Design Diary Monday: Stuck In a Rut

Well, we've caught up with the present with my current game's design process, but I suppose that may not necessarily be a good thing. There's several numeric problems with the design right now that can be eventually fixed, and several fundamental design issues that might prompt another design change or just outright abandonment of the project.

I wrote down the rules last week, in case anyone is looking for a reference:

Here is how the game is breaking down at the moment:

1. It is optimal for each player to attack the target that appears on his or her turn instead of someone else's target. By default, if you secure your own target of opportunity on your turn and you're not being attacked, you're guaranteed to score those points; however, if you attack another player and fail, you lose all the cards you spend to attack and you get no treasure. Even if you win, you've only denied another player one turn's worth of points and as it turns out, in a game where the current point totals are blind, people tend to only track their own points and not worry so much about the points other people are getting, even if it means they'd lose in the long run.
2. The problem is compounded when the loss from failure don't justify the cost of attacking players. Since there's no limit on the number of cards used to form ships and crews, players just kept dumping entire hands in order to secure his or her own target. Your hand increases by 1 each turn, without an upper limit, but whenever you lose, you lose everything and the hand size resets. Players become even more risk averse as the game goes on for that reason.
3. The rock-paper-scissors mechanics don't work if a preference for a certain attack can't be established. There's an even number of pirate, sailor, and broadside cards in the game. You are severely disadvantaged without one of the three types of units, so you'd tend to see hands with all three unit types in every hand. In the end, knowing part of what the hand contains is useless, since all card types are probably present anyway. Throwing out random cards can score you as many victories as defeats, just like a normal game of rock paper scissors. The meta game is suppose to offset the risk-reward of the individual elements, but so far none of the designs worked toward that goal.

And now, back to the drawing board. I've been drawing blanks about this game's design lately, but hopefully I'd come up with something to talk about next week.

Extra Credit Saturday: Anatomy Correction

That last post I had turned out pretty bad...

I went back to the original sketch and tried to do a pass to correct some basic anatomic mistakes.

Overall, it's still an awkward pose, and the skirt doesn't look right at all. I might take another stab at fixing this or just try to start from the top again, who knows.

Art Friday: Jenn

Wanted to do some sort, any sort of CG today. Ended up not having any time at all. Still, I want to do one for the sake of getting back into the habit of doing it. I can't color stuff to save my life...

Melodic Thursday: Hurtful

A bit upset today. That and listening to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xbkovCQMmc">Circus Galop ad infinitum more or less produced this result:



Again, unfinished. I have a feeling that having some basic knowledge of note scales would save me a lot of grief, instead of fumbling around the keyboard looking for the right note...

Webcomic Wednesday: Future Sight P4

And the number of panels just kept increasing...

There's a bunch of layout issues that I didn't have time to fix. There's also some dramatic personality shifts... Oh well, at least there's some explanation for it to happen.

(P.S. Still messing around with font sizes, and possibly font face as well. This particular size looks like a nice medium point to settle at.)

Rant Tuesday: Why Can't Anyone Tell Me Any of This?!

Let's start with something easy... I've come to understand the significance of having your wedding ring on. Yes, I've known the definition of what a wedding ring is for a long time, but only recently have I discovered that it's an extremely reference guide to tell someone that "yes, you're married" without exchanging a single word. I bet it saves a lot of people a lot of embarrassment! And silly as it is, nobody ever spelled these things out, so I didn't come to this realization until I've started to actively look for potential partners.

By extension, that makes explaining the anomaly of having an extravagant engagement ring obvious: since the couple is not officially married, the ring is basically a giant "stay off my woman" sign.

There's just so many of these little things that nobody ever bothers to write down, that when you finally had it figured out you'd look at your younger self and lament about how naive you really were. As far as book knowledge is concerned, you do absorb a ton between 13 and 21, and it's easy to think you have the world figured out... then you grow older and you pick up on all these inconsequential things that wasn't explained, can't bother to be explained, never written down, that people simply "get" as they age. I suppose those kinds of hidden knowledge is what people call "maturity".

Maybe someday, somebody will actually bother to write all these things down, and we'd have people truly full of adult wisdom before the age of 21. I don't know though... there's something about learning by experience that really makes the knowledge permanent and pliable. Some things about life simply can't be taught.

Design Diary Monday: Consolidation

The design diary is now caught up with the current version of the game. Hopefully this is an iteration of the game that I can stick with for a while, and even more hopefully this will be the last major revision I have to make before getting to a publishable version of the game.

UPDATE: From the field testing that took place after the initial design went out, though, things are not going well. I'll have to figure out what can be salvaged and what needs changing... it looks like this will be a temporary stay after all.

This version of the game focused on the consolidation of assets in games and the simplification of rules... I also wanted to add some cooperative aspects to the game, which had not worked out so far. But before I make any changes, here are the current rules:

Components:
The game consist of one deck of 36 pirate cards (shown in picture), 24 plunder cards, and 16 captain cards. The full list of individual components are:

Pirate Deck
12 Broadsides,
4 Deckhands (2 of pirates),
4 Grenadiers (3 of pirates),
4 Brutes (4 of pirates),
4 Corsairs (2 of sailors),
4 Swashbucklers (3 of sailors),
4 Mariners (4 of sailors)

Plunder Deck
8 Merchant Frigates (+1 card, strength 2, vp 4)
8 Gold Convoys (+2 cards, strength 4, vp 7)
8 Warships (strength 6, vp 10)

Captain Deck
16 unique captains, each with one special ability.

Game Flow:

1. In the beginning of the game, each player chooses a captain and draw 3 to 4 pirate cards according to the crew size listed on the captain chosen.
2. On each turn, a player:
• Reveals a card from the plunder deck. If it is has +1 or +2 cards, add more cards accordingly (but additional +1s and +2s are ignored)
• Attack plunder targets. To attack a target, a player must reveal strength equal to or higher than the total strength of all plunder cards drawn that turn. The player can additionally add any number of cards face down to support the revealed crew. This form the capturing hand. The target is consider captured at this point; if the player can keep the crew alive until the beginning of his or her next turn, the plunder can be scored for points.
• Plunder targets can be attacked by multiple people with a combined strength higher than the total strength of the plunder cards.
• A player can also attack other players with captured ships that have not scored points. The game enters a battle phase at this point.
3. Player versus Player battles
• The defending player picks up the capturing hand, and the attacking player can use any card currently not involved in other capturing hands.
• Each player chooses one of the pirate cards available in his or her hand, played face down, and both cards are revealed at the same time.
• The battle resolves. The general premise is Broadsides beat Pirates, Pirates beat Sailors, Sailors beat Broadsides. If the same cards show up, the numbers on the cards determine the winner.
• Whoever wins the battle keeps the treasures, whoever loses must discard the entire hand
4. Captain abilities can be activated, and refreshes at the beginning of a player's turn.
5. A player can lose a turn and all cards on hand to change captains and draw a new hand.
6. Whoever has the most points when the plunder deck runs out wins.

That's the gist of the game. Starting from next week I'll actually go over the details of individual test sessions, the tester feedback, and some horrible truth about the difficulty of designer expectations versus playtesting reality. That's when the pain begins...

Art Friday: Pirate Mariner

One of these days, I'll actually ink and color these! One of these days.

Very simple composition this time, I'm trying to get the crazy old man thing going but ended up getting George Carlin as a pirate. Well, I don't dislike it...

Belated Webcomic Wednesday: Future Sight P3

July 4th happened, alright? I just wanted to take a day off... well, more accurately, Civ V happened. I didn't even realize I had the thing installed until yesterday, and it went badly for me. Like, sick to the stomach today badly. Anyway...

Font size got smaller. Still a lot of text... I think the issue is pacing, maybe? I'm trying to cram myself from point A to point B within a page, because webcomic pages just look weird without a conclusion, a pun, or a cliffhanger at the end.

Rant Tuesday: Don't Stand So Close to Me

As a continuation of sorts from last week's rant, I've taken some consideration on the other side of useless information that I collect a lot... personal information. Whether it's from Twitter,Facebook, or Reddit, they're all inane slice of life messages from people famous for doing something totally unrelated to their daily life. Looking over my tweets, in terms of getting tweets about things that I can learn and use improve my craft, the signal to noise ratio is about... 4%? and that's on a good day.

What it does, though, it make me feel so impersonally personal that I admire. I'm nowhere near these people geographically, but when I read about their daily routine it is as if I am their roommate or office buddy, watching their every move. We've gone from a daily entry in LiveJornal to the hourly updates of MySpace and Facebook to the minute updates of Twitter. With every increase in frequency we're that much closer to one another.

And that closeness creates tremendous friction. For people with tens of thousands of followers, each twitter account is just an incubation chamber waiting to explode. Unscreened by publicists and instantly connected to fans and haters, there had been many instances where in the heat of the moment respectable people end up tweeting horrible things, and because everyone is still coming to grip with the fact that all writings on the internet are public and permanent, the disaster explodes instantly over all the relevant media outlets.

Twitter is a useful tool... it's a amazing way to get a one-to-many message across the entire network. However, I think it's being used altogether too much right now. Don't stand so close to me - if you speak, please say something that I'd need to think about!

Design Diary Monday: Papercraft and Player Boards and Ships, Oh My!

When I thought I've designed my card game to my corner, I've considered my options and I've decided to make some changes, radical changes. So many changes that only things remained were the two principles of rock-paper-scissors ship battle and the use of the pirate dice. Well, that actually fixed a lot of things in place. So how different could the new iteration look? Well...

Behold, CUBES!

Instead of ships being represented by ship cards, the players actually have paper ships... the pirate and cannon crew cards became pirate and cannon cubes. Treasure from the locations? Cubes. The only thing that remained cards were the locations and the single use voodoo cards. Instead of forming ship and crew with cards, you loaded cubes into your ship... when attacking, you added cubes to your ships. Ship to ship combat still revolved around the strategy cards, but the cubes determine the dice numbers when cannon or melee rolls were made.

The changes looked good in theory. It radically redefined what information was hidden and what was known  since you can't put treasure or crew cards face down. Treasure hunting also became very eurogameish when players basically look for the best way to obtain the most treasure in the current round. Ship to ship combat was available to throw players seriously off-balance when necessary.

Unfortunately, the radical change of appearance was accompanied by rule changes that broke the system: for example,

• A new rule was added to encourage risk taking, where if you decided to haul your treasures in, you'd lose your shot at the rest of the treasures on the table. It forced every player to stay at sea for as long as possible, and created some truly bizarre scenarios where every single ship from every player destroyed each other completely, ending a turn with zero treasure taken.
• The sea combat rules were patched to a ridiculous degree to accommodate for the possibility of ships attacking without cannons, exasperated by loopholes around the evade->broadside counter. If evading cannons meant starting a new turn without changing the state of the game, a player with a ship without cannons but with superior pirate count could simply evade to force the game into an infinite loop. If evading cannons grant the player without cannons a chance to pursue (which broadside normally beats), then it weakens the usefulness of broadsiding. This might be hard to explain without the rest of the rules, but imagine if paper beating rock only resulted in a draw... or paper can transform to rock when faced with scissors. Any patchwork solution that me and my friend could come up with ended up short.

among other things. As a result, I believed the noble experiment of radically changing the game to a board game failed... but changing the game's format gave me a lot of insight about the workings of the core mechanics, namely that the pirate/cannon strength numbers play an extremely important role in combat and should not be arbitrarily quantized; that the treasures were not interesting enough to form a eurogame system around; that forcing players to take too much risk for removed real choices. Those were all lessons that I took to heart as I humbly remove all the cubes from the game and transform everything back into card game format.

Next week: heavy consolidation.