Loodo

Por Jonathan Leistiko

In January of 2000, I started posting one new print and play game every month at Invisible City Productions. When I first started, I had four games already ready to go, and I assumed that I’d be able to make up one game every following month.

I started with no formal game design training or experience. I’d made up a few games before, but each game took a lot longer than one month to make. I didn’t really consider how hard it would be to do.

People often ask me if making one game a month is hard to do. My response? “The first seven are really, really hard. After that, it gets easier and easier.” And that’s the truth. Virtually anything is hard to do at first, but as you practice, you get better. This includes game design.

Another popular question I get is, “Do you design from a mechanic, a theme, or a story?” If you think of these as different seeds you can plant to grow a game, then I don’t start with the same “seed” each time. Sometimes I have a story I want to tell, and I make a game that tells that story. Sometimes I think of or learn about a neat mechanic and make a game that features that mechanic. Sometimes I decide to use a common game set (like Chess, Checkers, Poker cards, Backgammon, Dominoes, Icehouse, or Go) and make up a new game that uses these pieces. Sometimes I have a moral or a lesson I want to teach the people who play the game and make a game that embeds this secret message. I made the game Run, Hamster, Run! as a comment on the morality of animal testing.

However, every game starts with a seed, and grows from that. As I design a game, I ask myself to following questions:

What is the player’s goal?

What actions can players take to reach that goal?

Do the game mechanics accurately reflect the metaphysical structure of the game world?

Do the mechanics encourage and reward the kind of behavior I want from the players?

There are other important concerns like fun, play time, player age, and such, but if you can’t answer these four questions, your game won’t work. Let’s break it down:

What is the player’s goal?

Does the game have a goal? Is the player’s goal clearly stated? Are the players aware of the goal from the start of the game? Is the ending condition of the game related to the victory condition?

Using Run, Hamster, Run! as an example, The goal is very clear: Be the last hamster alive. Stay out of the Alligator Pit.

What actions can players take to reach that goal?

Do the players have tools they can use to advance toward the goal? Can players take different actions at different times to make progress? Are there enough options to support different strategies? Do different strategies have roughly equal chances of winning? Do different strategies work better (or worse) when used against other strategies? Do the players know that they’re making progress?

Using Run, Hamster, Run! again, players have three basic statistics: Scamper, Mettle, and Friskiness and four actions they can take. Each statistic and each action is useful in certain situations and less useful in others. Each one does something important, so success becomes a matter of knowing what strategy to use and when to use it.

Do the game mechanics accurately reflect the metaphysical structure of the game world?

Pretend you need to generate a number from two to 12. How do you do it? You could…

Roll a 12-sided die while re-rolling ones…

Roll two six-sided dice and add them…

Draw a card from a stack of 11 cards numbered two to 12, and do not replace the card until the deck is depleted…

And so on. If you run an infinite number of trials for each option, you’ll get the same average result for each: Seven. However, this doesn’t mean that the options are functionally equivalent. It’s important to understand the difference between each option, because you’re creating the rules for the universe that your players are playing in. If you pick (1), you’re saying that each number has an equal chance of being picked, and has the same chance of being picked on all future trials. If you pick (2), you’re making seven and the numbers near it more likely and the numbers near two and 12 less likely. However, the odds of a given number showing up are the same in all trails. If you pick (3), you’re saying that every number has equal odds of being picked until it is picked, at which point it will never recur until the deck is reshuffled. If you run 11 trials with the deck, every number must appear once and only once. These differences are important and relevant. Each one implies a universe with different rules. Don’t use a deck of cards when you should use a random table of events. Don’t add a cluster of dice when you want equal odds for every result. Learn about basic odds and probability math. It’ll help a lot.

Going back to Run, Hamster, Run! … Each player’s hamster starts the game with seven Pluck chips. These chips represent how healthy the hamster is. If you run out of Pluck chips, you’re out of the game. At the start of each turn, you allocate Pluck chips to your three statistics. As you lose health, you become less capable of doing things. When you’re competing with another hamster, you put your chips in a cup and the other hamster does the same. Next, you shake the cup and take a chip out of it. If it’s your chip, you win. This mechanic means that if you have seven chips and I have only one chip, I’m not likely to win, but I have a slim chance of winning. That’s how I wanted the game-world to work. Have you ever had a contest where you knew you couldn’t win? I didn’t want that to happen in Run, Hamster, Run!

Do the mechanics encourage and reward the kind of behavior I want from the players?

Pretend you’ve made a game, but it bogs down two thirds of the way through. Players just hoard cash. They don’t buy anything and they’re not attacking each other. Your game has stalled out. Why? The game isn’t motivating the players to take the actions you want them to. Perhaps the first player to try to win always gets beat up by the other players and loses? If that’s the case, you need to find ways to reward risk-takers or to punish attackers.

I’ve seen this happen with my games, and with other designers’ games. A lot of play testing focuses on ensuring that the game encourages players to take the kinds of actions you want them to take. I even had that problem with Run, Hamster, Run! Some actions were too powerful and others were too weak. Biting other hamsters worked too well, so all anyone did was bite. I didn’t like that, so I changed biting and it became too weak. I wanted biting to be useful sometimes, so I changed it one more time. It also used to be too easy for hamsters to run faster than the conveyor belt, so I had to change how running worked and how fast the conveyor belt moved.

Game design starts with an idea that gets revised over and over until everything is balanced and does what you want it do. Game balance is one part math, one part psychology, one part art, two parts listening to your playtesters, and three parts persistence and patience.

Good luck!

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Essa é a versão original do artigo escrito por Jonathan Leistiko especialmente para a Loodo. Se quiser ler uma versão traduzida para o português, por favor clique aqui.