The Learning of Design

This weekend, I was visiting with friends, and ended up talking about how I learned to make games. I constantly tell my friends, family and complete strangers how much fun game design is, and that they should give it a shot. The short answer is that I studied game design in college, and took classes, but that's far from being helpful.

Welcome to the Hamster Wheel!

So, the other day, I was talking with somebody who was interested in working on an RPG, and was excited with the idea of a more conversation focused game, but had a small issue with it:

The other problem with conversation-based instances/encounters is that I'm unsure how they'd have signifigance to the game aside from "that was interesting." The player could gain items, but what signifigance do they have? Are they just used for the next instance?

This statement is, well, interesting, and it is fairly common among gamers. If I don't get something cool out of it, what was the point? Why did I run across the country just to get some boots that I'm never going to use?

Making League of Legends More Accessible to New Players

(I originally posted this to Reddit, but it got absolutely no traction there)

Hey guys, I've tried to introduce my several of my friends to League, and have had some trouble when I do. It is oftentimes difficult for my friends to learn how to play the game. These include people with extensive gaming backgrounds- RPG, MMO, FPS and even RTS. They quickly grasp the basics, as taught in the initial tutorial, but have trouble figuring out mechanics that belong to MOBAs.

In the past couple of days, a post talking about how difficult it is for new players to get into the game made it to the front page (Link). While a lot of what he was talking about was the toxicity of other players, making the game easier to understand would be able to help.

I would like to see League become more accessible to new players and have a few thoughts that might help. I would also love to hear from you guys any thoughts you might have.

Spectators Guide to Summoner’s Rift

Many of my friends and family don't play League, and can't understand what's going on at all while I watch it. To that end, I've decided to write up a guide to watching professional level League. This is an on-going project, and I hope to eventually make it into a short video or something along those lines.

How to Watch eSports- Part 1: Why Watch eSports?

In my past couple of posts, I've been talking about League of Legends, not just as a game, but as a spectator sport. In my case, I don't have to many friends who watch the game regularly (two or three, at the upper end). There are very few people that I can talk to about the general tactics and strategies of the game and even fewer with whom I can discuss particular players or teams.

Mind Control: The Daily Reward

I just had a small realization that I feel silly for not seeing before. This isn't a major game design trope or long winded rant on some topic near and dear to me, but rather an observation. Many games have daily rewards. Some games, like World of Tanks or World of Warcraft have these rewards reset at a particular time (usually around 6 in the morning or something silly). Many people say that these rewards are tools designed to get players addicted to the game, and get them playing everyday.

While this is correct, they're not actually the ideal way to get players to do that. SolForge and League of Legends also have daily rewards. However, these rewards unlock not on a set timer, but rather 22 hours after you achieve them. This means, to get optimal rewards, players will schedule the game into their daily life. Every day at noon, I log onto SolForge to get my rewards. My daily schedule is affected by the game, I plan to play the game way in advance of actually playing it. WoT, I just hop on when I want to, with SolForge, I plan in advance to get the best reward cycle I can.

Game designers and their fancy mind control, making us play games we enjoy.

Accessibility and Understanding League of Legends.

In conjunction with making gaming more acceptable, I want to make it more accessible. Earlier today I set up my dad's Roku to be able to watch League of Legends and sat him down to watch a game. Almost immediately, he was lost. In retrospect, I think League (and other MOBAs) are the hardest to sit down and start watching. Just a warning, but this uses a lot of game particular terms and assumes that you have at the least a solid understand of League of Legends.

Games and The Larger Stage

It's been a while since I wrote anything, but the advent of the League of Legends Season 3 World Championship prompted me to return to a topic that is very important to me. Gaming, and gamers are often ostracized by society. When I played World of Warcraft, family and friends didn't understand that when I committed to play with a group of people, I put that commitment above other events. Playing games professionally is also looked down upon, and if I mention that I'm planning on spending some time watching high-level games I get really confused looks.

Forging a Title

Right now, I'm trying to come up with a title for my game. The working title that I'm using for the beta is "Apocalypses Now". The general gist of the game is that the world is ending, and players are struggling to survive in the ruins of the Earth. The title, as it stands, while a little clever, is also very derivative, and not particularly interesting or entertaining. It doesn't roll off the tongue or stick in the mind. It isn't even easy to spell or say.

The Role of RPGs

A friend asked me what aspects and themes I liked about RPGs, and I responded with a word vomit. It is not clear, concise or even likely representative of my opinions, but it includes some, if not most of them and it is from the perspective of a designers, a GM and a player, so it is worth including here.

Mind Control for Practical Purposes

Earlier this year, I designed, organized and ran a campus wide Mafia game (Rules here). Surprising nobody other than myself, it required a lot of work and effort to keep on top of it. This was the first time the game was played, so I had to make rules decisions and re-balance the game while it was being played. As a designer, it is important to note that people are really crazy, and they'll come up with questions you wouldn't think of asking, much less answering. This is particularly pertinent when you are designing an open RPG as the question of "What can I do?" is often answered with "What do you want to do?". Eventually, however, they will want to do something outside of the rules that you have codified, and someone needs to decide how things should play out. For this, as I was running the game, the decisions fell to me.

Rise of Champions: A Senior Thesis in Game Design

While writing yesterday's post, I realized that I hadn't mentioned, much less discussed my senior thesis. I spent several months designing, resigning and revising Rise of Champions, as well as writing several pieces the history and design of other tabletop RPGs. I've just grabbed a couple pieces from the final hundred-twenty-five pages describing what I did and my intent while working on the project. If you're interested in reading the whole thing, it is currently available here.

The Rulebook on Rules

In my experience, the hard part about creating a game isn't figuring out the concept, or the mechanics, or even coming up with the specific rules. It is writing them down. Putting pen to paper isn't the challenge, but explaining the rules to somebody who isn't as intimate with them as I am is often quite difficult.

It's Pretty Simple: Complicated vs. Complex

One of my problems early in game design was learning how to get through the language barrier. What makes it tricky is that it isn't an actual language, and that it isn't really codified anywhere. When working internationally, you can learn a foreign language or pick up on cultural behaviors. When programming or working in tech, again, you can learn the literal language and study the jargon. With game design, different designers often use the same words to say different things. From my experiences, the language used is not necessarily constant, and that can lead to arguments that end up being semantics, but the debaters believe that they are arguing over the core of a term.

Game Design: Breaking the Seesaw

Time to enter the ring for another bout with balance. The last two posts have been about single player and multi-player balance respectively. This time, I'm going to try to look at a few different methods and approaches to balancing games. By changing the way you approach balancing, you change the way the game is played. Additionally, you oftentimes have to come to an accord with outside forces influencing your game.

Game Design: Playing on the Seesaw

In my previous post, I talked at some length about balance, particularly in single player environments. This time around, I'm going to dive into multi-player balance. As previously explored, the core of single player balance is making sure that the player continues to be able to make interesting and valid choices. This continues to be true in multi-player games, but requires additional care.

Game Design: Keeping the Spoon on the Nose

To me, as a designer, balance means a couple different things. In a single player game, it means that the player has interesting and valid choices available to them. For multi-player, it means that given equal skill, from the beginning of the game, each player has an equal chance to win. Its a bit more complicated than that however, so let's dive in.

Mafia: A Game of Disorganized Crime

For more than the past decade, I've traditionally gone camping with a number of other families. I bring this up, because, around the campfire, we often play the game "Mafia". The game rules are fairly simple, and we generally kept to the base rules with minimum fuss. Once diving past the base level of play, it becomes a fascinating game. The choices the players make are very rarely based on any concrete evidence provided to them from the game, but instead are based on conjecture and uninformed guesses.

How Guns Work (in Mass Effect)

The following is an article I wrote and posted a year or two back, talking about the then-upcomming Mass Effect 3. Its mostly a rant on the various ways to set up and design ammunition in a game. Without further ado, the original post:

Some GAB with a Dash of PB&J

A couple of weeks back a friend posted on Facebook about Gamers Against Bigotry (GAB). Rather than paraphrasing their mission statement, I have it here for you in glowing technicolor:

As a gamer, I realize I contribute to an incredibly diverse social network of gamers around the world, and that my actions have the ability to impact others. In effort to make a positive impact, and to create a community that is welcoming to all, I pledge to not use bigoted language while gaming, online and otherwise. Bigoted language includes, but is not limited to, slurs based on race, ethnicity, gender, religion, sexual orientation and disability.

What is a Game? Part Eight: Putting it all Together

When I started this blog, I thought that I would just toss out what my definition of what a game is in one of my first posts, deny the need to even have a definition and move on to talking about how I make games and showing off my innate design talent. Here I am, about a month later working on Part 8 of my definition.

What is a Game? Part Seven: The End Zone

I feel like I'm getting close to the end of my exploration of what constitutes a game. I know that I'm nowhere near done examining and refining my definition, but I believe that I am getting close to a block of text, that, when holistically analyzed might bear resemblance to the definition and explanation of the components of a game. So far, I've listed four components that I feel are vital to a game: rules, entertainment, interactivity and agents. A game also needs a ending, or a goal.

Designing Frontline - Part One: The Concept

So, I'm not quite done with trying to define game, but I wanted to start on another side project of mine. This side project is a strategy game tentatively titled Frontline. I had started my notes on the game, and realized that if I wanted to share the design process, and my thoughts on the design, I might as well start by making my notes publicly available. It has been my experience in doing something similar before that I don't always explain my choices, and instead just make changes to the rules and structure, without showing my thought process.

What is a Game? Part Six: Agents of Games

Now, my next statement isn't going to be particularly surprising. An important part of any game is players. But more than that, a game needs agents. There is a slight difference between player and agent. Agents don't necessarily need to have sentience. What a player is should be obvious. Agents, on the other hand, are a bit harder to pin down.

What is a Game? Part Five: Doing It

What separates games from other forms of entertainment? To put it simply, you play them. With a book, you read it, with a TV show, or movie, you just watch and listen. While that distinction is obvious, the separation from simple play and a game is slightly harder to nail down.

What is a Game? Part Four: For Recreational Use

In retrospect, I probably should have talked about entertainment and interactivity first, move on to goals and rules, then end with agents and agency. However, I can't go back now and fix it, so I'm stuck with moving on from that beginning.

What is a Game? Part Three: Why Rules?

I'm continuing from my previous post (Define Game) and I'm going to delve a bit deeper into my analysis.

The most repeated part of the definitions I got was rules. A bit more than half of the survey group included somewhere in their definition a need for rules. Now, I'm going to combine "Why rules?" with "What are rules?" because, when talking about one, you begin to talk about the other.

What is a Game? Part Two: Define "Game"

Last time I was here, I philosophized on the nature of games. Since then, I've gone ahead and asked a couple dozen people for their definitions on games. I asked people who are game designers, game journalists, gamers, non-gamers, people who have a dislike for games and everyone in between.

What is a Game? Part One: People are Games

Many people believe that before discussion about games begins, you need to have a definition of what a game is. While I agree that it is important to have a solid foundation before progressing, and it is vital that there is an understanding of what is being discussed, I disagree on the need for a definition.

Introduction: Assembly and Setup

Welcome to Journeyman Games!

So, right now, I've achieved my self proclaimed journeyman status. I've just graduated college having studied Game Design. I'm no longer a student, and by no means a master. Now, while I'm not going to march across the country with nothing but the tools of the trade on my back, studying under the great masters, I'll do what I can to learn from them.