Game Designer Wannabe

I attended DexCon 2008 with one purpose in mind: get feedback on Titans of Industry from my friend and actual game designer, Andrew Parks.

I arrived Friday morning and spent some time going around a meeting up with friends. I had brought a copy of the first game I ever made, Programmer: Battle for Bandwidth, with me to give to Carl Olsen, a fellow game designer. Carl is one of very few people who ever actually liked Programmer: BfB. Since I have long since abandoned the game as fundamentally flawed (its premise makes it too complex for a fun filler game and it is too random for a serious strategy game), I decided to give my prototype to Carl in the thought that at least one person on this planet will derive enjoyment from it.

I played a game of Louis XIV (second play ever) and I find myself liking it more and more. Eventually, Andy arrived and we got right into testing.

The testers were Andy, my friends Anni and Doug, Carl, and Andy's 12-year-old daughter, Sarah. At first I was hesitant to have someone so young testing what is an undeniably dry, heavy economic game. As it turns out, Sarah is an amazing tester who understood the game in ways that surprised me. She reportedly loves Acquire, one of my favorite games, and in the end I was grateful to have had her play my game.

The two big changes is this version from the previous test a few days earlier were the addition of turn order bidding and new Age I advancements.

The first change, turn order bidding, was the result of feedback from my regular tester and artist, Dan Glaser. He observed that being the first player in an age was extremely valuable because it meant first crack at the newly-emptied markets. We discovered this advantage was especially crucial to doing well in the third age.

To deal with this, I made players begin each age by engaging in a blind bid for turn order. This did not work well. First of all, the bids were much lower than I thought they would be. Half of the time, players bid zero. Secondly, The just didn't fit. The players remarked that the felt the blind bid did not feel like a natural part of the game.

The second change was the new Age I advancements. The old advancements just gave a player one extra dollar each time they sold a specific good. The problem was that this just was not enough of a bonus to get players to spend multiple turns acquiring them by building universities, producing research, and acquiring the advancement itself.

The new advancements allowed a player to replace an existing cube when placing a new one of a specific type by giving the owner of the existing cube twice its chosen price. This was intended to solve a couple of problems. First, it allowed players to deal with market lock-up. Even if a market was saturated with cubes, it was now possible to replace the existing cubes. This cost money, but it allowed players to steal points and maybe even market dominance. Second, it discouraged "bottoming-out", the tactic where players always price at the lowest available spot to guarantee purchase. Using this tactic just meant that it would be cheap for an opponent to get rid of your cubes if they had one of the new advancements. Protecting your cubes required you to price high, reducing the incidence of bottoming-out.

These new advancements failed because, well, no one bought them. I now realize the power of these advancements don't really kick in until the mid-game, so they were unavailable by the time players would want to purchase them.

The game lasted almost three hours, but that included quite a bit of mid-game design discussions, so that timing is pretty meaningless. The major feedback points I received were:

• Anni: There were turns when nothing at all productive could be done.
• Carl: Players should be able to buy their own goods before anyone else.
• Andy: There needs to be a way to let players get goods that no one is producing.
• Andy: It is difficult to plan a long-term strategy.
• All: Real estate needs to give more victory points.

I will discuss their feedback in my next post.

Sunday was uneventful. Sundays are always the quietest day of a convention, but I think that the con opening early on Wednesday made things even worse, as people were completely burnt out come Sunday morning.

When I got up, I immediately went down to the board game room and set up my Titans of Industry prototype. I was hoping to get in a playtest using my preliminary ideas for 3-player and 4-player rules. I waited there for a couple of hours without attracting much interest. On Friday I had done the same, and some people had come over and expressed interest in trying the game out later, but Sunday saw no such activity.

In the early afternoon I had a meeting with the owner of Jolly Roger Games. The previous evening, he had seen me working on my prototype and told me that he could give me some advice on getting published. The advice he relayed definitely included information I hadn't heard previously, such as how to write a cover letter or how to write a rulebook so that it conforms to printer specifications.

I also asked him about the viability of self-publishing. He warned me of the many pitfalls associated with it, from what to expect when dealing with distributors to having multiple games ready in the pipeline before you send your first to the printer. He said he was helping me because he knew how hard it was to get published, especially when many publishers give little or no feedback when rejecting a design. I was glad to get such in-depth advice from an actual publisher. I definitely realized some of the mistakes I had been making in my communications with publishers to date.

After that meeting, I went around to a few more publishers. It was already Sunday afternoon, so I wasn't looking to show them my prototype so much as to establish a personal connection so that a follow-up e-mail request for a meeting at GenCon would be more likely to garner a positive response.

Finally, I went back to the board game room and set up the prototype again. The only person that came over was actually a volunteer for Tablestar Games, makers of the depressingly good Wealth of Nations.

I say "depressingly good" because when you are trying to sell a heavy, economic game to publishers, the last thing you want to see is a brand-new, clever, well-designed, and attractively-produced heavy, economic game. I didn't have time to actually play through this game, but I did read the rulebook and watch part of a game. Some of the mechanics of this game, especially the factory tile-laying, are impressively well thought-out.

This volunteer saw that my prototype was obviously also an economic game and wanted to find out how I represented certain concepts in my design. There certainly are non-trivial differences between Titans of Industry and Wealth of Nations. My consumer demand mechanic is original, as far as I know (if you know of a game that employs it, please tell me). I also think a couple of things in Wealth of Nations are unnecessary, such as the claiming of territory with flags.

Eventually I hooked back up with my friends. We played El Grande. I liked it for the most part (influence games tend to appeal to me), but the unrestricted movement caught me off guard. Being able to move cubes from province to province without regard to adjacency is somewhat counter-intuitive. Had I known about this, I think I would have done things differently. After dinner, we turned in and my Origins 2008 trip came to a close.

So, how would I sum up this trip? Although my hopes were dashed by an undeniably harsh rejection, I am generally happy about the trip.

Let's face it: game designers have to be prepared to hear some pretty hurtful things about their work. Your work is never as good as you think it is (well, maybe yours is, but mine isn't). It doesn't get easier with time. I remember the first time I got feedback from a publisher. The feeling then was the same as every time since. You get a little choked up and there is suddenly a void in your abdomen. You realize that something you have spent hours and hours working on for years is considered terrible by someone who is just giving an honest opinion.

The important thing at this point is to not lose focus. You're going to want to shut out everything you're hearing. Don't. Set your ego aside, suck it up, and get back to work. The feedback you are receiving is the single most important thing to your future success. Be grateful that you have access to opinions you would normally never get. Evaluate it and incorporate it, then try again. If your design doesn't change, neither will your results.

You need to understand that this industry is built on relationships. Everyone knows everyone else. Take every opportunity to network. One of the playtesters who lambasted my design also pointed me towards another publisher who might be willing to look at it. That's at least two contacts netted from that experience: the publisher and the playtester (who is a known person in the industry).

Also, don't stop designing. Don't get too attached to a single game and tie your future to it. Keep coming up with new ideas and testing them. Ofttimes, I will find ideas I come up with for one design migrating into other designs. It is diversity of thought that spurs creativity and allows you to come up with solutions you otherwise wouldn't have.

A corollary to that point is that you must also not be afraid to abandon a design. As I've been posting over the past week, I noticed how many of my prior designs I've either set aside or abandoned completely. I believe that my moving on from this early work has allowed me to grow as a designer. If I was still working on "fixing" Programmer: Battle for Bandwidth, I would never have had the time to come up with Titans of Industry.

Frankly, I'm almost ready to move on from Titans of Industry. This game is mechanically where I want it to be. If the gameplay still isn't good enough to publish after a couple more rounds of fixes, then I am better off abandoning it and coming up with something more marketable or dedicating more time to developing and selling Privateering. In fact, I'll say right now that if no publisher is actively considering Titans of Industry at year's end, I'll stick it in a closet and never look back.