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More Thoughts on Making GeekStack a Game
Posted on | December 22, 2008 | No Comments
I’ll take it as both a good sign and a bad sign that a reader pointed out to me that I haven’t updated the blog here much. Here are two excuses, one bad (but with good advice attached) and one good.
First, I read the Twilight series of books. They’re fun, fast reads that have a lot going for them (including providing social currency if you’re around teenage girls). Unfortunately, the series is nearly 3,000 pages long. It took a couple weeks but I read through all of them and now consider myself free again. Here’s a tip before you start reading a series of books: read 10-20 pages and figure out how long it takes to read a page. Multiply that by the number of pages. Decide whether you’re ready to commit that much time to the series. This would have been more useful to me if I had come up with it before I was 2200 pages into the series.
More importantly, I’ve been stewing over the issues raised in my last post, about how to make GeekStack a card game. The more I thought about it, the thornier the problem became. Many hours spent in the Geek Cave (basically anywhere I didn’t have access to Twilight) led me to the following conclusions:
1) GeekStack needs to be a game if it’s going to be big enough to be a full time venture. Trading cards have potential but probably would take a long time to get to the size I want them to be. I fear that my attention span would wane after working on something part-time for many years.
2) Being a game means that the first edition has to be better. Inconsistent early-edition trading cards are quirky, distinguishing, and potentially valuable. But inconsistent game pieces give the following options:
- Break rule compatibility, making old cards basically worthless.
- Old cards are too weak and not used in the newer system, making them basically worthless (i.e. Palladium RPG characters in a Rifts world).
- Old cards are too powerful and have to be restricted, and become extremely valuable (i.e. Icy Manipulator and Moxen in Magic: The Gathering).
- Old cards fit in perfectly and do not have an imbalance with newer cards.
Of these possibilities, #3 and #4 are the most desirable. #2 isn’t so bad but #1 would be death. Who would trust a company that just wiped out your investment in their product?
As far as the probabilities go, I can simply choose to avoid #1. Doing so prevents me from making big changes to gameplay later on, so guaranteeing that is a big commitment. As far as whether I end up with 2, 3, or 4, there’s no way to tell that beforehand. Any good game will have simple rules with a lot of unexpected implications. I don’t have nearly enough hubris to assume that I’d design a game (my first!) right the first time. (I do have enough hubris to assume that I can get it right eventually).
3) My plan for expanding by covering additional fields just got more complicated. When the cards were just pretty and informative, it was easy to add a new set (say Astronomy) unrelated to anything that has come out before. Now, if all the cards are going to be part of a coherent game, the game structure has to accommodate future (an unexpected) types of cards and subjects. So even though the first set will be Computer Science, basing the game on accumulating computing resources would make it incompatible later. This means the game has to be much more flexible while still being simple enough to be addicting.
4) Because of all that stuff I just said, I need to have play testers before I release a final game.
But since I’m self-funding, I can’t afford to print several iterations of practice cards. I also don’t have enough people nearby that I could give the cards to, so I’d have to deal with shipping logistics. Finally, since part of the fun is based on weighing the pros and cons of different, scarce cards and trading to get the kind you want, so there has to be some simulation of the card marketplace that would exist for a final product. All these reasons mean printed cards are out.
That puts me back with all the problems I was trying to avoid in my initial post. My new task list includes lots of simple things like:
- Make a website where my candidate games are playable online
- Make a game engine that lets me change rules and even game styles quickly
- Gather data from every game played so I can compare objective and subjective feedback about different rules, cards, and game styles, and combinations thereof
- Think up or generate game definitions and corresponding card allocations to test, some in response to feedback from previous games, others out of the blue to look for new ideas
- Get a community of several hundred or more people willing to experiment with my buggy code and unproven games and give me useful feedback.
- Oh yeah, keep working my day job, commuting, doing husband duties and raising my two kids.
Merry Christmas to me!
I’ve been considering and experiementing with the best way to go about tackling this new set of problems, but one thing that is for certain is that the next item on my To Do list is to change all of the “early 2009″ references to just “2009″.
Thanks for keeping in touch and Happy [insert whatever makes you happy about December] to you and yours!
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