing and word of mouth, so, what are the odds of a game designer who can barely code, with no way to pay an artist, programmer, audio, and PR make a breakout hit now? Sure, you've heard of the success stories of these one-man teams who've done breakout hits, but is that even feasible now with the current market, or are you more likely to lose your shirt when betting the farm.

More importantly, sitting here looking at how I approach my version of indie game development, I've come to the conclusion that I don't fit in that "indie" game model either. The indie games that takes on success and finds an audience are games with grand ideas or thematic structures, games that are all too ready to jump out there and scream to the world "this is what a game can be". The type of game design I approach is a much more mechanical, much more traditional way of design: I don't care about sweeping ideas and visions, but rather what makes it fun and engaging, and analyzing the numbers and models behind things. An "indie" game has a design shelf-life of forever: it's a fresh and original look on an idea without a time compromise (as an example, look at how long Fez has been in the works), the games and mechanics I design has a shelf-life: if I'm building on top of what's come before me, I need to be done before someone else also builds on top of that. Note that I'm not saying one is better than the other, but I am recognizing that there is a difference in the two, and my type of design isn't suited for "indie" like games, and it needs more resources for me to scale up onto the iOS market.
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So, this brings us back to full circle: Freemium/Social games. In the last few months, I've really started thinking about whether I should even apply or approach these studios. What's nagged me most about this is whether I want to even bother with these games in the first place. I tell everyone I meet the one and only rule I had with game design: You need to play the types of games you make, and I was this close to breaking that rule. I appreciate people coming in with different skillets and different backgrounds to any large scale development, and it usually makes for a stronger product when taking input into account, BUT, the person who's closest to the core design decisions should also be the someone who care speak for the target audience of the game. I can tell you for a fact that the only Freemium/Social game that I've stuck with in the long run was Pocket Planes/Tiny Towers, only because they don't behave like your typical Freemium/Social games.

Now I understand that F2P game are here to stay, and I certainly agree that the likes of TF2 and LoL makes a very compelling case that F2P does work, but those are the fringe cases in the sea of "farmville clones" out there that I want no part of. To me, most people and studios approach Freemium/Social game right now in the gambling casino model of harvesting whales and toy with the human desires of virtual goods to fulfill "needs". Are these addicting mechanics? Yes! Are these "game mechanics"? No! Games can be many different things, it can be expressive, it can be skill based, it can be analytical, it can be competition; Freemium Games, and at least the bulk of the studios out there right now, approach it as a money tree, where money decisions drive "game design decisions" of "wait 6 hours, or pay us now". It's not the type of games I grew up with, it's not the type of things I want to make when I said I want to make games, and it's definitely not something I want to be a part of.
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So, why quit professional game development now?

Simple as that. It's been two years, I've pretty much burnt through close to all my savings now, and I feel like a terrible son when my parents comes over and shoves money in my hand. I tell them that financially, I'm still ok, but we all know I'm cutting this way too close now. I don't know if I can say I regret not getting where I wanted to go: to make a game, be a part of the process, from start to finish. Right now it hurts, knowing that I didn't do that. I know for some of you reading this, I've gone further than you've imagined having actually published a game, but for me, it just feels like I haven't done enough. I don't think I would have minded if I had worked on a project from start to finish and for it to bomb spectacularly: at least it would have meant I was a terrible game designer, then I can move on. Right now, it's more like a no decision, I only wished I had a legit chance.

Hey, look on the bright side: now that I'm no longer looking into the game industry, I can speak much more freely about my thoughts on things that are happening in it. There has been many instances where I had to really hold back on how I feel about certain approaches in games and game development, and now I can really tell you how I feel about Freemium Games (IT SUCKS.)
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While I'm officially calling it quits, I guess un-officially, I'm shelving all this game development stuff into a hobbyist state. I'm going to wrap up my most recent iOS game and ship it late March, but the timeline beyond that is much more hazy. My iOS Developer license actually expires around the same time, and I'm not really sure if I'd extend it just to ship another game in a year's time. I've been fiddling with a few other ideas that I was going to go into production with, but as a hobby project, these games will now take many more months then before (and I'm definitely not going to bother with as many playability bug fixes).

Recently I've started playing with the ideas of building a board game, and that will be an ongoing project for the foreseeable future. It's a pretty fun pipe dream to see it through, and maybe who knows, I can toss this sucker up on IndieGoGo (not kickstarter cause they hate Canada) and see it takeoff somehow.

It's also been a while since I blogged about game design, so I guess I'm going to resume that when I get a more stable job. At least I guess I can play armchair designer, right?
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So yeah. There you have it. I'm not happy about giving up, but I'm done, game dev. Thanks for all the good times. Call me if you need me.