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From Idea to First Playtest

Subsurface Games 1 Comment

The first game I designed was actually a co-design, and Louis onboarded me after a few playtests of his own. For a while, I was an active game designer without any idea how to start a design: I had gotten in right after that part. I’d go around and ask established designers at conventions, or on panels and Q&As: Every time, the answer would be something along the lines of “you just do it”, which is… well, not that useful.

I’ve seen a few people around the Twitterverse asking these questions recently. Remembering my own questions from back then, here is MY method for going from an idea to a first prototype.

Disclaimer: This is a method that works for me. If you have a different method, awesome! If this one doesn’t work for you, I’m sorry! This is just meant as an example: you can try it out and see what sticks.

Step 1: Define your core

Whether I’m inspired by a mechanism, a theme, an experience, my first step is always to define what I want the game to be. This takes the form of a pitch, a short, 2 or 3 line paragraph about what I want the game to be. I want it to be snappy and dramatic to begin with (it will get longer as the concept solidifies) because (a) it’s easier to grab attention that way, and (b) it helps me identify what is the core I’m aiming for, and what is just brainstorming around that idea.

Usually, I’ll try and get some feedback on this pitch. I’ll talk about it with friends, other designers, or just in general on social media. This is useful both to gauge interest, but also to help me smooth out any rough edges: in a way, I’m playtesting the pitch!

Step 2: Deconstruct that core

Once I’ve identified this core, I need to figure out how the game will fulfill that promise. Where marketers often try to represent their target audience with an imaginary character, I try to represent my central idea with a target moment that represents the experience I want the game to offer.

From then, I identify what building blocks I need to make that work.

A few examples:

  • For Off the Record, the core was the growing-pile mechanism, exemplified by that decision between a huge, 6-card pile, or that one card you really need. I needed a reason for you to need a specific card, but a way for any card to be useful for you, which led me to turning in Poker hands for points.
  • For Cybertopia, the juice was that free-flowing roster of workers, where you’d get a different group of options every time you’d gather. That means I needed workers which were different enough for that to matter, and a way for them to be grouped in the actions where they were sent. I also needed those “groups” to be unrelated to the workers’ unique traits, so that they wouldn’t all be piled up in the same groups: instead of workers, we started looking at them as multi-use cards, which made a lot more sense design-wise.
  • For SuPR, the pitch is a large thematic thing, but the core is “you have to save the town, but the more dire the situation, the better it looks”. I knew that the central mechanism needed that risk-reward, where you were not completely able to control your actions, nor perfectly plan them ahead of time, or else, there would be no luck for you to push! This made dice drafting feel like such a good idea!
    Then, coop dice drafting suggested the idea of a “love draft”: instead of “what can’t I leave my opponent?”, I loved the idea of “OH! I NEED THAT DICE! PLEASE LEAVE IT FOR ME!”, which meant, like with Off the Record, I needed a way to have something that was just *perfect* for a player, but for every player to be able to use it, leading me to the idea of a dice you used for both the number and colour.
  • For my untitled coop roll-and-write, I wanted to merge that moment at the end of a game of Pandemic or Spirit Island, where you look at the map and go “this is what’s left of the world”, and the permanence of a roll-and-write sheet. Because of that, the gameplay must be centered around a map, which players are building up while the game is doing its best to tear it down.

Step 3: Good artists borrow…

Even with that central idea fleshed out some, you’re still far away from a playable prototype. This is where I follow the famous saying, and outright steal another game’s frame.

Sometimes my inspiration starts from a game in particular: as I mentioned previously, the coop roll-and-write idea came up right after a game of Troyes Dice, and the first prototype was, more or less, a cooperative version of it.

If not, I try to find a game that would fit my building blocks: with SuPR, I started from Pandemic: the Cure, another coop dice game, and added the “scoring” system I wanted; with Cartographia, we started with Blue Moon City, but with players getting bonuses when others would map the same space as they previously did; Cybertopia started from Imhotep, with the worker cards replacing the boats; With a Smile & a Gun started out as Cat Lady, with the dice-drafting rondel to go with it.

I then make my first prototype as close to that game as I can. But…

Step 4: Start with the second prototype

“Your second try is always better than your first.”
“So how do I start with my second one?”

My first prototype never actually touches the table.

The simple act of building a prototype, to me, is a first round of testing: I ask myself how things will interact, I write cards and get cool ideas, I find a cooler way to present a decision, I imagine myself playing a round and cursing my friends out.

You can argue it’s semantics (and you’d be right), but it highlights one of the biggest problems I have with creative endeavours: I can’t start creative without knowing what I’m making, but I need to start making it to figure out what I’ll be making. Therefore, I have to trick myself, and start making something I know I won’t ever be using, just to get the gears in motion.

Sometimes this “first prototype” is writing a bullet-point rulebook, sometimes it’s taking pieces from the seed game and moving them around, sometimes it’s opening up PowerPoint and making cards. The zeitgeist says “get it to the table ASAP”, but you can use a metaphorical table: in a way, a spreadsheet is a table, right?

Step 5: Schedule a playtest

If you are gifted with the ability to solo playtest your game, go ahead and do that.

Otherwise, if you’ve read last week’s post, you know that the best way to finish a prototype is to schedule a playtest and give yourself a deadline.

Oh, it’s not finished? Of course it isn’t: that’s WHY you playtest.

You can keep on changing and tweaking and editing and adding, but a 30-minute playtest will help your design more than another 30 hours of modifying your prototype.

I just beat designer’s block

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I ran my first Kickstarter campaign in July to publish Subsurface’s first release, With a Smile & a Gun. It’s been an extremely rewarding experience, but it’s also been draining, especially during a worldwide pandemic. Since then, between said pandemic, the lack of a regular game night, and the remaining amount of work related to producing and shipping a game, I have not worked on any of my designs. Actually, I’ve only run two non-WaS&aG playtests in the last 12 months.

Truth is, inertia is a pretty major hurdle to jump. After focusing on the business side of games, I’ve lost my design momentum, and in these circumstances, it’s been really hard to get back.

I’m sure I’m not alone.

Before I dig into how I got back into it, let me say that it’s okay if you can’t get yourself to work on your projects. If it’s doing more harm than good, don’t. Don’t beat yourself up: these are difficult times. It’s okay if you’re not being productive. You’re not less than because you’re struggling.

However, if you feel like a creative endeavour would improve your quality of life, but you’re not sure how to get back on the horse, then here’s what’s worked for me:

Play some games

When I was younger, I’d read a lot of YA books, and I’d keep on wanting to write my own books. Then I read webcomics, and tried to learn to draw. Then it was movies, and standup comedy, and short stories.

For me, consuming any form of art makes me want to produce my own. I’ve been told it was hubris, thinking that I could make better versions of these things —and to a certain extent, it is–, but to me, it’s less a question of “better” than “more to *my* tastes”.

It stands to reason that this dry spell of design coincides with an equivalent dry spell of playing. No game night means that, slowly but surely, gaming is less common. Sure, we used to play over BoardGameArena and Tabletopia, but it sort of fizzled out over time.

Then I got back into it. I started my weekly online game of Arkham Horror LCG again; then a friend bought roll-and-writes and offered to play them over Zoom; then I started playing games with my daughter after she comes back from school.

Inertia is a thing, but so is momentum. A little push puts stuff in motion. After a game of AHLCG, all I can think about is levelling my deck, which makes me think about how cool this card combo could be, and oh, I haven’t played Underwater Cities in forever…

Be it games over Zoom or BGA, with friends or strangers, or even in person with your partner or roommate or kid, or even solo or on an app: starting to enjoy the hobby again might give you the spark.

Get excited!

That friend who bought all of those roll-and-write games? He said “you know, if you were working on a roll-and-write, we could have a weekly playtest night!”

After every new game we’d play, we’d talk about the design, and eventually, we played both Aeon’s End and Troyes Dice back-to-back. “Wouldn’t the Troyes system be a great skeleton for a coop roll-and-write?”, he asked, and, well, we talked about it for an hour and a half.

I find that while playing games brings those sparks, talking about those sparks with others is the kindling that starts the fire. It’s what turns idle ruminating into forward progress, and gets that rolling stone moss-free.

Procrastinate about something else

Even with a good idea that excited me, making that first prototype is such a big hill: without super-momentum, you roll back down all Sisyphus-like.

LPT: If you just cannot seem to get Sisyphus to offer his quest to buy his freedom -- make sure you actually talked to Bouldy. : HadesTheGame

Then, November arrived, and for the first time in forever, I thought about NaNoWriMo in late October: finally, I could try this writing challenge, use social media for added accountability, and…

Well, having this other, much more daunting task made making the prototype look like the easy way out: isn’t that interesting?

I’m not sure you can reproduce this feeling, but when I had to write 1700 words of a novel, for which I only had a two-line description to go from, I managed to trick my brain into making that prototype and thinking it was procrastination.

Again, this is what worked for me! Please don’t use this blog post as an excuse to not finish a work assignment or a school project!

Schedule a playtest

Here’s a veteran tip:
The best time to prepare a prototype is an hour before the playtest starts.

If you wait for your prototype to be ready before you set a date, it will never happen. If you schedule other people, magically, your prototype will be ready.

livememe.com - 60% Of The Time, It Works Every Time

Momentum might be a thing, but a deadline is another.

Designer Diary #1: The Spark

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This is the first entry in my Designer Diary series for With a Smile & a Gun, coming to Kickstarter on July 14th, 2020. In this installment, I talk about the inspiration for the game, and core of the game, and how I filled it out to a workable mechanical framework.

Two-player games were my entry point into the board gaming hobby and, fwo-player games were my entry point into the board gaming hobby and, for the long period before I managed to get a steady game group, mostly the only way I played. I had two opponents: Josianne, my best friend and partner of 15 years, and James, one of my closest friends, a relationship based on ribbing and schadenfreude.

Ever since I started designing games, I knew I wanted to make a two-player game one I could play and enjoy both with Josianne, on a more casual, feel-good level, and with James, where I’d get to explode into laughter at his swearing whenever I messed up his plans. 

With a Smile & a Gun is that game.

First Steps

When I first started working on a two-player game, there was one core concept I was interested in exploring: I wanted the players to share a pool of actions, but to be able to use them for different objectives. In Agricola, to block you from taking wood, I need to take wood myself but I might not want wood. For that, I wanted each action to be used in different ways, to be interesting regardless of strategy.

The idea of a “shared action pool” led me to try and make a game about a  werewolf — one player would play as the human, the other as the beast within⁠ — where each action would take the form of either a helpful companion or potential prey. This was my first game design, and it never got anywhere; I realized I needed to start smaller. I might still make that game one day, but at the time, I wasn’t a good enough designer for an asymmetric project like that, like Vast or Root. To be honest, I still don’t think I am.

The question became: how could I make “shared opportunities, used differently” work without drowning in asymmetry?

Second Draft

Eventually, in mid-2017, I started playing (and loving) a lot of dice-drafting games: Sagrada, Roll Player, Blueprints, Grand Austria Hotel. It took me a bit before I realized that mechanism was exactly what I was looking for: a shared pool, which players would be able to use in different ways. 

I usually tend to spend a lot of time in the early stages of design thinking about game ideas in an almost academic way. Once I find a core, I break it down, trying to find what makes it interesting, and then trying to see what other mechanisms would be best suited to support the core. I often start with “key moments”, which are what I want to cause, as often as possible.

In this case, the key moment was the turn angst of leaving the last 4 in the dice pool, hoping your opponent doesn’t take it… Then, either it got back to you, or it didn’t: either way caused a strong, emotional reaction. 

For that type of moment to happen, I needed players to have two ways to use dice: one that required specific numbers, to cause that turn angst, and one where you could use a bit of everything, to allow for that denial drafting, where the numbers mattered, but it lowered the cost to block. It’s not exactly what I had in mind from the get-go, but it checks all the boxes: you don’t need to hurt yourself in order to block your opponent. I was already imagining doing it to James, and was grinning just thinking about it.

From there, the blocks started falling into place: 

  • The simplest way to require a specific number was to make it a draft-and-move: drafting a die to determine your movement, and the spot you fell on determining the actions you’ll do. Like a roll-and-move, but with a decision point instead of a random result.
  • To avoid a single hate draft costing you the game, I took the 3×3-grid mechanism from Cat Lady: if there was an action you desperately needed, you could access it from its row or its column.
  • To make sure the second die still mattered, I was inspired by Signorie, and made higher dice better, but penalized the players for taking only high dice. In a two-player game, making it a majority-contest opened up a lot of interesting decisions related to the shared pool: the last low die can become a decision maker in a tight race.
  • The best way to incentivize the players to deny opportunities to their opponents, without falling into take-that or wasted turns, is area majority. With a mechanism where placing a cube is worth as much as keeping your opponent from placing theirs, you have to focus on what you leave for them. Piece o’ Cake and Hanamikoji are two of my favorite games, and definitely inspirations for this limited-opportunity approach to area majority.
  • With a two-player game, area majority games often don’t work very well, because there’s no incentive to try and catch up: if a single presence is good enough for 2nd place, why bother trying to get 1st? It’s a flaw often raised by Rahdo, amongst other people, and one I definitely agree with. By adding a third value, not a dummy player per se, but a set value the players have to beat to get their piece of the pie, you often solve this problem: it’s a simple solution that’s often left behind, but it was perfect for this game.

And suddenly, there it was: the skeleton of a game, which still stands to this day, which survived iteration after iteration.

In the next entry, I’ll talk about the game’s thematic evolution. If you’re a mechanism-first designer like me, and you also struggle with finding a theme, maybe my process can help you out?

If this game sounds interesting, you can go look it up at withasmileandagun.com

Daniel Newman on his Roadblock

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Roadblock is a series of articles where I interview other designers, developpers, and others involved in the industry, to do a deep dive into a specific issue they’ve dealt with in a project. The goal is to add concrete examples to the mass of game design advice out there.

JV: Today I’m sharing with you folks a discussion with Daniel Newman, designer of Dead Man’s Cabal, Rolled West, and Ahead in the Clouds.

JV: So Daniel, what game are we talking about today?

One of the games I spent a good portion of 2019 on was called Nebula, and then later The Well. It started with an idea for an action selection mechanism that I came up with while driving to Granite Game Summit. It involved a tray for 8 action tokens with a slider to select which actions you can do that turn, but depending on what ring of the board you were in you were limited to 4, 3, or 2 actions. I thought it would be cool to have a game where your position on the board would determine your effectiveness, with the fewer actions gaining you higher value rewards.

The first thought I had thematically was mining an undeveloped Nebula. I came up with a couple of generic resources (gas and minerals) and structures needed to harvest those, and actions revolving around moving through the nebula, building structures, and using those structures. It was…fine. I had a couple of people in my playtest group who said they enjoyed it but it didn’t really feel like it was doing anything special. I put it away for a bit and then had an idea to rework it, using the same general idea but with a hand of cards that cycled similarly to Concordia, and rethemed as spelunking in a cave system called The Well (because it was 3 layers of concentric circles). I thought it was more interesting and definitely had a better table presence. I generally got a better response with this reworking in the group as well, so was feeling pretty good about it by convention season.

JV: What was the problem, and when did you first encounter it? 

I thought things were going along nicely, that it was pretty much ready to pitch. I showed it to a publisher at BGG.con and it was a disaster. It didn’t play anything like I thought it should. Things I thought were super clear were not. The publisher I was showing it to seemed angry and agitated for the entire game.

I realized that so much of how I wanted it to be played had been internalized by my regular playtest group – they had all played it a bunch and were just ignoring the obvious problems with it because they were familiar enough with the systems. It felt like it was smooth because of familiarity not because it actually was.

Because it’s so easy to bring things to this group twice a week, i don’t usually seek testing outside of the group.

JV: How did you handle the situation with the publisher?  

We wound up finishing the game, as it was, and then I apologized for the experience being so bad. This is someone I show games to regularly so I was a little surprised at his reaction, but it just had a number of things in it that he really doesn’t like in games. He assured me that it wasn’t me personally that he was upset with. He’s someone whose opinion I very much respect, so seeing that reaction really convinced me it was time to shelve this one.

JV: Had you ever encountered a similar problem before? Why was this one different?

Not really. I tend to have a pretty good sense of whether or not a game is working, despite what feedback I’m getting from testers. I think I just really wanted this one to work even though it was never really feeling like it was coming together. This was also an unusual one because I tend to use an existing game as a starting structure and base my design on that – obviously things change pretty dramatically pretty quickly, but that tends to get me going much quicker and makes it so I don’t have to reinvent the gaming wheel every time. When I did the ground-up reworking as The Well, I used a couple of games as models for the systems I wanted to use, but it still never came together properly. 

JV: Can you talk about the process of solving it? What worked? What didn’t?

Honestly, I never really solved it. I’ve shelved it indefinitely. Sometimes it’s the right thing to just put it aside. Maybe I’ll come back to it, I probably won’t. I have at least half a dozen games on my prototype shelf that I just decided wasn’t worth working on. There are a couple of nuggets of goodness in them, but I had another idea I wanted to work on and just didn’t want to devote more attention to this design that wasn’t working out.

JV: When did you decide to let it die? Did you try some stuff before then, or did that one pitch taint it so badly it turned you off the project entirely?

I’d been trying lots of different things over the life of it and nothing was really feeling right. The bad pitch was the nail in the coffin. I had scheduled a pitch meeting for it with another publisher later in the week and cancelled it because I just no longer had confidence in it as a game.

JV: And how do you avoid that problem with other projects? Have you changed your way since or was it just the exception?

This was actually very recent, just a few months ago, and one of the last games I pitched. I’m still mulling over exactly what went wrong in the process, as I had never had this happen before. I think I’m just going to be more aware of how many different people play my games before I bring them to publishers to show.

JV: In general, what do you think are the Pros and Cons of having a small but regular pool of testers?

Obviously it’s great to be able to get your design on the table super frequently. You can make a lot of progress in a short period of time, especially in that early stage when you’re constantly iterating and making big changes. If it’s a group that meets twice a week, like mine does, you can also not feel terrible about skipping one or two now and again because you know there’s another in just a couple of days (unlike groups that only meet once a month, in which case you’re going much longer between tests).

On the down side, you wind up testing with the same people over and over again and you can develop a meta where people generally understand the game and only slightly adjust to the new tweaks every time and are playing generally the same way. You just don’t get as much variation in approaches to the play and can miss huge problems because people get too comfortable with the game.

JV: How did you develop that “small but regular” pool?

I happened upon it kind of by accident, actually. This was a group that already existed and was meeting about once a month before I joined and started meeting once a week around the time I started attending. There were some fairly well known designers as part of the group, who I didn’t know when I joined, but later found out they had put out some fairly popular games. The group really started to flourish when Gil Hova (one of the aforementioned designers) took the reigns and started spreading the word a bit more. A lot of it was just due to better organization and finding a better, more reliable place to meet – the open seating at a Whole Foods, as a matter of fact, one of the few large semi-public spaces in NYC.

JV: You talked about usually starting from an established game: how does that usually happen? I have this list on my phone of games I want to “fix”, to design a different game based on the same central mechanism. I usually love half of the game, and hate the other half with a passion. How do you handle that? 

It’s a bit different for each game but lately it’s either “I really like this game but I don’t like how ‘x’ works, so what if I take this mechanism and do something else with it” or “I have this theme that’d be fun to make a game around and I really like how ‘x’ does it, so I’ll just borrow that and change it up and use that as a starting point.” Usually it’s some sort of combination that happens simultaneously. How much I borrow or start with really varies depending on what I need and what else I have in mind. For example, the game I’m currently working on ostensibly borrows the upgrading of tiles from The Taverns of Tiefenthal but now that I’m a few iterations in it doesn’t really feel that similar. The rest of the game is pretty remarkably different.

JV: Well thank you for your time Daniel! You made a few very good points about varying testers, saving face after a bad pitch, and starting a design from an established game. Aside from being a bit of a bummer, I think you also brought up an interesting, under discussed aspect of game design: sometimes, you just have to admit defeat. 

In addition to game design, Daniel Newman is sometimes on Twitter. [/sarcasm]