Challenge: Making a Smol Solo Game, 1.6

[yhlee]

1.6 Iterative Design

Previously:
Previously:
- 1.1 overview; parameters and desired player experience.
- 1.2 research, inspiration, comps.
- 1.3 design document and writing your rules.
- 1.4 rapid prototyping.
- 1.5 playtesting.

Next:
- 1.7 release! (fin)

We're going to discuss iterative design, which is:

- You have a game design (1.3).
- You made a prototype so people can actually play it (1.4).
- You got people to playtest it (1.5).
- Iterative design is where you take what you've learned from the playtest and revise your design. (1.6, this one!)

Now you have a new design and you go to:

- You have a (revised) game design (1.3').
- You make a (revised) prototype so people can actually play it (1.4').
- You get people to playtest it (1.5').
- You revise the game based on what you learned from the playtest (1.6').

Wash, rinse, repeat until you have a working game (or you're sick of it or you run out of funding or hit the deadline, whatever). Hence iterative. :)

That's the big picture. But more granularly, how does this work?

Possible outcomes (NOT comprehensive):

- Worst case: The game is so badly borked that you have to throw the design out and start from scratch. For hobbyist game design, this is okay. In fact, if it's a "dead on arrival" situation, you want to identify that as EARLY as possible so you can cut your losses. I have in fact thrown out entire designs because they were so borked they couldn't be salvaged. But I learned from those experiences.

- Best case, honestly: The game more or less works, but the rules are unclear/ambiguous or need tweaking. For anything but a smol game, especially if you have never done game design before (or only have a little experience), this is unlikely UNLESS you have cribbed off/hacked an existing game with good bones. That's often okay (depending on details). For example, the basic concept/structure of "choose your own adventure" is something you can use without guilt. It gets stickier if you're "cribbing" off a unique mechanic.

- The game works, but in a way that is completely unlike what you intended. At this point you have to decide whether to go with it or rewrite the game to do what you wanted it to do.

This is a sillier example (?), but notably Stephen Granade wrote an IF (interactive fiction, or parser-based text adventure) that—well, let me quote Stephen from The Player Will Get It Wrong: Reflections on Players and Your Game:

Players can't tell where you sweated and toiled. They don't know that you spent three weeks coding a river that would sweep any object dropped in it downstream. They won't drop anything in the river, or if they do, they won't be that impressed. Instead, they'll focus on something else entirely.

It happened with Losing Your Grip, and it surprised the hell out of me. Here I was, all pleased with myself because I was putting in multiple paths. This will be interesting, I thought. People will discover that some sections of the game come in two flavors, and they'll talk about it.

Instead, what is Grip known for? Head kicking. An action which took all of five minutes to dream up, code, and re-write has come to symbolize my game.

(Aside #1: Admit it, how many of you kicked the head instead of trying to save it? You can do both. Last I checked the head kickers were beating out the head savers by nearly a ten-to-one margin. Clearly I have tapped into some primal human instinct. Perhaps our ancestors were hunted by heads buried in mud, and learned to kick those heads in order to survive.)

- Parts of the game work, but one or more of the mechanics are janky.

- Parts of the game work (or all of it does?), but the game's mood isn't what you intended. This is harder to control when faced with my family unruly players. My family, for example, is INCAPABLE of playing games that are thoughtful, somber, tragic, elegiac in the intended manner. Notoriously we are the family that took the gorgeous narrative/rules-light game Decaying Orbit by Sidney Icarus and turned it into a tragicomedy full of murderous sentient cats and sun cultists, emphasis on the comedy.

Relatedly, and this should have gone under rules-writing (I will edit it in), but:

There is no rules set or phrasing that will magically prevent bad-faith play or well-intentioned rules-hacking/tinkering.

So yes, you want to write clearly, but also don't get hung up on making rules that will magically "prevent" someone being an asshole. You can't do that with a set of rules, which are just...words/diagrams/pictures on a sheet of paper or equivalent. Write your rules for good-faith players.

At a certain point, you have to accept that humans gonna human. Unless your audience is ONLY your household/family/whatever, you can't teleport into the players' living room and MAKE them play your somber elegiac game in a somber elegiac way, or MAKE them give +2 attack speed to the shortest player, or MAKE them play in an anti-imperialist fashion, or MAKE them use Free Parking just as Free Parking as opposed to the "fines/fees get paid to Free Parking and whoever lands there collects the sum" house rule I've encountered every time I've ever played Monopoly.

I would in fact argue "teleporting into the players' living room and MAKING them play XYZ recreational game in the prescribed fashion" is, in most cases, not even desirable, but that's a separate discussion. (I say "recreational" to exclude sports, e.g. chess tournaments, or things like poker.)

- The game works more or less, but the game balance is borked. Maybe the flamingos are overpowered, or there's a high-cost card that's so useless no one plays it (HALLO THAR, "Hunter of Naga" from AEG L5R CCG), or there's a game-destroying combo you didn't think of. CCGs are notorious for the latter because of the combinatorics involved. If your game involves numbers in a mathy way at all, this is where, sorry to say, usually a working knowledge of probability/statistics is your friend. (Games may, of course, involve other branches of mathematics as well, AS YOU KNOW, URSULA-BOB. XD)

That's before we even get into weird rules-lawyering like the infamous Chaos Confetti apocryphal story/urban legend (context: Chaos Orb was a card that destroyed any card it landed on when dropped from ONE FOOT above the play area):

During the final match of an important tournament, the player, being at a disadvantage, decided to literally tear his Chaos Orb into pieces, then launch them in the air to touch almost all of the opponent's cards, thus obliterating his board and winning the game. Legend says that this was evaluted as legal by the judge, but the player was disqualified afterwards for having, at that point, a deck of only 59 cards.

(Aside: OF COURSE there's a version in which that player was Kai Budde. Even I've heard of Budde and I don't even play M:TG!!)

It's at this point I have to discuss game balance. The more moving parts a game has, the more combinatorially complex it is, or the more computationally difficult it is (if it's amenable to computation at all - chess can be brute-force calculated in a way that FATE RPG cannot), the harder it is to "balance" - if balance is even a desideratum. It's difficult to be more detailed here because this is generally highly specific to the game and its intended audience, but:

Player notoriously misjudge the "real" power of game rules/factions/units/cards/whatever. It might be true that XYZ is "overpowered" or "broken," but it might only be "overpowered" by 10% and not at all proportionate to the amount of complaining. (Full disclosure: I have done my share of complaining as a gamer. :p)

That said, if you're trying to figure out how to adjust stats, the dirty trick is the halving/doubling method: either HALVE the stat or DOUBLE it until you home in on what seems like a good value.

And again, there are times "balance" or "overpowered" are orthogonal to the point, or there are other considerations for the audience. AD&D 2nd ed.'s Planescape setting included the Lady of Pain, who a friend of mine described as "the reification of GM fiat." (He was in divinity school.) Canonically, you can't kill or defeat her.

Funny niche example, but a college friend was big into game design. One of his board games, Escape from Castle Otto, had "characters" representing people in our friend group. My boyfriend-now-husband Joe was notorious for RIDICULOUS LUCK (we were also Wheel of Time readers, so one of his nicknames was Ta'veren), so unlike every other character, who had fixed stats, "Joe" rolled dice so his stats were random.

My character was very boring and mediocre in most regards, EXCEPT. "Yoon" had the power: Kill "Joe." "Joe" would then respawn with brand new stats. I should add that this was a fairly standard turn-based board game, but "Yoon" could exercise this power at any time. It could even be used to "Joe"'s benefit to reroll bad stats. But "game balance" wasn't really the point here, so much as a commentary/in-joke on relationship dynamics. :p

(Joe and I have been together for twenty-five years, and married for twenty-one, and he is STILL a ta'veren lol. We even still have our copy of the game! We should play it over the holidays for old time's sake.)

Don't think a solo game can't be "unbalanced"! Or that "game balance"/winnability is always the desired state? Chris Bissette's The Wretched [itch.io, £10.00 GBP] is survival horror designed such that it's very difficult to "win," which of course reinforces the doomy nature of the game's genre.

Challenge 1.6
- revise your rules!
- revise your prototype (or create a new one, depending).
- playtest!
- repeat until satisfied (or you're sick of the exercise, lol).

Next:
- 1.7 release!