Starting a Thematic Design

I was recently a guest on the Meeple Syrup Show, where I talked about starting thematic designs. This post is a companion piece to that discussion, which can be found here. 

When I was thinking about my design process, I divided the steps into three general phases: scaffolding, outline, and details. Scaffolding addresses the initial have-an-idea process. Outline looks at building the bare bones of the design. And details is the rest of the design process. Obviously, the third section takes the most time, but I don't dwell on it as much because 1) this is about beginning a design, 2) the steps in the details section occur repeatedly and in different orders and proportions depending on the game, and 3) this part of the design process is discussed very regularly on other platforms. 

With that said, here's the process:

Scaffolding

1. Come up with an idea prompt. You can use a generator that involves various lists and dice rolls or pulling items out of a hat, which is what a lot of game jams do. You can keep an idea list in your day-to-day life and reference the list when you want to start a new design. You can jot down random phrases that sound like clues in Dixit as a jumping off point. (Example: "The spaces in between.") You can pull random Apples to Apples cards. However you do it, the prompt you settle on should interest you. 

2. Come up with an interesting question using your prompt then try to answer it. When you do, look for answers that suggest action. What stories does my prompt suggest? What actions could occur in those stories? Could those actions translate to mechanisms? Pick an angle you find interesting that has some mechanical promise.

3. Spend five minutes researching general knowledge connected to your idea so far. This could be historical information, genre tropes, or something else. When people summarize the topic, what elements do they include? Board games tend to present thematic information in broad strokes, so knowing the highlights is important even though you ultimately won't stop there. As you research, continue to look for mechanics ideas. 

4. Settle on which aspects you want to model in your design. These should be aspects that are interesting to you which can be modeled through game mechanisms. You should have a general concept of which mechanics are a good jumping off point for your design. 

Outline

1. Determine who the player characters are in your game. What are their thematic goals? What are their mechanical goals? How might that translate to a win condition? Are there other mini-goals that feed into the major goal?

2. Determine the obstacles that prevent players from reaching their goals. What presents a challenge mechanically? How does that challenge translate thematically? What are the consequences of failure? Is there an upside? How does a success help players toward their overall goal?

3. Determine the actions players will need to overcome obstacles and achieve goals. Some verbs to consider which are both mechanical and generically thematic: acquire, deploy, relocate, appraise/evaluate, communicate, create, build. You can adjust the thematic terminology later. For now, it is important to think in terms of action. 

4. Start a rough pen and paper prototype and attempt to play your idea so far. (I don't usually write much down until this point in the process. Experiment with writing while brainstorming, talking aloud, and just thinking, because you'll engage different modes of thinking. I prefer to let my mind drift and chew on a problem, but you may not.) This point is about as far as you can get in a short game jam. 

5. Do more thematic research. Make sure the actions you settle on align with the theme. I would recommend around an hour of research at a minimum at this point if you are designing with a real world theme. You should have a basic grasp of the subject matter and a sense of the emotional experience inherent in your chosen theme. This is important to have before you settle on mechanical structure in order for your mechanics to feel appropriate to the theme. 

Details

1. Playtest. Repeat until the game stops changing. Make changes. Make better prototypes. 

2. Research similar mechanics in published games. 

3. Do more thematic research. Incorporate setting details, character motivation, and other thematic conventions. Make sure you are doing justice to your theme.

4. Determine the hook of your game. I think it's okay if this is later in the process. You won't know what your game wants to be at first. 

I don't suggest this is the only way, or even the best way, to start a thematic design. However, there is a benefit to stretching your design muscles, and this is a highly portable method providing you have a smart phone. I do a lot of these steps instinctually and thus quickly, so I am unsure how following this format like a recipe will work. I think it's worth trying at least once, but I don't expect it to become how you design going forward. Instead, I highly encourage you to take what works for your design style and discard the rest. 

ShippBoard Games is a board game design blog that updates most Mondays.

On Prototype Quality

If you're reading this, you probably already know that prototypes should look nice but not too nice if you are pitching to publishers. Let's look in a little more detail at the importance of a certain level of prototype quality. 

Prototype quality communicates a lot of information to publishers. If prototypes are too nice, they signal that you are invested in a certain look for the game and may be hesitant to make changes. This is especially true if you have invested money in art and graphics. (If you are an artist doing your own art, you may want to say so upfront to avoid confusion.) Publishers have a vision for their line of games. So unless your finished game fits perfectly with that vision, they will want to make changes. 

Prototypes that aren't nice looking at all signal that the game is not yet complete. Even if the mechanics are complete, an ugly prototype signals that you haven't yet considered how to make your game into a product. So, what should a just-finished-enough prototype look like?

Your prototype needs to be usable. Cards need to be shuffleable. Components need to be physically close enough to the finished version that the game plays the way a finished version would. I usually only buy dice and standees when it comes to prototypes, but if I'm sending out a prototype to a publisher I will try to get real cards printed (and sleeve my cards if not). 

In addition to a usable level of component quality, your graphics need to be usable as well. Icons need to discernible. Text needs to be kept to a minimum. Layout needs to be considered. You don't need to be a graphic designer, but you do need to be familiar with how information is conveyed in board games. Again, usability is key. 

Lastly, you need to make the prototype look just good enough that the publisher can imagine it in their line. Placeholder art can convey a surprising amount of information: tone, intended audience, table presence, cost of final art, etc. Placeholder art also gives your game some color and character to help it stand out. Importantly, placeholder art says "I want you to finish the look of this game." 

A pitching prototype needs to convey what the game can be without actually spending much money yourself. It needs to inspire a publisher's imagination by leaving only a few things to the imagination. There is a certain element of 'doing all the hard work but letting the publisher think it was their idea' in a pitching prototype. And that's okay. You are doing 95% of the work in order to inspire someone else to do the remaining 5%. The trick of it is that that remaining 5% takes just as long as the 95% and costs 200x more. And really, if that last 5% is fun for you, why are you pitching? Just make your game. 

For me, the fun part of pitching is finding a collaborator who sees my design work and gets excited. Finding someone who believes in the project and commits to doing the parts I don't enjoy. But I confess, I also like the dance of showing what a game can be without actually producing the game myself. It's a form of communication, and it's an art. It's a skill I'm still developing. 

ShippBoard Games is a board game design blog that updates most Mondays.

An Approach to Complexity

I'm not going to try to be comprehensive here. This post is about my general philosophy of complexity in game mechanics. 

You have probably heard the phrase 'complexity budget.' The term refers to the amount of complexity your design can tolerate based on your intended audience. You can stretch that budget by relying on players' existing knowledge and by well-developed game logic. You have to take into account rules complexity and strategic complexity. Too much complexity makes a game incomprehensible or too difficult. 

For my money, rules complexity is a bigger issue than strategic complexity. I can tolerate being bad at a game because I am not a good strategist, but I am frustrated when I am bad at a game because I don't understand what I am supposed to be doing. Often, rules complexity is artificially increased by poorly-written manuals or bad graphic design. 

However, there is one aspect of rules complexity that designers can miss: the ratio of complex systems to complex actions. I don't think I'm the first person to point this out, but it deserves more attention. The more complex the systems in the game, the less those systems can tolerate complex actions. The simpler the systems, the more the actions can be complex. 

So, in a game with one mechanism, that mechanism can be fairly complex without exceeding the complexity budget. There is a reason 'I cut; you choose' games are generally filler games: the action mechanism is surprisingly strategically complex. It involves assessing your play state and that of other players, then attempting to predict what arrangement of resources will tempt other players without making any lot too good. Add this mechanism to a complex game and it would grind gameplay to a halt. In complex Euros, players already have a tendency to stretch out their turns by calculating their various options. Adding a mechanism that has that sort of calculation built in could create a snowball effect. 

If you look at published heavy games, you typically find they are made up of simple actions—lots and lots of simple actions that interact and affect each other. Certain mechanisms, like deck building, are actually a molecule of simple action atoms. Most of the strategic complexity of deck building comes from choosing which cards to buy—which is no different from any other card market mechanism. Mid-to-heavy games will often have one complex action supported by simpler actions. The action might be strategically complex, like an auction, or rules complex, like a unit in a war game that has a lot of stats. 

I don't think there's a hard and fast rule, but it's important to pay attention to the balance of systems complexity versus action complexity. 

While I'm on the topic, let's talk about other things that can use up your complexity budget. 

In-turn Calculation: Look. Some people just have a hard time with math, ok? I would much rather a game has me doing simple math than clever math, unless the cleverness is that the math doesn't feel like math. Having to calculate as a part of my turn limits what other information I can absorb because my brain is busy. 

Out-of-turn Calculation: I'm actually more forgiving of this because it is usually optional. I can choose to do some strategic calculation when it's not my turn if I feel like it. Doing math during downtime is also easier because I'm not trying to do multiple things at once. 

Spatial reasoning: There appear to be two types of people: those who don't like math and those who don't like spatial puzzles. Mentally manipulating images is challenging even for people who like spatial puzzles and impossible for some other people. There was an era where number-crunchy games were seen as inherently heavier than (and thus superior to) spatial puzzle games. Spatial puzzle games often opt for strategic complexity over rules complexity, but that doesn't make them inherently lighter. Games like Calico have done a lot to push back against this notion. 

Memory: No, not that kind of memory game. When a game has a lot of rules exceptions and corner cases, a lot of distinct actions and resources, and not a lot of thematic logic to help lighten the load, you can exceed your budget just through overtaxing the players' memories. I do want to be clear that while this section includes rules overhead, it is more than just that. The rules could be perfectly straightforward, but the graphic design doesn't help guide you through play. Or the rules are simple, but there are a lot of steps and no player aids. If memory isn't an intended mechanism, you may want to minimize it in your design. 

Hopefully, this post has got you thinking about complexity in a new way and/or reminded you to review the complexity budget of your designs. 

ShippBoard Games is a board game design blog that updates most Mondays.

On Publisher Changes

I know someone who interned with a successful theatre set designer. The designer had all his interns build a piece of model furniture (think dollhouse furniture but made of paper and paint). Then he had them squash what they built. Why? Because in theatre it doesn't matter how much time you spend on something, if it gets cut from the show it's gone. There isn't enough time or space to keep everything. The lesson is don't get attached to something just because you made it. 

So, let's talk about the number one reason cited when people talk about self-publishing: "I didn't want the publisher to make changes to my game." I want to skip all the usual pros and cons—artistic control versus existing business structure—and talk instead about one major pitfall of self-publishing that crops up all the time. 

It is one thing to want final say in how a product turns out. Many publishers got their start because of that desire. But my guess is that one thing that separates the more critically successful publishers from the droves of quickly forgotten crowd-funded games is the ability to edit their creations and accept feedback. They are willing to kill their darlings. 

I sometimes think that the secret to being a successful designer is the willingness to trash a design that isn't good enough. 

My problem with the discourse around self-publishing isn't that there is anything wrong with self-publishing but that if you are so enamored of your own ideas that you could never accept outside changes then there is an increased likelihood that your game isn't going to be very good. Or it might be great mechanically, but you refused to hire out the graphic design. Or you became so confident in your knowledge that you didn't adequately research the business-side of crowd-funding, like taxes. I worry that there is a relationship between being unwilling to accept outside changes to your ideas and producing bad products. Exactly zero successful board game publishers are a one-person show. 

I don't think there is anything wrong with just wanting to work on your ideas your way, per se. But this attitude so often goes hand in hand with frustration over lack of critical acclaim or other markers of success. Why did my kickstarter fail? Because you didn't solicit or accept feedback, most likely. (Sometimes that feedback is start with a smaller game.) Why aren't you an overnight success? Because no one can be, certainly not on their own. 

The successful self-publishers I know value collaboration as much as they value their artistic control. In every interview, they talk about the people who make them look good. Working with a publisher is a different sort of collaboration, one I value a lot. Because publishers have more experience making products than I do. I also don't want final artistic say. Instead I want to find a publisher who believes in some aspect of my design vision and is willing to invest. Which invariably requires changes, but those changes make the game better. 

I will always champion the designer and publisher collaborative relationship. But if you want to do both, you should (if you can do so in a financially responsible way). I just want to say, in case no has said it yet, you will have to squash your model chair. It doesn't matter if you are the boss or not. At some point you will have to make an artistic change that hurts to make. You will have to sacrifice your vision to practicalities. And it is when you refuse to make the sacrifice that you will fail. 

Sacrificing your vision is not failure. Sometimes it is the key to success. 

ShippBoard Games is a board game design blog that updates most Mondays.