Game Design Diary – August

This is the second monthly Game Design Diary post which in and of itself is a cause for celebration! That means I’ve worked on game design for a solid two months now! Which is already the most consistent amount of work I have ever managed to do. I thought I’d start with a little celebration before looking through what I had hoped I might do this month:

• “Finish latest prototype” – Yes
  • “Preferably in time for said designer meetup” – er… no I finished it last week
• “Start playtesting Wren’s Churches at home with my wife” – No
• “Prototyping a larger game” – …No
• “Investigating digital prototyping” – Not exactly but I have made some interesting steps in this regard

Overview

I have had a very busy month and not had as much time for design as I would have liked and have been aiming for. Full weekends and bathroom decorating in the evenings have kind of got in the way a bit but I should hopefully have more time in September now that most of that process is done and out the way. That’s my excuse anyway! I am still happy with how things are going though, especially after a productive final week, so I’m still motivated and excited to keep working!

Wren’s Churches

My most advanced design, and the game that has been the focus of the limited playtesting time I have had available. (I could only make one Playtest UK meet up this month, and managed to have some friends over for a bonus playtesting session too) I feel like the core of this relatively simple game is mostly working now, which is fantastic. In one of those ironic developments, a change I had been resisting ultimately proved exceedingly effective. At least in the most recent playtest. There is still room for improvement in the other ‘half’ of the design and this is where the next set of tweaks will be focussed.

Lesson: sometimes your instincts are wrong; try ideas even if you aren’t sure about them.

Hunt the Bismark

My newest prototype explores a pivotal naval battle in world war 2, the sinking of the battleship Bismark, which I suppose makes this a war game and while there is combat, at its heart this is a hidden movement game. Not being a war gamer, I don’t feel the need for a single hex or unit chit. It is more war themed than war game.

It is, however, reasonably complex. More so than anything else I have ever designed. That has both slowed my attempts to get a prototype together and made it a bit challenging to keep all the ideas for the core rules together in my head. So, I tried something new: writing the rulebook first.

Lesson: Writing the rulebook really helps clarify a more involved design

The rulebook is often the last thing to get written it seems so doing this before finishing a prototype felt like an unusual move? However, it has proven exceedingly useful. Instead of various ideas spread across the pages of a notebook, I have all the core rules in a roughly sensible format in a Google doc. This will make it a ton easier to teach and means I don’t have to try and write it all later! Future Matt will be pleased! More importantly though, it really helped bring the whole design into focus and get more of a feel for how elements interact. It was also very effective at helping me see what was missing, what I had forgotten to even consider. I wholeheartedly recommend putting together a rulebook early for more complicated games.

Digital Design Systems – Trello

In keeping with a theme of keeping my ideas organised in a more practical way, I’ve also been experimenting with Trello as a day to day replacement for physical notebooks. I was looking for a system that could be easily extended to collaborations, as well as curious about how effective the versatile nature of digital organisation systems could be. So far, I’ve been finding it incredibly useful!

Trello is an app designed around creating lists as a means of project management. Broadly, think of task lists, with each item in a list able to hold considerable information about the task, have a discussion thread, end dates and assigned team members. Each board can have any number of lists and there are a bunch of customisation options and plugins available. The powerful thing is that while it works fantastically for To Do lists, it is incredibly versatile.

So for each game I’m working on, I’ve set up a Trello board with Ideas, To Do, In Progress and Done lists for tasks or rule ideas that I want to work on, I have special lists for particular card decks with an item for each card, and I can prioritise and categorise tasks using labels that can be added to each item. I still have physical notebooks for playtesting (although I’m trying out writing up those notes into another list when I review the feedback) or for sketching out math and layout designs. I’m hoping to figure out systems for importing and exporting card lists to a format more useful for digital prototyping, though I still need to figure out a lot of details there!

There is something incredibly pleasing about creating a new organisational tool and it really didn’t take long to set up and get going (I have used Trello before, but it really is a simple interface). Three weeks in and I’m still really happy with it. It’s made it incredibly easy to just jot down a couple of thoughts as they occur, and naturally attach them to all the other relevant thoughts I’ve had on a particular element of the design. Should I have a collaborative project at some point in the future, I’m hoping this will be an incredibly useful tool.

Let me know if you have any questions about this, I feel like there is a fair bit to dig into!

Plans for September

August plans didn’t entirely pan out but hopefully with weekends freeing up again and less other stuff getting in the way I can make a bit more progress this month. Or I can just massively overreach again! No worries either way.

• Roll and Write Global Jam contest – this intentionally short scoped contest is only running this week so, if I have time, why not take a punt on it? If nothing else it will be a good exercise in rapid prototyping! Slightly worried that I haven’t played enough Roll and Writes to really say I understand the genre but, by the same token, maybe that will help me avoid falling into the same systems that everyone else has done?
• Another mid-sized game – I’m probably not going to be focussing as heavily on game design after September so I’d like to have another prototype of a bigger game put together so that I can spend the later months of the year developing the games that I have. I’ve got a good idea of what I want to build here, I just need to flesh it out and then put pen to cardboard.
• Playtesting Hunt the Bismark – I want this title to be my focus for playtesting this month, particularly at Playtest UK. I also have a close friend who was excited to help me with this one once I had pulled together a prototype, so hopefully I’ll get chance to start working with him on it.
• Widen my playtesting circle – a repeat aim from last month as it was so important and yet I never quite managed to do it. That will help me considerably with continuing development of Wren’s Churches while I try to focus my current playtesters on Hunt the Bismark. That’s the idea anyway.

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Are you doing any design work this month? What are you hoping to get done? Leave a comment and let me hear about it!