Walking to and from work this week, I listened to Keith Burgun's Clockwork Game Design podcast interview with Justin Ma (FTL, Into the Breach). In truth, it's not a great interview, but there were a few observations Ma shared that I found particularly interesting. Perhaps I should be finishing my 7DRL entry, but first, let me grab these ideas before they run away.
The discussants frequently compared board games and video games. Ma suggested that a player's experience with a video game is about 20% game design, while their experience with board games is about 95% game design. This is an interesting admission from an accomplished game designer that a majority of a player's attention is not actually in game design (which one might also prefer to call "system design") but in other things. In this discussion, Ma mentioned that he's terrified of making a board game because there is nowhere to hide.
Burgun asked Ma what advice he would give to indie video game developers, and Ma's response was, essentially, don't do it if you have any financial risk at all. He offhandedly suggested that the average game on Steam sells 500 copies; that's average, not median. Now, he's not presenting it as statistical fact, but his intuitive storytelling should be enough to give anyone pause.
Toward the end of the discussion, they talked about the presentation of information, and the relevance of information, in game design. A particularly interesting point here was that (roughly) if you do 40 damage, and your opponent has 80 health, then what you really care about is that you can defeat them in two hits. With enough advancement of your damage ability, you might get that down to one hit. The design question is, then, why not just have your damage be one and their health be two? I am not sure that I thought carefully about how this is manifested in Into the Breach, but it is. Burgun turned this conversation toward the idea of taking as much of the system as possible and making it manifest on the grid: he said that if he does x damage, his imagination turns off, but if he can throw an opponent three squares, his imagination opens up. His example of a Sumo-style health system is pretty much exactly what happens in En Garde and its fancy cousin, Flash Duel.
UPDATE: I remembered another interesting piece of this when discussing it with others, and so I came back to this post to add it.
In the comparison of board games to video games, Ma pointed out that in a board game, it's easy to flip a card that fundamentally changes how the game works. When programming, though, that's incredibly difficult. I think built in to this perspective is the idea that when you build the core engine, you likely won't know you even want a particular variation. As a result, parts of the engine become ossified and practically impossible to change in any reasonable amount of production time. Burgun's and Ma's discussion floated around this idea that video games tend to have simpler, conservative systems whereas board games can be more bold in exploring system design. It strikes me as ironic that despite our unbelievably powerful computing devices, it's our own human limitations and native abilities that really determine what is easy or hard. The computer, after all, can only do what it is told.
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