BoingBoing criticizes it as a terrible game, but I don’t think that’s taking it on its own terms–I don’t think it was meant to be a good game, but rather a conceptual exercise. However, I can imagine a mechanic in which players better keep an eye on anything they don’t want to dissolve into something else.
A Treasure Trove of Traditional Games
Here are a couple sites that provide a compendium of traditional games with directions on how to put together what you need to play:
Custom Dice Matchup
Jump down to the custom die generator
Stone Librande teaches game design in addition to being a professional game designer. He has an exercise in which he has his student create custom six-sided dice.
The rules for the custom dice is each side should be numbered with an integer that is 0 or greater and the sum of the numbers on the six sides should add up to 21 (which is the sum of the sides on a standard six-sided die: 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6). Then the students pair up and have a matchup between their two six-sided dice, higher roll wins.
Rolling two standard six-sided dice against one another would give both players a 15/36 chance of winning and a 6/36 chance of having a tie:
Custom dice, however, changes the odds. For example, the blue die in the following matchup would win 58% of the time:
As an exercise, create a couple of custom dice (or use the dice generator below) that follow Stone’s rules (the sides are numbered 0 or greater and add up to 21). Roll the dice against one another a few times. Once you have a feel for the dice, try to guess which one has the better chance of winning the matchup. See if you guess correctly by creating a matchup matrix along the lines of the ones shown above.
Custom Dice Generator
| Die 1 | Die 2 | |
|---|---|---|
Graph Paper
Here’s a great site for customizing graph paper that you can download and print out.
Speaking of graph paper, you might want to check out Conway’s Game of Life.
Drawing the Line
I have had three careers in my life: game developer, contemporary artist, and professor of both. Being a contemporary artist comes with the knowledge that a significant portion of society is hostile to what you are creating. When people outside of the insular art world view your work, there is a good chance that they think “that is not art,” even if they are polite enough not to utter it.
Lately, I have been hearing similar statements in the game world; that a given interactive fiction, or a role-playing game, or a massively multiplayer game is “not a game.” Sometimes the dismissal seems motivated by a desire to protect some cherished form of game, other times it comes from a more dryly academic desire to define and categorize.
Rulebooks & Game Design Documents
Galva is the Bradley University student game that won Best Rulebook and 2nd Best Overall Game Design.
My Bradley University sophomore game design majors did an outstanding job in the BoardGameGeek Mint Tin Game Design Challenge. That competition involved creating a board game that can fit inside an Altoid’s tin. Among the honors received was 1st place in the Best Theme category and 2nd place in the Best Overall [Game] Design category. The BU students also took home 1st place in the Best Rules category.
Becoming skilled at writing tabletop rules is good preparation for writing video game design documents. Game design documents (GDDs) are written by video game designers in order to provide programmers with a blueprint for building the game. A game designer who can write a good tabletop game rulebook, will probably be able to write outstanding video game GDDs. Rulebooks are more difficult to write than game design documents because they need to be polished and comprehensible to a wide spectrum of readers. In contrast, video game design documents are internal and for the development team. Whenever the document is unclear, the team members can simply ask the designer for an explanation (as opposed to having to puzzle it out for themselves).
See also: Rulebook Roundup
Presenting at IndieCade
I’ll be presenting at IndieCade later this month. I’ll be sharing the session (Board Game Design & Development) with Tim Fowler, who has designed (among other things) Paperback. I’ve been wanting to play the game, but it’s currently sold out until later this month (maybe I can get one at IndieCade?).
So if you’re at the conference this year, stop by and see what Tim and I have to say!
Clint Hocking on Intentional Play
Learning Video Game Design on the Tabletop shows the reader how game AIs can be created in the form of finite state machines.
For a real-world example of a finite state machine in Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, download and Clint Hocking’s 2006 Game Developers Conference talk “Designing to Promote Intentional Play” (35MB).
Comparable Basis
Learning Video Game Design on the Tabletop uses Kingdom Rush to illustrate how one might go about creating a “comparable basis.” Establishing a comparable basis is a useful technique for determining an initial design for a game’s various numerical data (such as what each type of tower costs in Kingdom Rush).
Here is a “tower pricing” spreadsheet that I created to work through the comparable basis I present in the book. It should be noted, that the spreadsheet is my own creation and not necessarily how Kingdom Rush‘s designers went about pricing the game’s towers. Even so, it is a useful example of an important designing technique.
See also: “Monster Hunter.”
Button Men
Sanctum Button Men, artwork by Lee Moyer
Learning Video Game Design on the Tabletop comes with a set of Cheapass Game‘s Button Men, courtesy of James Ernest. The book’s Button Men fighters were inspired by Sanctum, an online game I helped create back in the late 1990s.
Button Men is a clever little game and definitely worth trying out. You can find information (rules, game materials, etc.) here… and as a bonus, here are two legacy Cheapass webpages about Buttonmen (here and here).
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