Over at Lost Garden (one my my all time favourite blogs) Danc is making my little project look woefully incomplete. From time to time, he designs and offers art assets for a game, inviting programmers to finish the job. The latest features a Lemmings-style game starring thrill-seeking ninja peas.
So good!
Short version: The third of 20 game design pitches, written in response to a list that my friends threw together in an effort to stymie me. This week, the theme is “poaching pears!”.
Whoops! No executive summary here this week. Instead I thought it’d be interesting to talk through how I ended up with the game design that we’ll get to at the end.
The theme this week is “poaching pears”. My first game idea is some kind of casual action game where there is a bunch of pears protected by a monster of some kind. Maybe it’s an angry farmer and he is trying to stop you. You have a spear which you control with the mouse and you try to spear pears while he tries to block you. You are arrested by the police for murder if you spear the farmer. In other words, a shooting gallery.
This feels like cheating to me (every theme ever in time can be turned into some kind of reflex based aiming game) so I discard it. If we’re going to have a game based around a theme, let’s actually use the theme, right kids?
There are two words in play. “Poaching” gives the conflict of the game (someone wants something they aren’t meant to have), so the key is “pears”. The orchard from the first stab is a good idea, but instead of letting it fade as a setting, it would be cool if it was more integral. Our game will be about two things: On one hand, we’ll be stealing pears from our enemies, on the other hand we’ll be have our own orchard that we must protect.
The next big question is what kind of game this will be. I’ve already written up a casual multiplayer game and a kind of god strategy game, so those are out of the running. Because of the pears/orchard thing (unless we were making American McGee’s Pears!) I think that we need to keep the game somewhat light-hearted. One area of gaming that’s generally lacking in the lightheartedness is First Person Shooters such as Counter-Strike or Doom. The highly excellent Team Fortress 2 is a notable exception but it’s still totally soaked in blood.
I considered making the game a kind of first person action game that was about racing around a map, breaking in to an orchard, stealing pears and running back to your own side while also stunning (no killing) the other players. The game would feel a lot like capture the flag and would allow for intense sessions of fruit stealing action. The problem is that the online team.based vs. mode FPS market is pretty saturated with titles and the people who like them best are adrenaline junkies for whom ultra-violence is a huge part of the appeal. Our game is already quirky enough just for being about pear thievery, we don’t need to add another hurdle to the track.
One area where quirky light-hearted concepts are very popular with audiences is family-based board games. So that’s what kind of game this is going to be.
When you decide on a family board game, a lot of decisions are made for you.
Our game is going to be turn based and will support 2-4 players. There will be three phases to the game 1) setting up your defences, 2) playing the game and 3) scoring.
Scoring will be dead easy: whoever ends with the most ripe pears in their shed, wins!.
For set-up, I haven’t sorted out the details yet, so we’ll gloss over it in the pitch, but the core idea is that there will a no-mans land between orchards and then each orchard will belong to a player. There will be a set of pieces that must be placed in your orchard area, things like the shed, some trees and some fences. Players can decide how to set up their orchards in the hopes of making defence easier or harder. The nice thing about this is that it auto balances because if a player makes it harder to navigate their area, then the enemy will have trouble getting in to steal but they will have trouble getting in to deposit their loot. Forcing players to eat their own cooking is a good way to give players freedom to customize while dampening the likelihood of the game being over before it starts.
For playing the game, we need to decide whether this is the kind of game where there is one player, one unit (like Snakes n’ Ladders) or one player, many units (like Risk). I decided to go with many units, allowing the player to spread their attention between attack and defence. Next we have to decide whether the units will be all the same (like Checkers) or whether there will be different type (like Chess). I decided to go with multiple types. Unlike chess, we’ll limit ourselves to three.
Three is a good number because it allows us to create a cyclical relationship between the units. A beats B which beats C which beats A. This relationship has the combined benefits of being easy to remember and leading to some pretty deep gameplay. It encourages a lot manoeuvring and feints (”If I bring A forwards, he’ll send his B in, so I need to clear the path with my C, except that his A is nearby…). Little did you know that Paper Rock Scissors was actually a source of deep strategy!
In our game, we can have this relationship by having Runners, Guards and Brawlers.
Runners will move faster than the other two, allowing them to avoid almost any conflict. Guards will be the slowest movers, but will make up for that with a ranged attack where they can lob rocks at the others. Runners will be especially vulnerable to rocks being as they are lightly armoured. Brawlers on the other hand will have armour that protects them from the worst of the damage, giving them time to close the distance and get in some punches.
This is a pitch, so we’ll gloss over what happens when, say, a runner meets a runner and we’ll gloss over how damage is tracked. We do know that the answer to both of these questions should be very simple and easily tracked as there will be a lot of different units (probably 9 per side) in play. Units will probably have only 2-3 damage states (Fine, Wounded, Dead) and we’ll need a way to tell the difference between Runner A and Runner B (could be colour coding, having distinct models for each one or having space to place damage markers).
We want to keep the game moving quickly so we’ll limit the number of moves that a player can make in a turn to 3. With 9 units per side players must make tough decisions every turn. Interesting decisions are the core of a good strategy game. A move will consist of moving the unit and then attacking with it if there are targets in range. I haven’t decided if the combat should be resolved by dice rolls or should ‘just work’. Dice rolls add randomness to the game which it helpful for balancing out differences in player skill (the more that is left to chance, the less player skill matters; Craps is utterly skill-free while in Chess you have no one to blame but yourself). This can be a huge benefit in a family games where we can expect a broad range of ability on the part of the players. Dice are also exciting. Every time there is a die roll, you get a mini moment of suspense and relief. On the other hand, games with no dice are super-elegant. We’re making a family board game here, so die rolls to resolve combat are probably the way to go. We can use our Paper Rock Scissors scheme as a guide for modifying the rolls (i.e. Runners are +1 against Brawlers).
I think I’ll skip the pitch entirely this week, I’d just be repackaging the stuff I just finished explaining and this has gotten pretty long. Overall, as this is a family game we’d want to emphasize the fun factor, the simplicity of learning and the depth of strategy and replay value. We’d probably also want to spend some time talking about the actual physical product: what would the pieces feel like to hold, how would we decorate the board, how is it all assembled?
I really love board games. Unlike computer games. which come with a powerful calculator to do a lot of complex math in the background and with the ability to track a nearly infinite number of pieces if you want, board games constrain you to the limits of human computation and memory. This forces you into the creation of elegant rulesets and focusing on the most important parts of the gameplay at the expense of all else.
Plus, there’s a lot to be said for crowding around a tabletop with drinks and chips, shouting at your friends while they betray you with tiny pieces of plastic and cardboard.
by-nc-nd