A few weeks ago I got my weekly invite to my friend James' game night.  I go as often as I can because he's one of my favorite designers to work with as well as being one of my best friends.  On this particular week he wanted to work on something new and he pointed us to a website where a designer had issued a challenge.   James wanted to try this out and asked us to bring some ideas to game night.

Four of us got together and started building on an idea that James had and by the end of the night we had a nice two player game using simple components that we'd all contributed to.  I love that kind of collaborative effort. Over the next week James showed it to another friend of ours and they expanded it to three players, and at the next game night we changed it around some more (somewhat radically.)  You gotta like change!  It's coming along nicely and should be a fun entry into the contest.

But that's not the game I want to talk about.  Once it's done I'll post something here so you all can see it and comment.

I like the idea of this contest on so many levels.  First, I agree with Daniel Solis; there's not a lot of incentive to make a "new classic."  At least not a lot of monetary incentive.  There have been some reasonably successful games in this category like Blokus, or maybe Gipf, but in general that's not where the money lies.  I applaud him for setting this up.

Second, this is a great design challenge.  Making a game within a set of parameters like this is tough enough, and keeping it simple enough to be a new classic is even more difficult.  No game with an 80 page rule book is going to last 1000 years.  It has to be simple and elegant, but with a great depth of play.

Since I first heard about the challenge I've had about four different ideas for mechanics or such that I think could turn into a game for the challenge.  None of them are very far along but I'm pretty excited to explore them and see what develops.  I'll post more as it develops.

Let me start by saying: I'm a Blizzard fanboy.  That's kind of an understatement, really.  I've been playing their games since the original Warcraft came out.  I'm an especially huge fan of both Diablo games and World of Warcraft.  I've been to several Blizzcons and played both the WoW CCG and miniatures game.

I used to be a fairly hard core World of Warcraft Player.  Twice.  I played it from beta through launch, and then for a year or so (possibly as long as two.)  I was in a high end raiding guild.  I eventually quit because the game stopped being fun and started being about politics and loot whoring.  I just wanted to play the game and have fun.

I stayed away for another year or so, until Burning Crusade came out.  I started playing with some of my real life friends who were in a much more casual guild and the game became fun again.  We still did high end stuff, but more casually and with more fun in mind.  I was still pretty hard core, though.  At one point I was experimenting with programs that let me play five characters at the same time on the same computer, but coordinating keypresses.  I also thoroughly ravished their "recruit a friend" program to powerlevel multiple characters.

My wife and I played through the release of Lich King right up until my daughter was born. (In fact, my wife ignored her early contractions so we could finish a raid.)  A baby pretty much put a stop to our ability to raid effectively, or really to play, and so we hung up our accounts.

I like WoW a lot, but I also like not playing WoW as well.  When I play WoW, I tend to miss out on a lot of other gaming.  It takes so much time to go on raids and level and do quests.  It's all fun, but you don't have as much time to play some other game that is going to eat up 10+ hours to finish.  My consoles tend to languish, unplayed.  I miss releases of the biggest PC games as well.  And it's harder to go to game nights and keep up with hot board game releases when you have to schedule around your raids.  So, there's pluses and minuses.

As you may know, Cataclysm just came out.  It's a very exciting expansion on paper.  They introduced two new races; the Worgen and Goblins.  They greatly reduced the restrictions on which other races could be what classes (really only paladins and druids still have many restrictions.)  There is, of course, the obligatory new zones for the high end players and an increase in the level cap.  However, one of the biggest changes is that they completely revamped most of the "old world."  They resculpted many zones from the original release of the game, added a ton of new quests, made it so that you can fly in those zones for the first time, and many other changes.  It's an amazing amount of work to update those areas so that people want to go back and play in them.

After a lot of thought about it (and some gentle coercing from some friends that still play,) I decided to give in and try it out.  I didn't even have to go to a retail store.  You can purchase and download directly from Blizzard.  I reactivated my account, patched up to full (it took about a day, I think, including downloading and installing Cataclysm.)  Then I jumped right in.

Some of my friends that still play are playing alliance so I thought I'd start by making a Worgen.  I've always wanted to try a hunter, and that combination is available as Worgen.  Next I had to decide on male or female.  I play both.  I don't role-play female; that would be weird.  My philosophy is that I'm going to have to stare at this avatar for a very long time and I want it to be something I like looking at.  Usually this means that for "pretty" races I choose female and for "ugly" races I choose male (since they tend to look tougher.)  Worgen females aren't pretty, but the males look tough, so the choice is easy.

The starting experience for the Worgen is fun and full of story.  You start as a human who's town in beset by werewolves, and play through the war that follows as the wolves are defeated and the undead move in.  Along the way you get bitten by a worgen and change over.  Alchemists discover a way to suppress your bestial urges.  In the end your war with the undead is interrupted by the Cataclysm and you join up with the alliance to help out.

Blizzard makes very good use of their robust "instance" technology which allows the world to change around the player.  I can't count the number of times this happens in the starting areas.  You'll be sent to talk to an NPC and when you come back around the corner the area is destroyed or full of monsters, or something.  It's very cool and immersive.

Since I last played there have been significant improvements to the user interface.  Blizzard has always had a very open policy regarding their game.  Anyone who wants to can make "add ons" that help players out.  They've made thousands of them that do anything from making routine actions automatic to helping keep information at the players fingertips. It's very cool and Blizzard must love it because they often take those add ons and incorporate their functions into the game.  For example now the mini-map tracks where you need to go to get a quest done.  This is new and very cool.  They've also added the ability to toggle what you see on the minimap. Everything from trainers to innkeepers to quest NPCs.  That's great.

I played my Worgen until I left their starting area and got to someplace "familiar."  After about level 13 or so they join up with the elves and start playing in their areas.  This would normally get boring for me, but this is Cataclysm and those areas are VASTLY different than the last time I went through them.  Some of the old quests remain, but there're a ton of new ones as well.  I'm pretty sure no one ever runs out of things to do anymore.

The next time I logged in I decided to see what the starting experience is like for the other new race, the Goblins.  O.  M.  G.  Goblins in WoW are sort of the comic relief.  They work with technology, but aren't very good at it so they are always messing up in amusing ways.  Also, if someone's sending you on a quest to do something funny, it's often a goblin.  All of this comes through in the Goblin starting experience and more than I could have imagined.  The Worgen story is full of tragedy and angst and the Goblin one is full of humor and fun.

First of all, you don't start as a lowly anything that has to run around and kill rats.  Oh, no.  You're the boss of a factory that makes a highly addictive soda pop.  Your first quests include zapping lazy trolls that work for you and riding around in your car to pick up your buddies.  I loved it.  It was just such a nice change from "kill 10 rats" or "go get some orders from that low ranked guy over there."

As much as I loved it, though, I haven't finished it yet.  The next time I logged in I immediately got pinged by a friend of mine who offered to help me with my "main."  A lot has changed since the last time I logged in and my character was essentially trapped where he was.  The portals have all been switched around and I needed to get somewhere that I could access the new ones.  He's a mage so he came and got me and took me where they are.  He also invited me to the new guild and I decided to hang around and explore the new high level content.

First, guilds are greatly changed now as well.  They have levels, just like characters.  As the guild levels up, everyone in it gets special advantages like bonuses to XP or increased movement speed, or extra gold.  Blizzard knows what they are doing.  Plus, each character has a level in the guild.  Doing quests gives you guild experience.  As you level up in the guild you gain access to more guild functions as well.  It's pretty cool.

I explored the main city a bit, and then decided to head off to the new lands, so I got on a boat.  Halfway through the voyage the boat was attacked by a giant squid and I was pulled overboard.  Thus began my adventuring in the new underwater realms.  It's a very interesting experience to adventure in three dimensions instead of just two and I'm not sure if I like it, yet.  You can avoid a lot of stuff, which is nice, but it can also make it harder to find what you are looking for, and you can get surprised by things that are closer than you thought they were.

The new talent system is ok.  Previously you got one talent point per level from 10 on up and you pumped them into talents in any of three areas for each class.  Now you only get one point every other level and you must choose one of the three areas to specialize in.  You can still spend points in the other areas, but it seems like it's a lot harder to be a hybrid than it was before.  I really haven't finished exploring this aspect, though, so I might be wrong about that.

The biggest surprises were the items, though.  Blizzard has always put out new, more powerful things with new expansions.  The characters level cap is going up, so they need more powerful things.  In the past, though, the new stuff was always paced realistically.  If you were a top raider before the expansion the first items you'd get in the new content wouldn't really compare with your old top end equipment.  That is NOT the case here.  The first quest I did had a reward that far outshone my old "epic" gear.  On the one hand it's nice to have new loot, but on the other hand I worked for weeks on each piece of that gear and now I can just toss it aside for things that people hand me for almost no effort.  It works fine, but feels bad.

Well, that's pretty much where I am.  I've gone through the initial storyline about saving the survivors of the squid attack and defending them from the nagas in the area, and I'm on to a quest line about some human thieves in a cave that's fun so far.  I'm about half way through my first new level.  I haven't even gotten to the main hub for the new content yet, so there's lots to do.

I'm enjoying the game, but I don't feel really hooked this time.  That could change as I start to play around in dungeons and such, though.  Assuming I let myself get to that point. There are several things that could keep me from getting there.  First, I like playing a lot of different games these days and (as I said above) there's not much room in my queue for playing both WoW and Fallout 3, for example.  Second, I don't think my lovely wife is coming along with me this time, and that's always been a huge reason for me to play.  I love how we help each other play.  The child just isn't really going to let both of us play at the same time; nor should she.  I've been sneaking my play in late at night when she's asleep.

So far, though, I have enjoyed it and will keep playing for the time being and see where it leads.

It's not really fair of me to start up a brand new blog without paying some attention to the old one, is it?

I've been working on a lot of game designs recently, and it's had me thinking about my process for making a game.  I'm not sure how long I can ramble about this, but let's start with initial concepts.

My games usually start with a single idea.  Most often it's a mechanic I want to explore.  It can come from another game I've played where I liked something but didn't think that it had been done right (or at least the way I thought it should be.)  Or I want to explore it more than the designer had or take a minor mechanic and focus an entire game around it.



The second most common way I start a game design is with a theme of some kind.  Time travel, or zombies, or something will strike my fancy and I'll think about ways to make a game out of it.  Most often this gets married to a mechanic I'm interested in and we're off to the races.

Guillotine happened in this way.  I was having lunch with a bunch of the other game designers at Wizards of the Coast one day and we got onto the subject of the French Revolution for some reason.  By the end of the lunch I'd decided that it would be a good theme for a game. I settled quickly on the idea that the players should be the headsmen competing to get the best nobles from the line, and the rest of the basic mechanics fell into place from there.

Ideas can come from other sources as well.  One game I'm working on at the moment started as an idea about packaging components and a whole game has evolved from it.

Once I've gotten my initial idea I tend to create games like a parfait (who doesn't like a parfait?)  Maybe more like an onion, or even better, like a space station.  There's the initial idea at the center, and then I add bits to it wherever they seem to fit best.  I keep adding bits, and then discarding them when they don't work.  I guess the best way to describe it is that I have a very "modular" approach to design.  I ask questions like "What's the hand size?"  "Do players score as they go or only at the end?" and so on.  I then create the mechanics to support those ideas and bolt them onto the superstructure (I like the space station metaphor) until I've got something I can prototype.

Sometimes the game comes together well and with a clear vision and I make the whole thing up for testing.  That can be a lot of work, but if I have faith in all the pieces it saves time because it's much easier to tune a completed game.  Sometimes, though, I need to test the core to see if it's worth creating the whole station or not.  It can be hard to know if that initial mechanic is even viable without testing.  In the most extreme cases I'll only do the bare minimum of extra design work.  I'll create a playable game, but with a lot of bare bones mechanics surrounding the core I want to test.  That way I'll (hopefully) be able to isolate that mechanic and see if there's something worth pursuing.

Once the basic structure is done it's playtest, playtest, playtest.  I try to play every game as much as I can.  I learn something new with every game I play.

The most important advice I can give about playtesting, though, is "don't be afraid of change." Don't hold onto a bad mechanic just because you love it.  It might be wrong for the game.  And don't be afraid to scrap or heavily modify big sections of the game to see what works.  In fact, as much as you can, think ahead of time about different ways the same game might work and test them all out.  You'll find hidden synergies in the mechanics this way.

Also, bring a pen.  Take notes.  Change components in between games as you discover problems and try again with the changes.  I say between games because in general you should finish most playtest games you start, even if you've discovered something minor that is wrong and you want to change it.  You'll get valuable data about the endgame, scoring, etc. that you'd never even get to stopping and starting again.

I hope this post has helped you get some insight into my design process and maybe even helped you think a bit about your own.