One of the coolest new items I bought are lights for my cutting table. Huh? I came up with the idea after seeing a kickstarter for a cutting board with a light strip for more precise cutting. I thought this was a great idea since it is so hard to be precise. I already had a cutting board that worked great and I didn't want to spend another $60. So I bought these lights from Amazon. Here is the link:
http://www.amazon.com/Fulcrum-30010-301-Battery-Operated-Stick-On-Silver/dp/B000R7PM36/ref=sr_1_1?s=lamps-light&ie=UTF8&qid=1399926108&sr=1-1&keywords=Led+lights
$7.75 for 3 lights. I will use 2 or 3 depending on the length of the paper. Here is an example of how they will help.
http://www.amazon.com/Fulcrum-30010-301-Battery-Operated-Stick-On-Silver/dp/B000R7PM36/ref=sr_1_1?s=lamps-light&ie=UTF8&qid=1399926108&sr=1-1&keywords=Led+lights
$7.75 for 3 lights. I will use 2 or 3 depending on the length of the paper. Here is an example of how they will help.
You can probably see how obvious your cut line will be. You may also notice that we placed a dot in the middle of the board. This shows up on the top right of the picture. When the board was split into 4 pieces it will show up on all of the slices. Also, we use lines on the outside edges for the same purposes. You may be able to see this on the bottom right. These lines and dot help with cutting the board evenly and you can barely see them on the final product.
The last thing I will cover today should probably be your first purchase. The little plastic cube. It is as essential to a game designer as a little black dress to your favorite lady (who may be you). They go well in any situation. I use to get them at teaching stores, but you can get them on Amazon as well. Here is the link:
I use the cubes for everything, including but not limited to resources, action markers, character pawns, and enemies. You can even increase the variety by. Glueing them to plastic disks. This distinguishes them from other cubes of the same color, and gives them a neat look and feel.
That's all for this week. Next week we will talk about teamwork in game design.
Until then, I am Peter, keep designing great
games.
Very nice tip! Lighting is very essential to the cutting process, and you only find this out after you've made some bad cuts using expensive stock! I also agree with the cubes and transparent disks - both are very handy in my own design efforts. Continue the great job with these design tips - I look forward to them!
ReplyDeleteKeith,
ReplyDeleteThanks for the great feedback. All the comments I have gotten by email, Twitter, and now here are definitely encouraging me to keep going. I am having to hold myself back from posting more than one a week. But I told myself when I started that I wanted to limit it so I could spend most of my "free time" designing.
If you have any topics you want me to, or think I should cover please let me know.
Peter
Very nice, I am enjoying reading your series of design tips so far. One thing I would appreciate that I don't feel I've seen enough of is tips on breaking your own designs. Where to start, what things to focus on, when in the design process to start breaking the game. I have been having a little trouble deciding where to focus in breaking my own design and have mostly been playing it and getting feedback and noticing things that work and don't work. I've decided that as long as I understand the core engagement (what makes the game fun and engaging) I can keep redesigning the game functions around that concept. What do you think? It would be nice to hear another designers process and what they go through to break the design and make it more fluid while keeping the initial fun idea in place.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the great question. I definitely want to take some time and put together a full post on this topic. But here are some quick thoughts.
ReplyDeleteI think you hit the nail on the head. Most of the time we don't go in trying to break the game. If we think something is broken then we will focus on trying to exploit it, and see what happens. I find there is so much fine tuning to do along the way that there are always things to work on. Focusing on the core of the game will get you farther into your design than focusing on what may be broken. If it is so broken that it doesn't play, or someone breaks it during a playtest session then we just stop and talk about what happened. We don't just focus on the "broken" part of the game though, we also try to find out what parts the playtesters like. What they didn't like. What felt fiddly. If we think something may be broken, we won't put it in front of a playtester. We will either play it solo, or get together and play it.
If you find that someone keeps winning the same way, or with the same card then I would look into it. It is usually pretty easy to increase or decrease the power of something. Increase cost. Lessen effect. That is all part of the tweaking process. I think it is important to have a strong core design first. Even if some things are over or under powered. Trust me once you get it in front of other people you don't know, they will find the chinks in the armor. People love to tell you how broken something is. You just have to take it all in, write it down, and go back to it when you have time to calmly assess if they were right. Sometimes they aren't but a lot of times they are on the right track.
That was a lot of rambling, but I will have a DToW out tomorrow on UnPub conventions. If you want someone to help tweak, or break your game that is the place to go.
- Peter
It's funny, the more I think about this, I think I have a better answer. Everything I said above still applies. I think your best option for breaking a game is putting it in front of others, but when do you do this was the question.
ReplyDeleteI think you focus on the core of the game until you think you have it. You think you are ready for publication. Then you take it to others. Funny I have been calling this getting the kinks out, but it is exactly the same thing. You have the rules, you have the core of the game, and you just want to make sure something isn't overpowered, or worse yet useless.
Until you are at the stage you are "done" messing with mechanisms, too much will change to worry about the details. The core should be strong, then you tweak/ break it.
Yeah, I feel like having a strong core is key. As long as you stick to that core, and it is enjoyable, everything else can be tweaked and balanced to accommodate that key mechanism or process. Finding an aspect in your design that is one you like but also useless is really disappointing. Figuring out the balance of what to trim and what to keep at that point is important. The question seems to be, what needs to be done to still keep the choices interesting and to keep the game fun?
DeleteThat last question is one I had with my first game design. It is a really good one, and I think comes up a lot with game designs. I think it is the reason so many people don't finish, or abandon a design. I haven't had to do this yet, because I found a partner to design with. He was more into American Style games where I was more into streamlining. The combination worked out really well.
ReplyDeleteHe added theme to my project, and questioned everything. Why is this in here? How is that thematic? We built a really bloated game, but there was fun in there. Then we focused on streamlining the mechanics. Bastion has been through over 17 iterations. We actually had it with a publisher for most of last year and they kept giving us feedback. With each set of feedback we drastically altered the game, which in hindsight I think was the wrong idea. We lost track of our core goal and made a bloated game again. Ironically my group loves that game, and it may get released at a later date under a different name. But I knew it wasn't what we were all about. We make thematic games with streamlined mechanics. That is our core. I think once you find that core, every decision has to be based around it.
Same with each game. Find it's core. What makes it fun. A lot of times that is what I asked my early playtesters. What was fun about the game for you? I got a lot of the same answers and realized that the rest had to go. Be built around the fun. Streamline everything else so you can focus on the good stuff.
Our training in Bastion is worker placement. It is a cool new way of doing worker placement, but worker placement none the less. Why did we make that choice? Because it was fast and let us get back to the fun part of killing bad guys. Thanks for keeping the conversation going. It is a good one.
I like the idea of examining mechanics and processes under a "thematic" lens. Keeping things streamlined and not fiddly but still having conceptual relativity is important for some games and less for others, although I can usually connect the dots with most games "Why do I have to feed my people? Because they're people, and they're hungry!"
ReplyDeleteAlternatively, developing a game starting with certain mechanics in mind is quite challenging as well. For instance let's say you want to design a worker placement game with elements of engine building and set collection and maybe even some bidding and auction, a lot of games have pulled this off well, Keyflower and Bruxelles 1893 come to mind. But learning how to make various mechanics mesh and flow with the theme of a game is truly a skill, it takes time and plenty of hard work and generally, thankfully, an overactive imagination.