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.
In the frozen Canadian arctic of the Northwest Territories and Nunavut, there is a famous road known as the Tibbitt to Contwoyto Winter Road. It’s a long haul road for ice truckers that’s over 300 miles long and most of it is built on frozen lakes. Sometimes it’s hard to know which direction to go in, but by far, the hardest part is that there is a limit to how fast you can go – 16 miles per hour. When I heard about this, I said to myself sardonically “sounds like game development.”
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Testing, manufacturing, shipping, and building an audience all take a lot of time and there is no way to really shortcut this. Whether you work 20 hours per week or 60 hours per week, you cannot meaningfully reduce the amount of time it takes to do certain tasks. Manufacturing and shipping can’t be changed at all by extra work. Testing can be expedited, but only as fast as you can afford to bring in fresh testers or make changes to the game. With building an audience, sooner or later, you will run into some kind of constraint…
You can spend money on ads, but only until you run out of money. You can talk to more people, but only until you run out of either people to talk to, energy to talk to people, or – in the case of things like Twitter or Instagram – you hit an API limit set by a web developer. You can bring up your game multiple times, but only until people get sick of hearing about it. You can keep talking, but only as long as you have things worth saying.
Game development…no, creativity itself, requires a mix of commitment and downtime. In fact, I’d hoped to speak about this on a post about mental health with a real licensed psychiatrist on this very blog. That post fell through after Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico and left my contact without power for months. (He’s physically okay but was unable to respond to questions.)
You can’t speed run this. A single project, even with a large team of creators and administrators will still need to go through several stages, listed below. Let’s imagine you have infinite staff and money at your disposal. Where will you hit a bottleneck?
Early Game Design: If you’ve got tons of game designers and you work in shifts where 2-3 designers are working on a game 24/7, this will take several days. You can’t have much more than 6-9 people working on game design or else communication will get really weird, really fast.
Artwork: Let’s say you create great art specs and break discrete parts of the game up between artists. This will still take a few weeks because each artist will have a contract, some will flake on you, and some will not meet the spec.
Game Tweaks: Let’s say you have an infinite supply of fresh play-testers. Yet every time you make a new tweak, you’ll have to iterate the game. Even with 24/7 shift work, it will take several days to get this right.
Sample Production: You’re going to have to have another place print your game. If you know exactly what you’re doing when you make the order and you have it rush shipped, this is a two week process.
Reviews: Once your game is ready for review, go ahead and wait six weeks for reviewers to get back to you. They’re busy and do their work with full-time jobs and kids most of the time. You can’t rush them because you need their trust to continue on.
Kickstarter: Okay, you don’t technically need Kickstarter, but a lot of people like using it to estimate demand and have some degree of certainty in success. Take two weeks for a short campaign.
Manufacturing: Let’s say you start the print run as soon as the Kickstarter ends and front the cash even while waiting on the Kickstarter check to clear two weeks after the campaign. It will take six weeks to print and two weeks to air ship it. (Most people can’t afford to air ship, and sea shipping takes up to three months).
Fulfillment: Let’s say you rush ship all your rewards from the warehouse – that’s a two week process.
Without factoring in sales and marketing, it is not even theoretically possible to create a board game and fulfill it in less than six months of time. This is assuming you have tons of staff and tons of money, which very few of us do.
What I’m driving at is simple: if you work alone or in a small team, be patient, pace yourself, and have fun. You can’t sprint a marathon. You’re not missing out on anything by not working yourself to exhaustion. There are structural limits to how fast you can move.
If you get bored along the way or feel like you’re not making enough money, here are some suggestions:
Stagger your game projects so that you’re working on more than one at a time.
Launch another project or start a different business entirely.
Help other creators make something they’re proud of.
Spend time with your friends and family.
Take a vacation.
Binge watch YouTube. Yes, seriously.
I don’t even think business geniuses like Bill Gates or Warren Buffet could build up massive empires from nothingness in a year or two. They could do it again and probably do it in less time than it took the first time, but if they were truly left with nothing but their knowledge – no contacts, no cash – it would take a while to build back up to where they are now.
Let’s put the myth of the obsessed genius creator in the ground. The most effective creator is the passionate one who puts in consistent effort regularly BUT who does not burn out or isolate themselves in the process. The effective creator takes in the world around them, reaches out to others, and generally lives a life outside of their work.
Most Important Highways & Byways Updates
I’m chugging along on the final 100 tests. I’m feeling good about Highways & Byways. I’m on track for the late March Kickstarter I’ve been aiming for.
It looks like I’ll be getting the prototype game in the mail today!
Board game development is a very individual process. Every single developer has different methods for creating their games. This article is the sixth of a 19-part suite on board game design and development.
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Rules provide directions on how to execute activities within a game. They explain, limit, and clarify. Game rules are how we regulate the mechanics of our games so that they are consistent with the messages we want to send to players. Sean and I will explain further. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of our direct messages on Discord.
This guide comes in four parts:
What are some guidelines for writing good rules?
How do you test your rules?
Rules testing in action
Advice from Sean
What are some guidelines for writing good rules?
Brandon: Once you get through the drafting stage of rules, it comes time to get very serious. Rule writing can be business-like, resembling technicial writing in a lot of ways.
Brandon: What are some guidelines for writing good rules?
Sean: Guidelines for writing good rules really boils down to learning the art of instruction and communication. I’d say the main tool set for understanding and wielding that art form is empathy. When writing rules, you need to clearly understand and feel how that player may be feeling in the situation you’re writing for. In some cases you may want to invoke a specific reaction, hopefully not extremely negative, but a reaction that helps propel that player forward so they can strategically use other opportunities that may come their way in order to continue playing the game.
Sean: The last thing you want to do is isolate the player so much that the game is no longer playable. Isolation and making a game difficult are two very different things, which is why writing good rules are very important so misinterpretation doesn’t creep in during game play.
Brandon: I agree with what you’re saying. Never write a rule you wouldn’t want to read. For that matter, never write a rule you wouldn’t want to read to a table of people who are halfway listening!
Brandon: When people feel isolated from a game because of its rules, there’s usually one a few things going on. The rules could be way too wordy or vague. They could be framed in a negative manner.
Brandon: For an example of framing: there’s a huge difference between “lose 50% of your movement this turn” and “move 50% of normal speed this turn” even though they’re functionally the exact same. The latter just sounds better.
Brandon: To flip this, I’d say you need to make sure rules are concise, clear, and framed in an nonthreatening manner. For rules that explain, it’s really important not to make them too wordy. When rules clarify, it’s really important not to make them too vague. For rules that limit, it’s really important to frame them as neutrally as possible.
How do you test your rules?
Brandon: With all this in mind, how do you make sure your rules are actually any good? How do you test them?
Sean: It’s all about how others perceive the rule. This is why it’s very important to test with as many people as possible that are brand new to the game. Granted, it’s also important to have repeat testers, too, in order to make sure the flow of the game rules feel spot-on. Still, it’s even more critical to consistently play with new people. The reason for this is because the first impression means everything. If someone can read your rule and execute the action on the activity flawlessly, that is a fantastic rule. If it takes them longer, this may be due to a couple of different reasons.
The game itself is very complex, which has been known to happen as some games are specifically designed this way.
The game itself is very complex, and that wasn’t the intention at all, which is a larger problem.
The written rule and/or visual aid is poorly done and needs to be revised.
Confusing instructions help no one. (Source: Dawn Huczek, Flickr, CC BY 2.0, Link)
Sean: I personally have three different levels of testing.
Short-term mechanic testing. This type of testing goes back to coming up with ideas and tweaking them, testing each one individually based on what has been written down.
Private testing. This is where I will invite a specific group of game testers to test my game assuming they have the time to do so.
Public blind play tests. This is where most of the rules have been ironed out and are acceptable enough to use during a prototype either in person or online through something like Tabletopia or Tabletop simulator. This phase is supposed to help catch and inconsistencies, as well as document any unforeseen questions that players may have with any of the rules.
Brandon: It’s interesting that you split your rules testing into three levels. Number 1 is the most interesting since that’s where you make rules that fill objective needs.
Brandon: At the short-term mechanic testing stages, you’re really just using rules to help underlying mechanics manifest themselves! This is to make sure the game is – on some fundamental level – balanced.
Brandon: Later, once you start doing private testing, a lot of balance issues start coming out of the rules. You have to tweak them over and over until the game actually plays well, allowing for different strategies and styles.
Brandon: The blind play-test stage is where clarity and framing become serious issues. If your rules aren’t clear, blind play-testers will struggle because they’re trying to learn without your help! If your rules are framed poorly, they’ll feel like they’re getting screwed over by the game when, from a strictly mathematical viewpoint, they’re not.
Rules Testing in Action
A photo of Highways & Byways having its rules tested at Protospiel Atlanta.
Brandon: You have laid out a really good framework for different types of rules testing so far. Yet this is all very abstract, so let’s tie it together by swapping stories.
Brandon: Can you provide an example each kind of rules testing from your own game design experiences?
Sean: Sure! Let’s start with a simple mechanic such as dealing damage. The thing to keep in mind here is that the majority of the time, we will always start to design something based on our own experiences, but once you’ve laid out the foundation, you must start bringing other experiences into it.
Sean: I started off with a very simple D20 type of system for Paths: World of Adia. This went very well with my short-term mechanic testing, but unfortunately, a lot of this had already been done. There was nothing new here, so I really had to dig deep into this one and start putting my own spin on things. This gets strange simply because the only way to put a true new spin on something is through the eyes of others.
Sean: I ended up resorting to a concept of taking MMORPG concepts and placing them into this D20 world. This completely altered the game and even broke some mechanics like dealing damage. The way something like the D20 system played was very slow, and very much meant for “theater of the mind” style of game play. By introducing this new MMORPG concept into a tabletop RPG world it dramatically changed everything.
Sean: Many times I had gone through how damage was dealt, and how it was taken. Where in an MMORPG world, that concept is very straightforward. Run toward the unit and attack or cast your spell. This was similar in the tabletop world, however there aren’t any beautifully rendered 3D visual models in animated focus. Here in a tabletop RPG, I had to seamlessly give both a “fast” feeling of gameplay while painting a picture for the player.
Sean: This was super rough until I realized that I wanted to create a way where the game controls most of the combat and the story can still be told by the players playing. This really was the best of both worlds. This lead to any damage mechanics being almost automated inside of a tabletop RPG – which is a very strange concept to think about.
Brandon: It sounds like what you needed to test early on was how much you could minimize human interface, such as from a game master, in combat. At the time you were creating rules, you needed a proof of concept. To get into the meticulous work would have been silly. You just need to make sure it worked.
Sean: When running through the private testing phase we initially ran into some snags. Questions of “how do I know when a monster is attacking me?” and “who’s telling the story?”
Sean: I initially solved these with a sub-par “threat mechanic” that gives each player a “threat meter,” and the minion or boss would attack the player with the highest threat. I also made it to where each player would take a turn telling the story.
Brandon: With your threat mechanic, it sounds like you needed a way to resolve combat. Easy to execute and remember were your first priorities. What you initially tried worked okay for private testing in the sense that the game was functional, but it didn’t quite “vibe” right with your players.
Brandon: I had a lot of problems like this with War Co., too. I needed to make sure cards had written and executable effects – phrasing wasn’t a worry just yet. That fine-tuning – the efforts toward perfect balance, framing, and clarity – come later.
Sean: Then we did some public play tests. Unfortunately, it didn’t go well at all. Many people were confused.
Sean: In the end, I had to go back to the drawing board. I was pretty much stuck, but I knew my concepts were great. People loved the idea but I failed to execute it. This is when I realized I seriously needed some help and another set of eyes. I started to scout out someone who could really help me put things in motion and help solidify some of these concepts I had.
Sean: Sure enough, I joined your discord server, Brandon, and that’s where I met Howl Philinish. He has helped me execute all of these mechanics, and then some, and really set-up a great backbone for mechanics like damage, who’s telling the story, and the threat generation system.
Sean: With that said, this means that we are now back in short-term mechanic testing and are slowly shifting into private testing.
Brandon: Public testing is so often where ideas fall apart. It’s often true that we need others to help us write clear rules since we tend to understand our own work better than anyone else ever could. We see our intentions and can never decouple them from our words. I remember you finding Howl through Discord, and I’m glad that happened the way it did!
Brandon: I’ve had so many rules go out the window through public play-testing. Nearly every Event Card in Byways got changed. I ended up implementing a light action point system to increase number of player choices. I’ve simplified Construction rules. I’ve reframed negative Events into more neutral ones. Public play-testing has dramatically improved the game’s rule quality simply because it’s not just me and, every once in a while, my brother.
Advice from Sean
Brandon: If you could go back in time and give yourself one piece of game design advice, what would it be?
Sean: I would specifically tell myself four things.
Don’t be afraid to share your work and don’t be afraid to ask people to look at ideas. Understand that even if it’s just 1 person who enjoys what you are creating, you are impacting someone else’s life by your creation and design – and there is nothing that will be more valuable than that.
People will only support your dream of game design if you talk about what you’re doing. You can’t expect to post a single image, never share it again, and expect that magically everyone will look at your stuff. You need to be absolutely consistent, and sometimes repeating your same post 1 – 5 times before receiving some kind of feedback or response.
Don’t be afraid to learn and change your game design. People will always give feedback, but you as the creator need to understand that you need to keep some old and bring in some new in order to have an awesome game. This doesn’t mean go and change everything because some guy told you he doesn’t like your game. Look for a consistent pattern that is brought up by multiple people and then possibly pivot and change your game design accordingly.
Understand your audience for your game. This is so critical as this changes everything you’re doing. From rules, to theme, to game type and concept, you must be absolutely sure that what you’re doing is targeting the right people for what you’re trying to execute. These two things must become a beautiful marriage. A marriage between audience and game. If that marriage does not happen, you will most definitely be forced to pivot. I learned this the hard way.
Brandon: Wow, I couldn’t have said it better myself! Those are some of the core messages of my blog. Share your work, don’t be afraid to self-promote, be ready to change, and try to understand people.
Brandon: Thank you very much for your insight. Looking forward to sharing this!
Sean: It was a ton of fun! I really enjoyed this and hope we can do it again soon. 😀
Creating and refining rules can be a complex process! By publishing our conversation here, Sean and I hope to be able to help you create rules that make your game balanced, clear, and tons of fun.
In next week’s article, I’ll talk about the storytelling aspect of game development – the internal narrative. For now, please leave your questions and comments about designing and testing rules below 🙂
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.
Highways & Byways is basically complete. I’ve started the final 100 play-tests. This is a process I follow to ensure a game’s quality. This method may not be appropriate for every developer, every team, or every game, but it is one I like. I’ve done this with War Co. and I’m doing it again with Highways & Byways.
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The final 100 play-tests start once I feel a game is basically where I want it to be. I start the final 100 play-tests after I’ve done a substantial amount of blind play-testing. I wait until I have all the art assets I need. I only start the final 100 play-tests when I need to test the game for outliers.
In English, that means that the more times you do something, the more weird stuff you’ll see. With enough games, outliers tend to balance each other out. That’s called the law of large numbers, but I’m not going to get into this because this isn’t Brandon the Statistician.
When people play a game, their expectations are formed by whatever happens in their first game. On average, the game is average. Shocker, shocker. But every once in a while, somebody’s first game is an outlier. That’s not necessarily good or bad, but it’s something game devs need to be wary of. Outlier games still need to be a good experience.
The only way to catch outliers is to just play a lot of games. For some games, 25 is enough, for others, it could take 500. Considering where I am with Highways & Byways, 100 games seemed like an appropriate goal. It’s a big enough sample size to suss out statistical curveballs, but small enough for me to actually produce the game in a reasonable time frame.
This is a checklist I like to check off before I start final testing:
Get the physical prototype ready. It’s too much of a pain in the butt to try to do this on Tabletop Simulator and you need data based on the real physical experience.
Get all the print files ready and perfect aligned with the manufacturer’s templates.
Check everything for grammar and clarity.
Make sure all the components are good, especially in terms of accessibility (physical, visual, etc.)
Make sure there are no broken parts left in the game.
Proofread everything again.
Create a spreadsheet to track the following: game number, date, time, players, length of game, critical stats*, and comments.
Find play-testers 🙂
* For Byways: vehicle, start space, and spaces left at the end of the game
Once all the prep work is done, I start thinking about my main objectives for the final 100 play-tests. I like to keep it simple:
Play enough to catch outliers.
Correct minor mistakes.
If there is something seriously wrong, iterate again and reset the count.
It’s gritty work and it’s meticulous, but it’s straightforward. You want to put your best foot forward for both your players and your business. Players in the Board Game Geek age don’t accept anything less than very polished products. You need to stand out in a crowded market and you want to get positive reviewer feedback. There are both morally high-minded and economically self-interested reasons for putting yourself through all this effort.
It helps when going in to have an idea of what kind of situations could cause a problem. For War Co., I flagged about 50 cards I thought could have dangerous synergies and play-tested with them slightly more often. Highways & Byways, mercifully, is simpler to test, but I’ve still got some concerns. I’ll just spell them out here so you have concrete examples. Maybe hard examples will get your juices flowing for when you do your own hardcore game testing.
What if certain Start Spaces give players an unfair advantage? This one is pretty straightforward. In Highways & Byways, there are six start spaces represented by stars on the map. If one puts you close to every other road, that makes the entire route shorter. That’s a flaw in a racing game. If statistics prove one Start Space to be clearly superior, I’ll simply move the Start Space. I’m awfully suspicious about that one near Scranton, PA…
What if there is a first player advantage? Just about every game has some variation of this concern at some point. Highways & Byways is no different. Only thing I can do is test.
What if one Vehicle is stronger or weaker? There are six Vehicles in the game. Each one has a special ability. These special abilities have changed a lot since my original intentions. Like the class cards in Pandemic, your ride determines your game’s strategy. If one Vehicle has an unfair advantage or disadvantage, I better nerf that now. The only way to find out is, as you guessed it, raw statistics.
What if some Event Cards have overpowered synergy with Vehicles? All Vehicles play with Event Cards to some degree, except for Rustbucket, but there are two that I’m worried about right now. Stationary Wagon lets you churn cards in your hand twice as fast as other Vehicles. It has no immunities and the action still requires you to move less to use it, but – I don’t know – I could conceive of this being overpowered. On the other hand, Five-O lets you move four extra spaces when you draw a Distance card. Distance cards already tend to let you move more in a turn, so this can lead to turns of dramatic and extraordinary movement, although very irregularly.
What if somebody drafts a really easy route and others draft really hard routes? The drafting mechanic allows for players to plan their road trips to a limited degree. It’s possible to get royally screwed over and have to pick something way out of your way. You do have some limited degree of control because you can pick better roads and draw up to 2 of 12 that are just not working for you. Yet at the same time, it’s totally possible for someone to get roads clustered in one region while others have to go to multiple. It’s rare and Event Cards mitigate this, but I still have to test it out to see how fair the game’s drafting really is.
Testing a lot will soothe my mind. I want this game to be not merely good, but great. I want every experience on the tabletop to be amazing for everyone involved. That’s why I’ve got to play tons and tons until I know it’s fine tuned. Only then can I put it in a box with my name on it. Only then can I ask for people’s money without guilt.
Are you in a similar place in your projects? Have you been there before or perhaps think you’ll be there soon? Leave your thoughts in the comments, I’d love to hear them 🙂
Most Important Highways & Byways Updates
I’ve started the final 100 play-tests.
All art is done.
I’ve ordered an updated version of the prototype.
I am play-testing as much as I can simply to assure quality at this point.
I want to be ready to print review copies on January 1 – it’s an ambitious goal, but doable.
