Brandon the Game Dev

Highways & Byways is just starting to come together as a cohesive project! Despite working at my day job every day this week, I’ve managed to dedicate a full 10 hours this week to game development and game development alone. I think this is important. I’m still dealing with sales, marketing, and fulfillment from War Co., you know! It would be very easy to slip into day-to-day routines that do not advance Highways & Byways.

This week I’ve reached a major mile-marker. The board is filled with byways and breakpoints. Highways & Byways is a game based in geography, and specifically, the location of beautiful – and often obscure – roads in the United States. I’ve selected 72 byways that span the contiguous 48 states. Every state has at least one byway. Breakpoints will be areas where pieces will eventually be placed and moved along the board. Breakpoints are currently about 100 miles apart.

The image above is what my game looks like right now. As you can tell, it’s a very noisy board with a lot of information. A major challenge of this game will be coming up with an elegant way to deliver this immense amount of information to players. You don’t want to overwhelm your players with data! I’m not concerned with that right now because that is something I can refine later. The creative process, much like bodybuilding, involves bulking first and cutting back later.

You may wonder how I’ve chosen all these byways. My browser history is rife with websites like “Federal Highway Administration Scenic Byways and All-American Roads”, “Wyoming Department of Transportation”, and “Scenic Nebraska Drives”, and “10 Absolutely Beautiful Roads You Have to Drive in Texas.” Every single road is chosen for either its scenery or its historical significance. Indeed, I’ve been checking them out on Google Images and Google Earth to make sure they live up to the hype. I want every byway on this board to be a real and amazing place that you can really go to. I hope to include the real directions on driving each road in the final game, but let’s see what happens.

Of course, I can’t just indiscriminately place scenic roads on the map. There’s a few requirements. I don’t want roads to overlap, with a couple of exceptions. I don’t want roads to intersect often, either. I want a road in each state, but I don’t want roads to be cluttered and too close together. I have to keep them spread across the country. That means some super-obvious roads (like the Grand Canyon drive) have to give way to obscure ones like the Dine’tah Road. There’s also a diverse array of cultures in the United States that I’d like to represent while I’m making this game…but gameplay is my first priority. Point is: creating a map for Highways & Byways requires a lot of trade-offs.

I have priorities set for the coming week. The next stop on this tour is simple: fill in highways between the breakpoints on byways. I need to connect all these roads so players can travel across the map. Then, once I have a cohesive, navigable map, I’ll be doing some early-stage self-testing to take measures on movement speed. This will affect how I set objectives and constraints in the game.

Pack a cooler, fill up the gas tank, and grab a 20 oz. styrofoam cup of coffee. We’re going on a road trip!

I’ve been hinting and hinting and hinting and hinting at a new board game project for a while. Today, I’m making it official!

I’ve just started development on a new board game. It’s called Highways & Byways. It’s a board game about college students dragging their beater cars across the nation in search of all places beautiful and forgotten. Every road referenced in the game will be a real place that you can actually go. You can read more about it here on the game’s website.

I’m keeping gameplay-specific details close to my chest for now, but I want to make sure you know two things:

1. I intend to fund this game on Kickstarter once I’ve completed most of the development…but I’m going to take my sweet time to make it great!
2. I’ll be documenting my whole game development journey through a series of weekly updates. That’s the purpose of the Dev Diary.

I talk a lot about game development on this blog. That’s the blog’s raison d’être, after all. Yet as much as I’m proud of my high-level advice and cheerleading, I want to do more. I want you to see the specific challenges game devs encounter and conquer. I want you to learn from both my successes and mistakes. I want you to see the emotional highs and lows. I want you to see why I make games, so you know whether’s it’s right for you.

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Now I’ll do what I’ll be doing most weeks: briefly covering the progress I’ve made over the course of the week. My progress has been focused on two primary objectives this week:

Objective 1: Set up a social media and blog system like I did for War Co.

Just this week, I’ve set up a Twitter, Instagram, Facebook page, and weekly blog for Highways & Byways. Whereas War Co. is all about sci-fi art and dry corporate dystopian humor, Highways & Byways will focus on gorgeous travel photos and wanderlust. The social media I’m running for Highways & Byways, like War Co., will not be used relentlessly to advertise, but rather to share things on the Internet that are really, really cool. As I find out what people like to see, I’ll tweak my approach while remaining within the theme.

Are you into travel? I have only a few days of content up, but you’ll like what I’ve got so far. Please follow on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.

In addition to the social media, I’ll also be running a weekly blog article on the Highways & Byways site that highlights a scenic road trip in the United States. These are real places you can really go to. I’m even including a map. If I’m going to spend all this time doing research to make a game that is both fun and accurate, I may as well share the fascinating things I’ve learned with you!

Objective 2: Continue mapping out the board.

With a robust social media and blog presence already set up and requiring minimal maintenance, I found myself free to do what I really wanted to do: develop the game itself! Highways & Byways is, from a physical perspective, a game based in geography. I’m essentially making a map of scenic roads. I started with a big map of the United States and I’ve started superimposing red lines in the shape of scenic roads. I have about 35 red lines on the map right now, but I’m aiming for 70.

Where do I find these scenic roads? I use a variety of resources, including the Federal Highway Administration website, My Scenic Drives, my own memories of thousand-mile drives, and Google searching when all else fails. Some states are really easy to find scenic roads. Some are excruciatingly difficult – I’m looking at you, Texas. I have a pretty complex vision of what I want the board to look like, but it’s going to take a lot of research and work to get there. I’m putting my head down and working, for I have this detailed vision that I find too difficult to articulate. I have to speak through my actions.

Once I complete a map of byways, I’ll connect them with highways. Then I’ll start self-testing to see how long it takes me to cross the map. This early data will give me a sense of how the game needs to be structured and at what levels its objectives need to be set in order to be balanced.

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It’s going to be a long journey, my friends, but I’m glad you’ve come along for the ride.