General
Designing ‘MARVEL SNAP’
by: Ben Brode
https://youtu.be/HjhsY2Zuo-c?list=PLJOqkQc0u8tyt9J6tHrmeg7sp8IJlS54L
Other Videos Referenced:
Hearthstone: 10 Bits Of Design Wisdom
by: Eric Dodds
https://youtu.be/pyjDMPTgxxk
How I Got My Mom to Play Through Plants vs. Zombies
by: George Fan
https://youtu.be/fbzhHSexzpY?list=PLJOqkQc0u8tyt9J6tHrmeg7sp8IJlS54L
Richard Garfield – “Luck in Games” talk at ITU Copenhagen
by: Richard Garfield
https://youtu.be/av5Hf7uOu-o?list=PLJOqkQc0u8tyt9J6tHrmeg7sp8IJlS54L
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Notes
They described game designers as chefs that collect ideas as ingredients and mix them together to create games. They reference how someone says they get a lot of ideas by going to game conventions.
Once they determined they were making a collectible card game, they just go out and play as many different versions of that type of game they can find to get inspiration and ideas as these ingredients. They also mention how this can help validate some of your design aspirations because when you see something working it can help confirm this is a decent idea to pursue. This can even help mitigate how much and how fast you need to make prototypes since you can see proof of and test certain mechanics in existing games.
They have this idea of “zero sum games = zero fun”, which I find very intriguing as someone that also looks at games like this at times. As in, what is the net entertainment you are bringing to society from creating a game. This leads them to focusing on enhancing “little victories” as a way to generate more consistent joy, particularly on the losing side, so there is more net joy created. They also just emphasize how single player sided games (it could even be a team of human players, like a PvE game) can more easily generate net joy.
- They mention there’s a 2014 GDC talk on these Little Victories.
- Link: https://youtu.be/pyjDMPTgxxk
Depth vs. Complexity
They explained these two terms simply as:
Complexity – cost you pay to play (learning needed to be done)
Depth – the fun part of the game (intereseting decisions you make)
They plot these two concepts on a chart, Complexity vs. Depth, and show that a game can be anywhere on here. They describe games that have significant depth with relatively low complexity “elegant designs”.
Doubling Cube Mechanic
They go into a lot of detail how much this doubling cube mechanic brings to a game. This mechanic is the idea of being able to influence the resulting winnings of a game directly and have the other player determine if they should concede or not based on these changes.
They witnessed that this cube mechanic could help generate significant little victories for the losing players. This was because the losing player could retreat early as the bet was increased, making them feel smart for leaving early before losing more resources.
They believe this also added a lot of depth to the game, similar to how betting and bluffing in poker adds a lot of depth to a rather simple game.
Text Complexity
Text in games, especially when it comes to instructions, is something I explore and encounter a lot and their findings gave a nice hard numerical line for this that I have been floating around for a while. They reference the 2012 GDC talk by George Fan on Plants vs. Zombies for their text rule, which is “Eight words on the screen at any given time”.
I would jokingly just say that players never read any text on the screen, so find a way to help them figure out what to do without any words if possible, so this was good to find that you can at least deliver a few words of instruction to the player that could be used as guidance.
They talk about how they used this principle to keep their individual card text as simple as possible as well. While not always able to fit the 8 word cutoff, they did use this as a starting point for when text was getting large. For actual text understandability they did playtesting where they had anyone raise their hand if they had to read a card more than once to see if they could trim.
Game Story
I love their story tier list for games because I feel that it’s an effective visual representation of how I feel about story in games that is hard to describe to people. They emphasize that an incredible story is still the best type of story to have for a game, but having no story at all is not too far behind, and having a bad story can actually be more detrimental than no story at all.
I would personally lump very minimalistic boring story in with “no story at all” because it does effectively become ignored. That will cost dev time and resources though, so from an actual game development perspective I think that ends up making it significantly worse since you’re getting a similar return to just doing nothing.
Mechanics from Other Games
I mostly wanted to have this section to show how you can just find interesting mechanics individually in games you play and that can be enough to go off of as your ingredient for working on designing a game that has that as a more core element or explores it in a different fashion.
Simultaneous Reveal:
They just found this mechanic very interesting and open, so they wanted to include it. They referenced a Lord of the Rings game like Stratego, and a Game of Thrones: The Board Game. They found just having this mechanic doesn’t work in a vacuum because it’s effectively random without context. Context is a critical secondary element needed to make this mechanic work.
Playing Cards to Locations:
They found this in Smash Up. They liked that this provided an easy point of variability and a point of context for the simultaneous reveal.
Luck vs. Skill
They open this section with their favorite talk of all time by Richard Garfield. They explain how most people see luck and skill as mutually exclusive factors, but they’re actually also plottable on the same graph and games can have any mixture of both.
i.e.
Chess = low luck; high skill
Chutes and Ladders = high luck; low skill
Poker = high luck; high skill
They cover input and output randomness concepts here.
Input randomness: the given inputs are random which give time to adjust (decide after random event).
Output randomness: randomness happens after input (decision) is already given.
As someone that grew up as one of the better local players for all types of games, I initially hated randomness as it provided the main point for me to lose games against people, and I wanted to win all the time. As I got older though, I learned to enjoy and embrace randomness in games, as it could simply provide a way for others to win even when I felt like I played better, which could actually leave us both feeling better about the games. Randomness also gives you a factor to play around as a more skilled player others may not even be aware of that helps you consistently win more, even if it doesn’t mean winning every game, which again can give you those feelings of “feeling smart” on your own, even if other players aren’t even aware.
Final Details on Core Game Loop
They wrap the talk up with some points on how they brought all their design ingredients together. They found the locations could help influence metas and provide a strong point of variance over game life, so they prepped a lot of locations to slowly add to the game after launch, had different rates for locations to change meta, and would swap out locations to also impact metas.
They talked about how changing the game siginficantly is just easier with smaller teams than larger teams. They mentioned how some UI decisions actually impacted game mechanics, like targeting being confusing on a mobile game so they just removed a layer of targeting from their game mechanics entirely to fit their targeted game platform and feel.