Board Games – Brian Crick

Catch ’em All

I love sets of things. On some level, perhaps we all do.

When I was growing up, my family had those Time-Life book collections. 23 books talking about the history of flight. 20 books about different countries of the world. 20 volumes on astronomy. Every now and then, we would get a new book in one of these sets in the mail, and excitedly add the book to its collection. I remember scouring flea markets many weekends with my dad, trying to find the last few records in some Time-Life music collection we’d gotten used. Our set was incomplete.

This could not stand.

Sets are fun. Sometimes, it’s infuriatingly difficult to know when you’re done with something. You wonder if you’re definition of complete isn’t complete enough. You want to add one more thing. You worry that there might be something out there you need, something that you don’t know you don’t know exists. But with well-defined sets… you know what you’re missing. You know what to look for. Most importantly, you know when you’re done. And it’s just such a satisfying feeling to know that, finally, something of yours is complete. Finished. And you can move on with your life.

I have started thinking about game developments in terms of set collection.

* * *

My still-in-development Global Game Jam game is all about finding new ways to traverse a world that doesn’t make walking from place to place very easy. So my first job, as I saw it, was to design a complete set of power-ups that let you move in new ways. I will know if my set is complete if you ways ways to:

Move, laterally, farther than normal, across chasms.

Jump up higher than normal.

Fall down greater distances without dying.

Move through things you couldn’t move through before.

Walk on things that were once hazardous to touch.

Skirt around and below things that were once dangerous to approach.

In very general terms — if you think in terms of what axes you can move on and where hazards are in relation to you — there are a finite number of ways one can move around one’s environment. I will know I have a workable, complete set of player upgrades if my upgrades cover all of these movement cases. And once I have those upgrades designed, I will be able to move on — because at that point, I will be done. And while I may tweak my upgrades throughout the development of this game, I will feel confident knowing that the vast majority of my conceptual work is done. I finished my set.

* * *

My wife recently alerted me to a simple approach to figuring out what scenes you need in your story:

Write down every major character, setting and concept in your story, in a big circle:

Then connect all of them.

Every one of those lines is a possible scene.

Write a scene developing Rey and Kylo’s relationship.

Write something exploring what Finn thinks about this whole Force thing.

Write a scene showing how Poe and Finn meet.

Write scenes with each of the characters doing something interesting in or around Starkiller Base.

Once you have scenes for each of those lines, each of those relationships, you have a good start of a story. You have a complete set.

* * *

I am working on a board game where you wander around a fantasy world exploring fun and interesting locations. I’ve been having the hardest time figuring out what those locations should be. So I forced myself to think about it in terms of set collection.

I made a list of everything I wanted the players to be able to do in the game, in general: they should be able to find clues about the main plot somewhere. They should be able to buy and sell items somewhere. They should be able to heal up somewhere, and investigate suspicious characters somewhere.

I ended up with some 15 items: a complete set of things I wanted players to be able to do. Then I shuffled them and put them in groups of three. No matter what ended up in what group, my groups would represent a complete set. Each group would become one location. Some of them were… odd.

What kind of place would you go to heal up, sell your old gear, and get clues about the main plot?

I don’t know, but that sounds like a really interesting place.

* * *

I tend to express my design requirements in terms of feelings. I want my players to feel like they’re excitedly exploring a fantastic world. I want my players to feel nostalgia. I want my players to feel like they can fly.

This doesn’t really help me find the specifics I need to do real development work.

Expressing my requirements in terms of sets has been immensely helpful. I have a specific destination: a filled bucket. I know what I’ve done towards reaching that destination: what’s in my bucket. I know what I have left to do: the empty slots in the bucket.

The bucket is filled, or it isn’t. I’m done, or I’m not. I have real requirements with concrete, measurable criteria for completion.

And if it’s not measurable, it doesn’t exist.

Good Skeletons

GDEX is coming up! It’s a game developer’s conference right here in Ohio, which I’ve been looking forward to since, well, the last GDEX I was at, back when it was called the Ohio Game Dev Expo.

I’d been meaning to get a new, knock-your-socks off Tinselfly demo ready, and… I won’t have a new Tinselfly demo for GDEX.

Instead, I’ve started working on Gemslinger again. It’s a nice, small project I can tinker with while also keeping room in my life for random board game contests and spending time with my family.

* * *

I drew a football player character the other day for that contest. I’m trying to improve my people-drawing skills, and this is where I’m at right now:

Part of this endeavor is learning how to do a good sketch before diving into tracing and coloring and whatnot.

See, the last time I tried to do character art, I had little stick figure sketches, like this:

I was proud of me. The skeletons all had different poses. As far as I could tell, I was ready to start layering bodies on these skeletons.

And then, I realized, my skeletons were too skinny. Sure, they looked fine on their own — they looked how stick figures should look, basically — but once I added my character outlines things started to look strange. My characters were all unrealistically thin, there was little space between the lines of the skeleton for the character’s bodies.

Generally speaking, I need to learn more about how to make a good skeleton, and more importantly, know a good or bad skeleton when I see it.

* * *

The reason I entered that board game contest is, I have no idea how to design a board game.

Sure, I can come up with mechanics and test them and make character art, but these are just… activities related to board game design. There’s no formal process here.

I started off by trying to streamline one of my favorite board games, Arkham Horror. Which seems like a decent place to start, but it feels a little like trying to learn to draw people without ever studying anatomy. Studying the surface shapes of faces and arms and legs and drawing those surfaces is nice, but starting with a skeleton and thinking about the layers of muscle and skin on top of the bones is way better.

My board game has no skeleton, and I don’t know what a board game skeleton–or video game skeleton, for that matter–looks like.

* * *

So.

Gemslinger.

When it comes to the story and tone of this project, I think of it in terms of this one fantasy book.

In this book, an ordinary, modern-day teenager gets sucked into a fantasy world. Told in first person, she discovers the first few pages of a magic tome left behind by an old sorcerer, and she learns to cast spells herself. She wanders this world, learning about its inhabitants and the old sorcerer and seeing all the world’s wonders, collecting more pages of the tome and growing in power… until finally she can cast a spell that takes her back home. And when she gets home, no time has passed and she can’t cast anything… but she’s, you know, learned a lot about herself while on this adventure.

Pretty typical fantasy-based travelogue+coming-of-age stuff.

There are lots of illustrations in this book, but they’re not pictures of the unfolding story. They’re more like drawings the main character drew herself, as if you’re reading her journal, interspersed with notes and fold-out maps and sketches with vellum overlays. And of course, it has reproductions of the pages of the magic book the heroine is collecting.

The book is kind of an artifact of its imagined world; a pretend-non-fiction reference book like The Starfleet Technical Manual, Arthur Spiderwick’s Field Guide to the Fantastical World Around You, After Man or Dragonology. The production values are amazing, the story is a fun, easy read, and every time you look at the maps and creature sketches you notice a new detail.

It feels like more than just paper and words. It’s a book, but it hints that there’s a world hiding within it, if only you can find it. It feels like magic.

I love this book.

Trouble is, this book doesn’t exist. I’ve been looking for things like this book and they don’t exist.

It’s an imagined combination of fantasy narratives I read as a kid, narrative-less fantasy reference like the Starfleet Technical Manual-type books I mentioned above, and the Ultima V game manuals, cloth map and plastic Codex of Ultimate Wisdom thrown in for good measure.

But… this is my skeleton.

I like this skeleton.

The details of this imagined book are pretty specific. The main character’s arc, the way the old sorcerer’s story is a counterpoint to the story proper, the way collecting pages drives the narrative, the way pages in the book can surprise you with fold-out maps and envelopes containing hidden surprises.

Imagining this game as an adaptation of a book is expressing something novel in very old terms, very concrete terms, terms I can easily imagine. I can imagine holding this book in my hand. I can imaging flipping through the pages and I know how the illustrations look. I know exactly what the experience of reading this book is like.

And I know what the video game adaptation of this book should look and feel like, and how it should deviate from the book.

rays-28-october-2016

I want it to feel a little magical.

* * *

But, you may be asking, as I’m asking myself, how is this a better skeleton than starting off a board game design with another board game?

My source material for the board game is still very specific. I’m still thinking in terms of adapting something old and concrete, and adapting it in a novel way.

So what’s different? Why am I uncomfortable with the board game skeleton?

I think it’s about being able to see or edit the skeleton if I don’t like it.

My imagined fantasy book is malleable. It didn’t always have an old sorcerer character. It didn’t always involve collecting pages of a spell book; at first it was just pure exploration.

This imagined Gemslinger book is constantly changing, based on the direction Gemslinger the game is heading. I can re-work my imagined book and shape it and it is soft: I can mold it and remove parts and add parts to it, and as I do, I feel its hard skeleton underneath its pliable skin. I can’t quite describe it verbally and I can’t quite think about it consciously way, but I can feel it. I know it’s there.

Arkham Horror will never change based on what I’m doing with my board game contest entry. It’s static. It’s hard. When I touch it, I can’t feel what’s underneath it; I only feel its surface.

I can’t feel its bones.

In Character

I noticed a little while ago that my MMO of choice, Star Trek Online, now offers your characters short-sleeved uniform shirts, like the ones worm by some of the medical staff in the first Star Trek show.

I was excited about this, because it means I can make my character look even more mundane — with a little customization, it’s not too far off from the plain black t-shirts I am wont to wear, every day I can.

I kind of like the feeling of being immersed in this universe, but I don’t want to feel like I’m playing a character. I want the character to be a projection of myself.

And while the character above neither looks that much like myself nor a 25th century spaceship captain, that image is less distracting to me than having me play a boxy male character wearing a futuristic jumpsuit.

* * *

As I prepare to run a one-shot RPG tonight, I’m thinking a bit about why RPGs scare me so much.

I think it comes down to being fuzzy about what is expected of me as a player. I never really looked at the role-playing part as a means to an end before, and thus don’t really know what the end is.

I usually think of it like, if the world doesn’t feel real to me during a role-playing game, I’m not playing the game right; I’m failing to do well at the game; and who wants to play a game they’re guaranteed to lose?

I put a lot of pressure on myself to enjoy the game the way I think the other players enjoy it.

But maybe it’s not about me. Sure, I may never find a tabletop role-playing session an immersive experience; I’m just too obsessed with visuals. But as a player, I might be able to heighten the immersion for other people playing, by being part of the world building that’s going on.

My goal, from that point of view, is not necessarily to think like my character, or to lose myself in my character, but simply to entertain. And that’s something I can kinda get behind.

Find a Reason

Sometimes, there is work you need to do, whose value you understand, and this understanding motivates you to do the work.

And sometimes, you do things for no reason at all, in the hopes that you’ll find something valuable in them.

I think the One Game a Month Thing is leaning towards the latter.

So in the day since my last One Game a Month post, already commited to making one game a month, I’ve thought of new reasons to do so:

I need practice talking about programming

I’m not real comfortable talking about programming, but it’s becoming more and more important that I can do so for my regular job — I can’t just work on my own and describe my progress in high-level, metaphorical terms anymore, because my co-workers and my boss now actually care about the technical details of what I do.

My regular projects like Tinselfly and Operetta are in tedious, heads-down places where they’re not real interesting to talk about, but having a new project a month will give me plenty of technical things to mull over in my journal.

It can be a family thing

I’ve occasionally made noises to my wife and brother about teaching them programming stuff, but sadly I never got around to prioritizing it. This is a good excuse to do that.

I can make game-like things that aren’t games in the technical sense

Specifically, I’m talking about that Celestial Stick People tablet app I’ve been threatening to make. It would be nice to get that done, and while I’m at it, revise the book since The Game Crafter now prints nice card-sized books for you.

Twelve Not So Angry People

Finished up outlines for my speakeasy board game characters last night.

Working as fast as I possibly could, I’d say each outline took 15 minutes. Working at a more leisurely pace (as I did last night) I’d put each outline at around 25.

You’d think it would take less time than that.

But anyway, have some random notes:

one game a month

So there’s this One Game a Month challenge coming up. And it occurs to me that I’ve already got four things in the pipeline — two board games, two computer games. I was already hoping to get most of those things done sometime in 2013. So, I figure, this speakeasy thing and the three other things in development — Tinselfly, a cyberpunky boardgame (big, big breakthrough last night!) and Operetta can get lumped in there. Ok, well, who knows what decade Tinselfly is coming out… but let’s not give up hope. A lot could happen between now and the very last month of One Game a Month.

But more on that whole endeavor later.

heels

OMG high heels are awkward.

I’ve never drawn a person wearing those before, but much to my surprise, it seems that most women in my 1920s fashion books are wearing high heeled shoes. So I figured I had to have at least one character in heels.

I couldn’t draw the feet on that character on the bottom, walking her fish, without thinking about how strange the position of the feet were and how uncomfortable that looked.

I’m glad that I’ve decided that, in the Tinselfly universe, everyone wears flats.

back view

The character on the lower left is supposed to be facing away from you. I’m not sure that’s entirely clear, or how to make that more clear.

Maybe, when there’s color, I can have some shading indicating that that’s the small of her back you’re seeing, through a relatively tame dress with a low back (again, based on real period stuff I saw).

hard edges

Here and there, I tried to make things a little too geometric to give things this art deco look.

I think I could have done more of that, but I was kind of rushing to get these done.

Understanding Not Required

I was playing this card game last night called Cards Against Humanity. It’s like Apples to Apples a bit. There’s a deck of question cards and a deck of answer cards. Players have a hand of answer cards, and each turn, one player draws a question card, reads it aloud, and every other player submits an answer card that they think fits the question. The player who played the funniest answer gets a point.

So for example, one of the question cards is

After the earthquake, Sean Penn brought __________ to the people of Haiti.

I tend to find absurd answers the funniest. There’s a Sean Penn answer card — you could say Sean Penn brought Sean Penn to the people of Haiti.

But in many ways, the point of the game is to be as gross or offensive as possible. This is, after all, “a party game for horrible people” according to the game’s box. So you could say Sean Penn brought pretending to care, or friendly fire, or even man meat; those are all answer cards you could play, things Sean Penn could bring to Haiti.

And those are pretty tame answers.

There are answer cards I won’t mention here, and there are many, many answer cards referencing things or acts I’m unfamiliar with, except to say I suspect they’re probably fairly naughty.

So last night was the second time I’d played this game, and I did somewhat better than the first, despite not knowing what many of the cards meant and not exactly being adept at making dirty jokes.

And I realized — it doesn’t matter whether or not I get the dirty jokes being made during the game, or whether or not I get what makes a dirty joke funny, because getting it isn’t strictly necessary for doing well. What’s necessary is a good sense of pattern matching.

* * *

Recently, some people at Google wrote some software to look at random images and try to identify and categorize important features within each images, without being told what was important or what was worth looking for. Evidently, the software decided that cats were important. I find this quote particularly interesting:

We never told it during the training, ‘This is a cat’… It basically invented the concept of a cat.

It’s easy to read an article like this and think about how we would think about this, about recognizing pointy ears and slit-shaped eyes and fur and all those things about a cat that make a cat not look like a person, but this is a pretty low-level thing going on here. The Google software does not know what a cat is. It presumably knows that, in many images, this recurring pattern appears, a pattern we would recognize as a cat, but which the software has no name for.

* * *

I rather like learning new skills starting with nothing but pattern matching, but unlike the Google thing, I want to be given some instruction as to what I’m looking for. Take music, for example. I didn’t start by learning music theory. I’m not sure you can say I listened to a wide variety of works and decided on my own what sounded best. I started by listening, over and over, to works that other people have defined as good. Famous symphonies, Oscar-nominated movie scores.

The trick here is to take it on faith that what people say is good, is in fact good. And of course tastes vary, but I’d argue that you at least have to start by taking these things on faith, if you’re going to learn anything.

Sure, I’ve studied a bit of music theory in the last couple of years, but I still have trouble defining what makes these works good; they are, by definition, good. You could say I don’t know what good composition is any more than that Google software knows what cats are. I just know some patterns, and I’m not even doing that much concept invention the way Google’s thing realized that cats were a thing. What sorts of musical things are out there, that I haven’t even categorized, much less studied?

* * *

This approach only gets you so far. If you want to teach, it will be difficult. If you want to do something that’s novel but still appealing, you’ll have a hard time. And it gets frustrating sometimes, being able to do things like draw or compose or code without really understanding what you’re doing.

But it’s a good place to start, and the nice thing about this approach is, I’ve gotten ‘so far’ on a wide variety of things this way.

Speaking of which, I should probably check out YouTube videos of commonly accepted ‘good’ running form. I’m sure they’re out there.

Rebranding!

Sometimes things just line up nicely.

(Which is to say, if you’re doing enough random stuff, the chances are higher that something you’re doing will mesh with some other random thing that comes your way.)

So I was working on this fully cooperative cyberpunk board game all about the players investigating several shady organizations vying for control of a fictionalized, future Cleveland. I’m really happy with the core concepts and many of the details, but have been dragging my feet on finishing it up and starting testing.

Enter Alderac.

Alderac is a board game publisher that’s trying to build a series of games around a shared setting called Tempest. And Alderac is looking for new and veteran game designers to make games in this setting. You can sign up, get access to a ton of Tempest literature and artwork that can be used in game prototypes, and then submit your game for consideration when you’re ready.

Tempest is a city-state in a renaissance-ish world, filled with intrigue and various shady organizations… sound familiar?

I think what I’ve got so far for my cyberpunk board game would fit well in this universe. And it might teach me a little bit about this whole world-building thing, reading about someone else’s world and trying to work within it.

Of course, I couldn’t mention all this without mentioning the whole don’t-do-spec-work thing. And while I gave that some thought, I figure this is a win-win. If the game gets picked up by Alderac, I get the full marketing muscle and brand recognition of a respected studio backing up my design. If Alderac doesn’t pick it up, I still will have gained some great experience, I will have had some great motivation to actually finish this, and I get full creative control of my final product.

I can’t share too much about the actual world or characters; there’s a sort of NDA thing going on, but I’m encouraged to babble about it on my blog, which is great since I’m not really happy working on new stuff unless I can share what I’m learning.

So expect more babbling about that, as I once again backburner all my other stuff that doesn’t involve other people to work on this more. 🙂

About a Sharp Dressed Man

Finished my King of Cups.

I tried a white tux, but the large swatch of white just didn’t work… it felt empty. So I just made it black like the businessman.

I feel a little weird about how not-detailed the sides of the tux are, but in some ways I like it.

Don’t have too much else to say about this, except that copy/paste is definitely not the way to go here. While there’s a similar end result here to the businessman, the underlying shapes used to create that result ended up being very different. Would have been faster to simply start from scratch.

Abstraction

Have the beginning of a King of Cups.

As you can surely tell, I started with the King of Coins and made modifications from there. I still need to change the suit, to make it a white tuxedo instead of a black business suit.

I’m not sure if this copying-and-pasting approach is actually faster than starting from scratch. I’ve spent 45 minutes on this so far, which is already quite a bit longer than the 15-30 minutes per face card I was hoping for. Of course, I really have no idea what sorts of expectations to set here, so I’m not going to beat myself up too much about the time spent… this is, after all, a learning process.

I didn’t really sit down and design the cup icon; I just drew something straight in Illustrator really quickly. But I rather like what I ended up with. I think I’ll keep it, with only slight modifications probably.

* * *

While I’m waiting on answers to some questions I had for the client, I thought I’d post some ruminations on what I want to get out of this. And what I want is to do work for precisely the sort of games I don’t like playing.

I like games that are about building stories. Games with memorable characters and places, where after the game, you find yourself joking about the funny or surprising or hero-clobbering plot twists that came up during the game.

These sorts of games tend to have lush, naturalistic illustrations where every picture could be a still from a movie.

I have neither the skills nor the desire to produce this kind of stuff. I like making illustrations that are a little abstract. The sort of illustrations that would be well suited for more abstract games, where your characters aren’t characters so much as ideas represented by people.

My stuff tends to lean towards Art Deco, so this is no real surprise. If you’ve got, say, an Art Deco mural with a bunch of construction workers… those workers aren’t people. They’re the visual manifestation of the idea of hard labor, and the nobility thereof. They’re archetypes. If you’ve got an abstract strategy game where you can summon any number of identical snipers each turn, those snipers aren’t individuals. They’re sort of platonically ideal snipers, and I like it best, from a visual standpoint, when the character portraits for these more abstract games have more abstract art for these kinds of things.

I’d love to have done art for games like Pandemic… there are people, but not really interesting characters you can connect to. I would have loved to have seen some stylized, glorified doctors and engineers in that. That would have been pretty awesome.

Of course, when my board game project gets further along, I’ll want to do more naturalistic illustrations for that since it’s supposed to be story based. Should be an interesting challenge.

Scopa King, Rough Draft

I mentioned a while ago that I wanted to try doing some board game art illustration, and have made a little progress there.

I’ve actually had two leads, but one of them wanted pin-up style stuff. Ugh. They also wanted 1920s style sci-fi which would have been really really cool to work on, but… yeah. Couldn’t ever take that work.

The other bite was a custom set of Scopa cards. It’s basically like a poker deck, with some numbered cards and some face cards used in an abstract trick-taking game.

I’m not a big fan of abstract card games, but making stylized face cards sounded kinda fun. I decided to do a modern spin on the symmetric, double-sided people used on regular playing cards, so each suit would have people in different types of dress: business attire, formal, military uniforms… and I haven’t decided on the last suit yet.

If I’m going to be doing illustrations for other people, I need to figure out the most efficient way to do that. I can’t just lovingly tinker with something until I believe it’s done. So I’m trying to change things up here.

I thought I’d try a businessman first.

I started with a very simple pencil sketch and inking:

I just wanted to make sure the basic proportions of everything were right, and do the minimum amount of penciling and inking necessary to get this into the computer. That approach is new to me, but I suspect it will work better than my previous attempts to more fully flesh something out on paper and then import that. I always have to re-do all my fine details in Illustrator anyway.

Since my old scanner doesn’t work with my new computer, I just took a picture of my sketch with my phone, and that’s what you see above. Sure, there are going to be perspective issues if I don’t get the angle just right, but it’s much faster than using a scanner. And it’s easier to see my light pencil lines.

Having gotten the photo, I then started tracing in Illustrator. I’m very particular about vectorizing everything, so I would never use a tool to do that for me… chances are, it would create paths with too many points and be hard to edit later on.

After I had my basic shapes, I added some temporary shading. So while there’s no color yet and the shades are far from final, you get a general sense that the suit will be very dark, the skin very light, the shirt white, etc. Never done that before, but this is supposed to be another efficiency improvement.

When I was working on these stylized fantasy characters a while ago, I was having trouble, because just looking at line art like this…

…it was difficult to tell how coloring would affect the line quality on a finished character like this…

…the problem being, the colors completely change how you look at the lines.

So here, I was all nervous because I was looking at a black & white drawing and thinking to myself, I won’t know if this is going to work until I do the coloring, but the outlines really have to be nailed down before I start coloring, or I’ll end up trashing all my coloring work and starting over if the outline of something needs to change.

And then it finally occurred to me that I could just fill things in with temporary shades of grey, and that’s enough to tell me how the final colors & shading might affect how you see the linework. And I can quickly adjust the linework based on my rough shading, if necessary.

I haven’t actually decided how I’m going to color this, whether it will be Illustrator gradients or Photoshop painting or my own paint program. I may just try them all and see what looks best or can be done the fastest or what the client likes most.

Next up, I need to add more detail like shading and seams and pinstripes, and de-emphasize the word ‘King’ in favor of a simple number (at the client’s request).