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Pigs and Weird Cities

Hello Avid Game design followers,

Here is an update about what is in the lab at Weird City Games this month. Pigs – currently under the working title Little Pig (thanks benny) has made it to the 2nd prototype phase. After a few solo tests and two group tests I realized the main mechanic, choosing where you want your pig to gather was too dependent on luck of the draw and not enough info was shared so that players could make a solid guess. It has been retooled with each pig having one gather card for each site, which they can augment with action cards. At the start of each turn the resource card is flipped and indicates how many of each resource become available in each area. If players go to that area they will split the resources with all other pigs there. Also new special builds, modifications to wolf rules and a structure of gather, one build and one extra action – extra buy, gather one resource, trade, draw action card. This allows more flexibility and strategy. Lastly still working to develop the Wolf Hunter strategy.

Weird City – this one is finally coming together and it is really nice to have two projects to bounce back and forth on. Weird City is a mix between rummy and Illuminati and mostly flavor though I think there should be some good game play. In the game there are approximately 100 cards – 30 locations/events, 40 people and 30 activities/objects. All of these cards will have between 1-5 descriptive adjectives. There will be a total of 10 pairs of opposing adjectives: new/old, safe/dangerous, radical/traditional. The object of the game is to build sets of weird combinations. Grandmothers (old, traditional, quiet) with skateboards (loud, radical, dangerous). Points will be scored for how many opposing adjectives you have. Three and four card sets can consist of adding a location/object or other personality type that compliments both cards and heightens the weirdness. Extra bonus points or safe sets for closed circuits where all adjectives are matched.

The main design obstacle is coming up with the ten adjective pairs so that they can describe almost anything and to have them diverse enough and then build it with a nice balance of all groups. Got to take a look at illuminati’s words and how they did the math. Anyhow those are what we are working on and getting excited for demoing at Gamestorm and sending in a submission for the Gaem Design contest at KublaCon in SF.

More Games More Fun

RE-entry

Hello Game World,
Been busy being sick and designing games and getting lost in the wealth of information available on the internet for game design, publishing, kickstarting and more. It is a well researched and discussed topic as gamers are geeks and geeks like the internet. Bonus for me. So got Weird City Games grant money approved and so am now moving into purchasing phase. First up is the completion of this website by the one and only, super talented, Ben Eisner. Then we are purchasing printer and die cutter and start making more elaborate demos and print and playing lots of people’s games. There is the work of about ten people ahead and lots of it is computer work but I am getting organized, keeping my eyes on the prize and ready to work, play, work, play. Blogging is going to become much more serious as of now and I have a good deadline of Gamestorm on March 20th to have Little Pig and maybe another game ready for demoing. Yay let’s make games. The more I learn about game publishing the bigger a task it seems but I think the key is to be aware of the big picture and also to take it one step at a time. Okay more soon Red Wizard is preparing for this site to go live. Keep on gaming.

The Quatro

More news from Weird City. Actually just more discussion of topics from the book mentioned previously.

In the Art of Game Design – the author breaks down games into four elemental components and stresses that they should all be balanced and support each other and the overall theme of the game. The more coherence betwixt the four the stronger the game can be.

Mechanics – how the game works, the rules, the mechanisms that determine how you play, how you win, how you lose, interact. Example mechanic is in Cribbage how the points are scored – pair is two, run of three is three etc. This sets up how you are able to move your pieces around the board. One of the most interesting mechanics of cribbage is pegging in that you count your hand once for interactive play and once by itself.

Story – The story of the game. What is happening in the game. What do your player tokens represent. How you can be involved in the story and how flexible the story is. This is the key to immersive game play and allows players to buy into the game experience.

Technology – The medium for the story, mechanics and aesthetics. How the game is represented physically. Cards, Boards, character sheets, dice.

Aesthetics – This is the presentation, the flavor, the art of the game. This meshes closely with story but is less concerned with narrative and more with look and feel. We have all  played Settlers of Catan and who doesn’t like just playing around with the roads and buildings. They are nice wooden pieces that are pleasing to touch and can be put together to form many different shapes. This is an aesthetic choice that really draws players into the world – even before play begins.

More of the holy quatro latro.

Themes

Okay so I have a lot of ideas about games myself but since I have been reading this game design book, The Art of Game Design by Jesse Schell, I mostly want to discuss the new ideas he is presenting and review them to get them in my mind and yours.

Themes – A game theme is important for multiple reasons. Primarily it helps players to enter into the make believe realm of the game. When playing a game we all enter into a pretend state placing value on outcomes that would have little or no value outside of the game. Themes can be shallow or deep depending on the design. Some games benefit greatly from themes and others, abstract games, games of chance do just fine without them. Chess is a great example in that it is a game based entirely on skill and requires logic and risk analysis. The pieces could easily be abstracted and the game would still offer a deep strategic experience but by assigning each piece a corresponding name that loosely matches their power players are able to identify with the pieces more and for me at least that helps me to think about the overall game. Themes are especially important for learning a new game as they give players a way into the game world. If chess pieces were all abstracted, this tetrahedron is able to move diagonally, and don’t let your rhombus be captured, we could still learn to play but the connection would be just that abstract.

Another example. Cribbage is one of my favorite games and has only a very loose theme. I tend to think of it as some kind of race but beyond that I am just counting points. It is very fun to play and not difficult to learn but I think it might be both easier to learn and more enjoyable if it had a concrete theme. A horse race and horse shaped pieces is an easy step. Then hand names could be called by different horse racing techniques. The naming of hands might be too much overlay and what might be better is to build hands and scoring that somehow reflect the horseracing theme.

So there you have it gemini Tim sometimes theme is important, sometimes not. But if building a game with a theme I think it is essential to have the various mechanics, structures and scoring of the game reflect the theme as much as possible.

Until next time.

Tim

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Weird City Games is a game design company based in Portland, Oregon. We focus on creating table top games that are interactive, dynamic and fun. 

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