Mechanics in Motion

Role Playing game systems have always been my personal favorite type of game design. They are, however, huge elaborate game systems with many interconnected sub systems, taking quite a bit of time to get right and fully realize. The downside of doing this sort of design is that while other designers have a regular stream of small games to show, the RPG and MMO system designer only produces one every few years. My latest project, the AIR Steampunk MMORPG, has just reached its first year of design, and is coming along nicely. Because I have the honor of working with an absolutely brilliant team of writers, this is the first RPG project where I have gotten to truly focus primarily on the system design and its integration into a storyworld being created in parallel. What follows is a summary of what the team has been up to.
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I rather enjoyed this presentation by Jane McGonigal.  Women in game design tend to have a much more socially conscious view, and  I always enjoy seeing conventional thinking challenged:

Gaming can make a better world

Listening to this talk brought up some old memories. Jane’s talk reminded me that once upon a time, I gave a crap about the world. As a kid, I remember the “Energy Ant” coloring books designed to help kids understand the energy crisis and do something about it. I remember that growing up, I put my young idealistic problem solving mind to the conundrums of society and how they might be resolved. Yet the more and more I learned just how screwed up the world was, I began to realize that there are very few people in this world who care about actually solving society’s problems. As a problem solver, I recognized that politicians didn’t seem to be doing it, they seemed to ignore all the sensible answers and care only about their mysterious agendas.

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Game mechanics can be quite technical and might seem like the dry boring part of the game. They don’t have the visual impact of slick graphics or the memorable journey we get from well designed narrative, and so they can be thought of as just another necessary component of a game. The truth is, they are the game. Misunderstanding on this point is what leads to long and tired arguments about story in games and whether or not games can be considered art. The mechanics of a game, once set in motion by the activity are play, become beautiful; they are entirely their own form of aesthetic. What makes games truly fascinating to me as a game designer is emergent complexity that results from a well designed system of mechanics.

Brenda Brathwaite is a designer who truly understands this concept, embodied in her series of games, “Mechanic is the Message”. The game in this series which has gotten so much attention,  “Train”,  attempts to explore the mechanics of the system of human on human tragedy carried out in the Holocaust. A true genius in her field, Brenda sees the world in terms of systems, and noted in her research that human on human tragedy is a result of a careful and deliberate system. She has said that in designing Train, her goal was to understand this system and figure out how to put the player into it. In doing so, the player gains new insight and understanding of an aspect of human existence.

When you design game mechanics, you are dealing with the same stuff that drives the universe.

I love collectible strategy games. I like cards with cool art I can hold in my hands, miniatures I can move around and paint in my spare time. I love cracking open a new rulebook to see what secrets it might hold, or design patterns it might repeat. I love that new feeling of a system unexplored and with the possibility of untold hours of exploration.

I’ve recently discovered a new one, Uncharted Seas. It’s put out by a company in the UK, Spartan games. Oh, its got all the expected cliché versions of the fantasy archetypes:  Bone Griffons (undead), various Elves, Orcs, “Empire” humans and some steam using races like Dwarves. The rulebook is a bit rough, not even completed, with continuing updates on the web site and pdf downloads just to allow you to play the complete game. The designers almost apologetic as they go to great length to explain how simple the rules are, and just how many expansions they plan to release. It’s got all the rough edges of a new game, but yet at the same time that is part of its charm. It gives me that new game feel, the hope of emergent complexity that arises from raw and pure mechanics ready to clash in the space of possibility.

What I especially like about Uncharted Seas is that a fleet can be bought for the price of around a new video game. They also can be painted pretty quickly. The mechanics are pretty clean, with a single dice pool ( 6 sided) where 4, 5, and 6’s score hits. The hits are added up and if they meet a target number, damage is scored. If a second, higher number is met, a critical hit is scored. This wraps up all the rolling into one pool, compared against one set of numbers. The really fun thing is that rolling a ‘6’ counts as 2 hits, and you get to roll again, allowing for chains of hits.

The company also seems to want to support the community, one of the most important aspects of a collectible strategy game. A local game store is running tournaments and has even apparently hired a representative for the area to help push the hobby. This is a key factor for the success of one of these games. So if you are looking for a fun collectable game that has all that new game charm, for a low price, check out Uncharted Seas.

www.spartangames.co.uk/uncharted.htm

If you have ever tried to offer feedback to artist on their work and things went badly, you probably ended up wondering, “is the artist oversensitive, or am I just a jerk?” Perhaps the problem was largely one of language. It’s pretty well understood that most artists are probably going to be lost in a swirling mass of programming terms when trying to talk to a coder, but have you ever considered that art has its own vocabulary? Terms like value, hue, warm, cool and saturation all target very specific features of a piece of art. People not familiar with these specific art terms are going to throw around all sorts of words that are ambiguous, or even worse, actually imply an art definition which is not what they mean at all. As my goal here is to try and offer some workarounds for those untrained in the arts, my solution is not simply for you to go out and start reading art lexicons. You will pick the language eventually, but meanwhile, there are some very important things you can be aware of that will help this process that artists call a critique. Read More…

Once you have collected your reference material, you will need a way to organize it, or it’s going to be a nightmare trying to find what you want when you need it. Putting the images online into a wiki or ftp site is be a great idea— though you will need to scan the images from the printed material. This is probably what you will have to do if you are working on an indie project with multiple artists across the country (or world). However, you want more than just a catalogue of images. What you want is a something like an Art Bible, which is a collection of images, colors, moods and other visual reference for artists to use. This is the job of the art director, so if there is one on your team, you can assign it to them (or just work on it yourself). Read More…

All design starts in the conceptual phase, where it must soon be manifested into physical form to be useful. In the game art pipeline, this important first step takes the form of concept art. Later in the pipeline, concept art is what all the modelers reference so they know what it is they are supposed to be modeling. Trying to explain to the artist using language what visual concepts you want them to manifest is difficult, and if you are not familiar with the artist’s vocabulary, it can get messy very quickly. Read More…

So you’ve decided you want to make your own video game. Your programming or design skills are good enough to meet or rise to the challenge, and you’ve chosen a game engine or begun creation of one of your own. You are looking forward to a working game, but on the horizon looms the ever approaching matter of the art assets. Maybe you are aware that there is something called the art pipeline, and you know that it’s eventually going to have to be sorted out. Sure there will be some challenges getting the art assets into your game, but that is technical stuff and you can figure it out. Maybe you even wanted to make some custom content, so you download an open source modeling program like Blender. That turned out to be a bit more involved than you expected. Like all technical challenges, you know you can get it figured out, but you are painfully aware that your time would be much better spent elsewhere. You’re not concerned because there are lots of artist out there, and after all, the art just makes it look pretty, the hard work is in the coding, right? Read More…