Making Games

[repost from my DW from January 2023]

- Matt Hackett. How to Make a Video Game All by Yourself: 10 Steps, Just You and a Computer. Where to buy (available in various ebook/deadtree formats). I love this and strongly recommend it if you fall in the specific audience of people who would like to play with indie (one-person, more or less) video game design/production. This is not aimed at the AAA crowd! And it's up-front about that.

This walks you through the high-level work of production, from ideation to picking a game engine (its audience includes people who don't know a lick of code) to, e.g., avoiding scope creep so you actually complete the sucker, even if you choose not to release it publicly. This is not about coding and it won't teach you about ray-tracing or FMOD/WWISE or pathfinding AI or whatever the hell. Literally the high-level stuff like "how do I pick the idea that's right for me" and "how do I keep this manageable" and "must/should/could" triage for features.

The most useful insight for my purposes was to pick a game engine that feels good to you, because that will keep you motivated when it's just you doing this! Literally I had stalled out in previous attempts to do video-games-with-graphics because I'd tried Unity, disliked it intensely, and just stopped dead. Unity is very powerful, but I am deeply mediocre at coding (hence switching out of a CS major to math) and it's overkill for anything I'd realistically be able to complete. On the other hand, I fell in love with GameMaker Studio 2 when I followed this tutorial that walks you through making a simple Asteroids clone and followed that up by adding simple sound effects. (I also want to add a simple looping soundtrack but, y'know, one thing at a time.)

So I want to proceed with a tiny coding exercise to imitate the Sorcery! videogame combat system, but very very stripped down, because I think that's achievable over a couple weekends if I put my mind to it. But for a project after that, I am looking at Ace of Aces as an inspiration and thinking of coding a turn-based starfighter dogfight. This is actually something I've wanted to do for a while, just, I had NO clue how to handle graphics etc. So, we'll see?? And honestly what I have in mind would probably work just as well as a card game or a paper prototype (in fact, mechanically that's where I'd start, is with the paper prototype). But that's something I'm still thinking about.

(Yes, I have Biggles on the brain.)

[repost from 2020]

Complete Kobold Guide to Game Design, 2nd ed., ed. Janna Silverstein. Some notes, VERY long. ( Read more... )

More later...

Dear Diary by Avery Alder is a zine about the process of writing Monsterhearts 2, a revised version of their game Monsterhearts. I'd been holding on to this zine for a while waiting for the right time to read it (this is why my house is so full of books, LOL).

This part particularly struck me:

Over the years, I've gotten feedback from lots of people on the asexual spectrum that they felt like Monsterhearts erased their experiences, and that they had trouble connecting with the game as a result of its baseline assumption that everyone was a sexual person. In addition to launching the big survey, I showcased a few iterations of the asexuality mechanic-in-development, and launched a feedback survey for asexuals. My experience here revealed an obvious lesson: wanting to create space for another isn't enough, you need to actually listen and be willing to scrap your own ideas when they fail to serve the process.

I originally encountered the first Monsterhearts before I was much aware of ace/aro people, so this had not occurred to me as a criticism of the game beforehand. I do remember that as someone who almost never wants to do tabletop RP about sex, Monsterhearts (the original) looked like a fantastic game that I would never, ever play because I cannot think of ANYONE on this planet I would feel safe doing "RP as a horny, angsty, monster [1] teenager" with except maybe Joe, and at that point why wouldn't I just go straight to sex. :p

[1] That is, the character "classes" ("skins" in the game's parlance) are (almost all) things like vampires, witches, werewolves, etc., as a very clear metaphor for engaging with growing up queer. Alder is queer and trans, and talks about this aspect in the zine.

Anyway, I generally don't do sexual/romantic relationships as mechanics in this way, although I've seen things like John Wick's add-on rules set Sexcraft, which I thought was well-handled for people who want to add that to their games. (I am not one of those people.) But from a design standpoint, it's something to think about?

[repost from 2017]

I was delighted when I heard that Marie Brennan (swan_tower) was releasing her series of essays on storytelling and RPGs (tabletop and LARP) in ebook format. I've enjoyed these essays, but I am rather terrible at keeping up with essays on websites/blogs, and having them all in one place where I can read them in one fell schwoompf--to say nothing of being able to pay the author to encourage her to write more ;)--was very appealing.

Dice Tales discusses the RPGs and LARPs from several interlocking perspectives: that of the writer, that of the GM, that of the player, and that of the anthropologist. In terms of writing, Brennan talks about ways that the roleplaying experience has informed her writing and v.v., and ways in which storytelling differs between the media. There are also handy GM tips (I am all about handy GM tips, as a GM of limited experience) and exciting player anecdotes. And I have no background in anthropology at all, and Brennan was explicitly studying RPGs while doing anthropology, so it was very cool to hear about them through that lens.

Essays include discussions of what an RPG is, why the mechanics matter, the phenomenon of house rules, how GMs find leverage over their players and ways to use rather than abuse player trust, positive and negative uses of metagaming, the uses of costuming (mostly in a LARP context), when character death is appropriate, the question of consent in games, railroading and GM responsiveness...really, there's a ton here, and it's a great read all the way through.

I found this read especially timely because I am currently GMing a DW comm RPG, hexarchate_rpg. Dice Tales doesn't explicitly address play-by-email or forum formats, but a lot of the GMing advice applies anyway. I personally find text media more comfortable because I am not a fast thinker and I have a terrible memory, so text gives me time to think up responses and plot things out and refer to previous moves, notes, etc. I am also shameless--I'm okay asking players directly what plot hook they want out of X development.

The anecdotes of great RPG/LARP experiences sound great, and I find myself envious--in GNS terms, I have rarely gotten to experience Narrative-focused play, which is right now what I prefer. (I used to be a split Narrativist/Simulationist in high school and college. I legit got into Fidonet arguments over whether AC represented damage reduction or damage avoidance. *facepalm* Then I grew up and realized that if you care about simulationism, you shouldn't be using AD&fuckingD in the first place.) When Joe ran his Eberron campaign back in Pasadena (notable for being maybe the only campaign I've been in that ran through to completion, in about a year meeting weekly), my very favorite session was the one in which we didn't even do combat, and I don't think there was a single dice roll. We had been handed the magical equivalent of the plans for the atomic bomb and had to decide what the ethical thing to do with it was, and we spent the entire session as a party discussing how to deal with it responsibly.

On the other hand, I can't help but reflect that I'm not good at tabletop (and would probably be even worse at LARP). As I said above, I'm not a fast thinker. I usually end up spending all our Pathfinder Society sessions being unofficial designated party notetaker (I have fountain pens and I like to use them?) and sketching randomly until someone tells me we're in combat and it's my turn to Power Attack. I can't act my way out of a paper bag, and usually by the time I've thought of a contribution, the play has moved on. So I just have to accept that I'm never going to be particularly useful in a live roleplaying situation. This thing where advanced roleplayers stretch themselves by playing different character types is basically unimaginable to me. I usually ask Joe to design the easiest viable character, mechanics-wise, to play, which is why I ended up with a barbarian in a team feat barbarian (me) + blood rager (Dragon) + skald.

My most successful experiences GMing tabletop/in-person were (a) a one-shot using Over the Edge, a very rules-light system (and even then, I used very few dice rolls and let people freeform most interactions since with a one-shot there's no reason not to) and (b) the Hidden Emperor L5R AU campaign that Joe and I co-GM'd; I handled most of the description and Joe handled the mechanics. :]

(It's hilarious how much I hate crunchy systems. I have a B.A. in math, for God's sake. But I want the math to...mean something? And most systems just feel like they get in the way, for me, because as a writer I'm effectively used to freeforming the hell out of everything.)

Still, even if I'm not a good gamer, I like reading about gaming, and I find different gaming systems and anecdotes (my God, the gazebo story!) inspirational as a writer. :)

Anyway, enough personal maundering--this ebook is a lot of fun, and it's available from Amazon (and probably a couple other places) or Book View Cafe in mobi or epub. Recommended.