Brandon the Game Dev

Dev Diary posts are made to teach game development through specific examples from my latest project: Highways & Byways.

Just here for Highways & Byways updates? Click here – it will take you right to the updates at the bottom of the page.

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This week, in Start to Finish: Publish and Sell Your First Board Game, I released Five Levels of Communication through Game Development. It’s about how to use subtleties to speak to your audience when you’re creating a game. You have very limited ways of communicating complicated concepts to your players with static cardboard and plastic, so what you imply and what you suggest through your game’s design is very important!

Turns out, this week’s development of Highways & Byways illustrates my point pretty well. I provided the following image to James Masino as a reference for creating the game’s board…

In a few short days, he turned around this early first draft of the Highways & Byways board…

Now James is by no means even close to done with his work. This is something he slapped together quickly as a demo because his real goal was just to outline the country and the road structure. We’re doing rapid prototyping. In fact, it’s somewhat unusual to commission artwork at this stage of a project, before it’s been blind play-tested, but I’m comfortable breaking this guideline for three very good reasons:

1. It’s a map-based game and the main struggle with this game is how it communicates location-based information in an elegant way.
2. The board art will be used for other parts of the game – so this is a high value-per-cost thing to go ahead and knock out.
3. I can afford to bite the cost if we have to scrap it.

Now let’s talk about how James strengthened the game’s communication. He stripped the text labels completely. He stripped them from the roads and he stripped them from the states. At first I was convinced the presence of labels was a necessary evil, but we discussed a better way – which we’re experimenting with right now. Point is: removing text allows the game to talk without words, reducing the cognitive processing burden you’d feel looking at the board.

He smoothed out the curves of the byway roads, which made it look prettier and more approachable. This, too, is a good way of improving the way the board communicates.

Simplicity is really important when making games. You can’t cut all the details out of a game, but if you find yourself groaning at the complexity of something (like finding where a road is in the play-test versions of this game), you probably need to make it simpler.

For Highways & Byways, the game hinges upon being able to quickly find over a dozen roads that you need to travel. My original idea of the game would have had you look up their location by state name, using the bulk of the “Byway Card” for beautiful art. Then play-testing revealed an easier-to-use and less expensive alternative: use a picture of the road, as it is on the board, to show where a player where to find the road.

I still thought “yeah, but we need labels” just in case the pictures weren’t enough. Then it hit me. What if we were to divide the USA into different color zones like Rolling America. If were to do that, the roads wouldn’t need labels at all! You could deduce the location of a road very quickly and reliably by the color of the states, the state border shapes, the shape/size/color of the road itself, and a mini-map that shows where the pictured portion on the card is relative to the United States as a whole.

James and I still have a ton of experimenting to do, but this just gives you a rough idea of how much thought goes into designing simple interfaces in board games. Highways & Byways is going to be a lighter game than War Co., and while it is shaping up to have a pleasantly surprising amount of strategic meat to it, I want people to be able to pick this game up in 5 minutes. That’s my goal – 5 minutes to learn to play, 30 minutes to learn to strategize.

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Speaking of communication, this is tangential but important. You need people to challenge you. Sometimes we, as creative people, get too in our own heads and get stuck on bad ideas. That’s why we need professionals and play-testers to help us create our best work. I pushed James to add labels to the board and he pushed back saying, “we need to try something else first.” We may very well wind up using labels in the end, but if this experiment with color zones goes well, the Highways & Byways board is going to be way prettier to look at.

Seek out fresh opinions and always look for a way to communicate more clearly.

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Most Important Highways & Byways Updates

• I have the earliest iteration of the board artwork from James now.
• It was going to be ready for play-testing, but we both want to improve the way information is shared on the board, so we’re trying another experiment first.
• Experimenting with breaking country into 7 color zones – without going too much into the rules, this could mean almost completely removing text from the game board AND reducing the text on Event Cards.
• While James and I have this back and forth going, I’m continuing to grow my game dev Discord and the newsletter. They’ve both been unexpectedly delightful projects. They are both vastly outpacing my estimates for audience, engagement, and that intangible feeling of people caring.
• I’m getting ahead on Start to Finish blog posts to build a backlog for when I go HAM on play-testing.
• I reiterate what I said last week. “I don’t have a lot of sexy updates this week. It’s nose-to-grindstone, ugly, early work for the next few weeks.”

Dev Diary posts are made to teach game development through specific examples from my latest project: Highways & Byways.

Just here for Highways & Byways updates? Click here – it will take you right to the updates at the bottom of the page.

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I talk a lot about the business side of board game creation. So much of success in this industry is based upon your abilities as a project manager, marketer, promoter, and accountant. When I talk about game design itself, I often talk about the relentless play-testing, balancing, and different levels of communication that you must master so that your game is understood and enjoyed.

But what about art? I don’t necessarily mean art as in pretty pictures, beautiful graphics, and appealing boxes. No, no, no. I’m talking about art for art’s sake. I’m talking about art in the sense of pouring yourself into a project, finding a way to creatively express yourself, and making something you truly care about. Where does art for art’s sake come into the business savvy game dev’s process?

“Secret one: if it ain’t fun, you’re done.” That’s a line ripped from a hip-hop track by KRS-One. It’s also an underrated rule of entrepreneurship. It is imperative that you like the project you’re working on, or you just won’t simply have the motivation to sort out the logistic tangles it takes to deliver. Oh, and there are always logistics tangles…

I like travel. I like it a lot. It’s fun, it’s exciting, it’s a little dangerous, and exposes you to a lot of different ways of life. The aesthetic experience of travel impressed itself upon my soul as the rubber of my car’s tires impressed themselves upon the freeways of the USA. That is where the theme came from. That is the basis from which the mechanics of the game are born. The mechanics and rules of the game are meant to capture the openness, spontaneity, and pleasant tension of travel.

I’m not so married to my ideas that I won’t murder mechanics. I’m not so attached to rules that I won’t rewrite the whole book if needed. Yet this is the wellspring from which my ideas are born. I suspect many game developers have had similar experiences.

Many of you know that War Co. was a childhood dream that I pushed long enough to publish. Fewer people know that the corporate dystopia theme basically came from career anxieties. In fact, even I didn’t really realize it at first. That’s because something in me came out through the writing of card stories. These stories were processed into art by James Masino. This art was used as a way to market and attract attention to the campaign. It paid off. The root of all this, the prime mover in this whole story, is self-expression.

It is okay to use your games as a form of self-expression.

You can still sell games while using them as a form of self-expression.

I feel like sometimes people see “sell-able” and “enjoyable to make” as mutually exclusive. I disagree with this so much.

I want to bring this all together now by telling you what James and I are thinking for the Highways & Byways art approach. There was a time in American history in the late 1960s and the early 1970s where travel was rapidly becoming affordable. Airlines were still nice. Motels were popping up. You look at postcards from this era and you see these beautiful and painterly representations of Americana.

I’ve been in and out of many Motel 6’s and Super 8’s that haven’t been updated since the 1970s. I’ve flipped through old books in the motels with faded pictures of bygone eras when the cars looked funny and blue jeans fit weird. I internalized this and wasn’t able to totally express what I was going for until James said it himself. As I’d been collecting brochures from rest stops, he’d spent hours searching for the right look on Google Images. He sought that certain je ne sais quoi tirelessly.

We’d had a conversation two nights ago that got me really excited. We both found ourselves expressing what we were trying to make Highways & Byways look like in the rough, imprecise language that so characterizes the early stages of creative projects. To be clear, we were not talking about accessibility issues, clear display of information, or high-level themes. We were talking about heart and soul. As it turns out, the heart and soul of Highways & Byways is probably going to look like this. (No promises. Games are iterative, you know)…

We want to capture that retro vibe of the “golden age of road travel” from back when a cheap motel cost $8.88 for a night. We want to capture that “load up the station wagon” era from before the Gas Crisis. Highways & Byways will exist in a realm where Gerald Ford is president, but cars from the 1990s are really old. It’s a little anachronistic, as if the luxuries of yesteryear are within the grasp of adventurous college students of this era.

This is not a calculated approach intended to appeal to the largest audience. This is not pinned to how many people I can get to sign up for a newsletter. This is not tied to a Gantt chart. This is what James and I want to do, and we’re going to find people who are into it.

Want to come along for the ride?

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Most Important Highways & Byways Updates

• We’re working on the board. It’s been outlined and now it’s time to color it in for a play-testable draft.
• I’m continuing to make wise use of downtime by growing my game dev Discord and by focusing on making the newsletter great for members and readers. My business case thinking is that once I get them both on autopilot, I’ll benefit from the exposure those two things bring while being able to refocus mainly on Highways & Byways.
• I don’t have a lot of sexy updates this week. It’s nose-to-grindstone, ugly, early work for the next few weeks.

Dev Diary posts are made to teach game development through specific examples from my latest project: Highways & Byways.

Just here for Highways & Byways updates? Click here – it will take you right to the updates at the bottom of the page.

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Much like last week, I’m finding myself with downtime in the development of Highways & Byways. I’m making wise use of this time by growing a community of game developers, but that is a subject that I will cover in more detail on another day since community building is such a ripe area for discussion. Instead, I’d like to focus on the conversations that James Masino (the artist) and I are beginning to have about the direction we want to take with the Highways & Byways board design.

Board games have few ways to communicate with players. Video games can use sound and video. Film can use various forms of visual metaphor. Music can use a wide variety of audio techniques. Board games, however, don’t change (unless you add expansions or do a reissue), so you have to make sure everything needed to play is clear to players from the get-go. If you can do so while leaving finer facets of strategy to be discovered slowly over time, even better.

Themes are one of the primary ways in which board games can communicate. Just about every game has a theme, unless it’s abstract strategy like Chess, Go, or even Hive. As communication tools, themes function as metaphors. Cure the disease before it spreads to the city. Win the Cold War before the Soviets take over. Connect the United States via rail. Themes create this story that make it easier for players to understand and interact with dry mechanics.

A lot of times, board game designers and publishers will create abstract games and add themes later. While I have theme ideas in mind when I start games, I don’t mind tossing them in the trash if they don’t work. Re-theming is totally fine by me. Once I’ve got the core engine and mechanics of a game going, I like thinking of my game with various themes and seeing what fits.

Then I throw myself into the theme. This is where it gets fun.

Because themes function as metaphors to help players intuitively grasp games, you must understand the essence of a theme before applying it as a metaphor. What I mean by that is that if you make a game about 1500s farming, you should read about 1500s farming and make sure your theme is at least roughly consistent with what people actually did back then. If your game is about warfare, read about battles, read political articles from bygone eras, read Wikipedia, and read relevant genre fiction. If your game is about driving far away, go drive. Highways & Byways came out of my interest in long-distance road travel. The game is a manifestation of another hobby I already had.

I’ve been lots of places. I’ve driven from Tennessee to the following locations: the bottom of Texas, Arizona, Montana, Maine, both Carolinas, and so on…you get the idea. Every once in a while I’ll take a vacation and I’m terrible at being a beach bum. I’d rather have adventure than spend time laying around on the beach. That’s why I’ve spent many night sleeping in my car at campgrounds. I’ve spent many more nights huddled up in Motel 6’s and Super 8’s. I’ve pulled over at far away gas stations only to stretch my legs and clear my floorboard of many discarded coffee cups. I’ve done all this in cars no newer than fifteen years old. Highways & Byways is about rough-and-tumble, tight budget travel by young people, which is what I’ve done.

I’d gathered so many pamphlets and maps and coupons from rest stops along the way. I’ve scrutinized brochures looking for the aesthetic of my game. I’ve paid attention to which maps make sense to me and which ones don’t. After all, Highways & Byways is a gigantic map. Paying attention to what made sense to me gave me a good feel for what to tell James when I was writing up the art spec document for him.

Granted, not all themes lend themselves to “method acting.” Obviously, it wouldn’t have made a bit of sense for me to act out War Co. in real life by shooting spaceships with spaceships. Furthermore, I’m pretty sure that Bernd Brunnhofer didn’t live in the Stone Age while creating Stone Age. Still, someone involved in that project had to have become an amateur historian at some point.

Returning to the metaphor of Highways & Byways, James himself is preparing himself to do great artwork by becoming something of an amateur cartographer. He’s spoken to me about looking at all sorts of maps – topographical maps, political maps, metro maps, and so on. He’s looking at the way maps organize information while maintaining their aesthetic sensibilities. He’s doing the same thing I’m doing in a different way – gaining knowledge of a theme so that he can make metaphors stick.

Theme immersion is an illusion caused by the communicative powers of a theme matching up neatly with the game’s core engine and mechanics. To truly understand how to achieve these communicative powers through theme, you need to read as much as you can about your theme. If possible, you could even try living your theme out a little. Sure, you can’t capture in a single game everything that a theme can offer. Yet you can use what serves your game’s purpose. A depth of knowledge will make that far easier to do.

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Most Important Highways & Byways Updates

• I’m still working very heavily on community growth in the interim period while the board is being drawn by James.
• My main priorities right now are the Discord, newsletter, and Start to Finish articles. I’m getting ahead so that when the board is done, I can focus completely on heavy play-testing.
• We’ve just started making the board. This will be a tricky process since there is so much data which needs to be neatly organized.