What it takes to design a game

Even though I've moved Decisive Victory off on it's own, I'm doing double blog posts about the game and its ongoing development.  Just in case that d6 blog network doesn't go anywhere.

The first game I ever tried to design was back during high-school.  I was starting to build up a collection of Gundam models at the time, and wanted something to do with them.  I had been playing 3rd ed 40K for a year or so, but my other miniature gaming experience was limited to Ogre Miniatures. I came up with a dice mechanic(using d12s of all things) that I though was pretty nifty, and tried to incorporate all the cool concepts from the Anime.  I was lucky at the time to have a few friends that shared a similar enthusiasm for miniature gaming and Gundam models so I was able to get play testers.

I don't recall the details of the rules(lost a couple of hard drives ago), but I do remember how the game played in those first few play tests.  Basically the mechs would shoot their big guns and then run up to each other to melee.  In the anime the close combat between gundams was always epic, but in my game it just ended up as the models standing next to each other and the players rolling off dice for 8 turns.

I had managed to turn the most exiting element of the source material into the most boring element of my game.  It wasn't a good game, but what do you expect from a 16 year old's first try?  I did learn plenty from the experience.  Keep the math simple and the game goes faster.  Scale is important; models that can move and shoot 6 feet a turn don't make for interesting miniature games without a spare football field to play them on.  Most importantly, don't let the game degenerate into roll offs.  You might as well play Yahtzee at that point.

Over the next few years I tried going back to the game to improve the problems.  I cut down ranges and movement to fit the game onto a reasonable sized playing surface.  I added a close combat mechanic that had models pushing each other around and bouncing off each other.  I even revised the core mechanic around a concept where you could declare as many actions in a turn as you wanted your mech to do, but the more actions you tried the lower the chance of success on every action.  Unfortunately I had lost touch with the enthusiastic play testers I had had before.  Without anyone to play the game with I lost interest (and the rules in the aforementioned hard drive failures).

I was in college by this time and playing FoW regularly.  Occasionally the FoW players would break out some WWII naval miniatures.  There where two rules sets the group liked to us;e General Quarters and Task Force.  Both where very old school, with lots of charts and different sized dice. Alot like most WWII ground combat games pre-FoW.  I had fun playing them, but wished for a rules set that did for naval combat what FoW did for ground combat.  I did write up a spread sheet to calculate point values for Task Force so that we could attempt to play balanced pickup games.

After college, I moved to Muncie to work for a software company there.  There was a small war machine community there, but no historical gamers, so my WWII miniatures collected dust for a few years.  I did pick up Victory at Sea when it came out hoping for that concise WWII naval war-game I was hungry for.

Unfortunately, No.  I've read much about the history of naval warfare in WWII, and that game just didn't seem to fit with what I knew.  Ships in VaS where stronger or weaker than battlefield evidence would suggest.  A good example was the Hood which was a beast according to its stats.  I can understand exactly how that happened.  The VaS Hood had plenty of hit points.  Understandable, the Hood was a large ship, it had to be in order to get the right hull shape for it's high cruising speed, but the internal structure wasn't as well constructed as its slower true battleship cousins.  It's armor stat was impressiveness.  The hood did have good belt armor protection, but other than in its belt its armor protection was inadequate and haphazard.

There in lies some of the problems with coming up with a good WWII naval game.  Balancing historical accuracy with play-ability.  A warship is a big complex machine, and reducing it down to a few lines of stats requires some hard game design compromises.  And there's detail that you could overlook if you don't do the research.  Most ships of the period did not incorporate homogeneous armor schemes, and had vastly different capabilities in fire control and AA.  If you don't know the capabilities of the MK37 Fire Control Radar or the deficiencies of the MK14 torpedo, you would likely screw up the entire US fleet.  

Then there's the issues of scale.  How do you build a game that allows for Destroyer range gun battles, Battleship range gun battles, and Carrier warfare?  Don't even get me started on where submarines enter the mix.  There are very many things that can be incorporated into a WWII naval game, but its hard to get them all to mesh really well together.

I had been playing around with some ideas for a space combat game for a while, but I could never come up with a movement system I was happy with.  I decided to take some of the mechanics that I had developed for that game and use them as the basis for a more traditional naval combat game.  Thus Decisive Victory was born.

That's enough for now.  I'll post again in a day or two and talk about the logic behind the design decisions I made, as well as changes I plan on making in the future.

Splitting Off Decisive Victory

A new miniatures themed blogging network has sprung up, and I've decided to move my WWII naval game.  Hopefully it can get some attention over there.

Check it out:http://caulyndarr.6sided.net/

Spaguatyrine is the greatest player ever

I may have made some remarks to the effect that Spag should play in some national tournaments before talking about his tabletop skills.   Well, he had to go be a jerk and take best overall in the Nova Invitational.   

I take back all the bad stuff I said.  I won't ever dream of implying that random chance has any effect on Spag's skills ever again.

I'm going to focus now on making my game better than about critiquing anyone else's.  I will "put up or shut up" as they say.

;)

Priorities

The certification studying is still ongoing.  I'm nearly through the first book, so I will hopefully take the first tests in a week or two.  I have so many irons in the fire right now that I get stuck in a paralysis and nothing gets done quickly.  There are many professional reason to get the certification, but side-lining my hobbies for 6 months is difficult to do.  

My Tau army is sitting at 1250 points purchased with about 800 of it built and painted.  I could get to 1500 if I built all that I had and picked up three more battle suits.  I could get it finished by the end of the year if I didn't have this certification thing going on.  Before the starting the certification stuff my schedule was constrained to where I had to choose painting or playing.  I'm not too thrilled with playing my other armies right now, so when I do have a free weekend, I don't much feel like making the drive to G2D4.

I'm going to set a goal of getting my tau to 2000 for next years Nova.  Hopefully I'll have it done a lot sooner than  that.

Certifiable

I'm going to be trying for a Windows Developer certification over the next few months.  Due to various reasons, I have to get it done in the next 6 months.  There are 4 tests and 4 associated books.  I'll need to read one book and take a test about every six weeks.  Needless to say, I won't be able to get much gaming in during that time-frame, so don't be surprised if you don't see me around for a while.

Grey Knight FAQ

It's here.

All the rulings are fairly reasonable.  The only WTF one was that units with more than 6 monkeys get no Inconceivable Customization.

Looks like my Dread Knight is only strength 6 with Doom Fists.  Le sigh.  Looks like I'll be buying hammers and swords for them from now on.  Very disappointed in this one; though, I was fooling myself to think it would go any other way.

The Ulumeathi plasma siphon should be renamed the "F-U Tau plasma siphon".

And to everyone who said Coteaz lets you take unlimited henchmen, I would just like to say, "I told you so."

Other things to note: no warp shunt during scout moves, and Grand Masters can make vehicles scoring.

I wish GW would do something about the 2 months of ambiguity after a codex release.  I don't see how 75% of these questions could not have been anticipated.

Cost of doing buisness

It's been a few weeks and people are still upset about the business shenanigans of our favorite faceless multinational toy company.  I don't mean to be the constant GW apologist because I agree they do some pretty bonehead things on occasion.  I do so like to play the devils advocate, and that leads me to defend things a bit more heartily than they deserve.  This is especially true when I think that opposing arguments are based on faulty logic.  Seeing things like this on TGN doesn't help either:

However PP is a company that LOVES you as a customer and listens to your concerns.

Really?  I mean really, really? I already countered this point last time. Privateer is a for-profit company. If they listen to your concerns it's not because they love you, it's because they think that a happy customer will give them more of their money.  And I've seen some of the responses that PP staff has posted on their forums to their customers, and they sometimes come off as more annoyed and condescending than loving.  That's only after putting up with gamer fanboi BS for a few years, lets see how they deal with their crazy customers after being in the business for 25 plus years.

Another argument that I've seen lately against GW is that other smaller companies release similar products at lower prices.  The conclusion of that argument always seams to come down to GW is price gouging their customers because its obvious that GW with it's higher production rates should be able to produce it even cheaper.  I'm not an economist or a business owner, but I've picked up some knowledge about business processes.  I've worked for large and small companies, and there are vast differences in how they run.  Most companies always tend to run along the same track when they transition from small to large because they all run into the same issues.  There are certain realities to running a business that people who've never worked in a cooperate environment may not realize.

As companies grow they need more and more employees with specialized skill sets.  When a company is small and does a small volume of business, they can get by with people filling multiple roles.  There comes a point when one person can't handle distribution and sales and development and management all at the same time.  So you hire new people to do it.  Every person you hire requires more expenses in terms of taxes, salary and benefits.  Eventual you get so many employees that you need managers to mange them and human resources to take care of the infrastructure.  Then you then hit some magic number and suddenly your business is subject to different labor and tax laws.  Now your office is too small so you have to move to bigger facilities driving up rent costs.  Bulk production can reduce variable costs per product, but in order to start bulk production you have to incur lots of fixed costs first.

Interestingly enough, there is a good episode of the Office(US) that illustrates this point. Michal Scott quits and starts his own paper company.  He undercuts the prices of his old employers and steals many of their clients.  But he only has three employees and keeping up with the bulk of orders is taking its toll on them.  They contemplate hiring additional staff but are dismayed to find out that even with their volume of sales they are loosing money and can't even afford to hire help without raising their prices.

A lot of miniature companies are very small.  It's a couple of guys with a spin caster in their garage, or a CAD program and a contract with a larger generic manufacturer.  And that works for the volume they sell at.  They can even sell their stuff at very low margin because the are probably only supplementing their normal income by running their operation in their free time.  If their product becomes popular all of a sudden, they won't be able to continue running their business in that fashion.  To provide their product to meet demand they have to grow their business incurring all those fixed costs along the way.  Suddenly the money they make per sale goes much less further than it used to.

Basically manufacturing products is complicated business.  Especially when you are manufacturing enough product to sell across 6 continents.

GW made a lot of mistakes as they grew, but they where also one of the first in the hobby to get as big as they have.  TSR is probably the only contemporary to match them, and look how they turned out.  Companies like Privateer have been as successful as they have because they where able to learn from the mistakes that GW made and grow smarter.

My basic point is don't attribute every business decision that GW makes to malice or stupidity.   There can be a lot of very good and unavoidable reasons behind each and everyone of them.  They can also be trying to make the best out of a bad situation for the sake of making sure their thousands of employees keep their jobs and their shareholder interests are protected.  Even the best companies can't make the right choices every time.  Institutional blindness and maintaining the status quo can effect a larger company much more severely than a smaller one.

Also don't become emotionally invested in the products you buy or the companies you buy them from.  Go ahead and get emotionally invested in the hobby; that's fine by me.  The companies that support our hobby on the other hand; you need to maintain a detached skeptical outlook on.  Even the really good ones like Privateer. Because when it comes down to your personal feelings versus their own bottom line, 10 times out of 10 you know which one they'll pick.

Don't hate them for it, they're just playing the game everyone else is.   As they saying goes, "Don't hate the player, hate the game."