CCG Design Scale

Hello everyone, today I want to talk about CCG Design Scale. One of the first decisions made in game design, this a short but improtant topic to discuss.

What is CCG Design Scale? Well, to put it simply, it?s the level of detail by which your resources, characters, and entities in your CCG are depicted.

To better illustrate my point, let?s take for instance an idea of mine that has yet to work out: A World War II CCG. Let?s take a look at this idea and how scale may affect its development.

First, the secret to CCG Scale is knowing what is important to control as a player. What is the scale necessary to make this work? And by scale, I mean what kind of intricacy is necessary for each character and/or action?

To put it in simpler terms: What?s the best way to show soldiers in a CCG like this, by squad or by individual?

In my mind, the Individual Soldier is by far more interesting than controlling a squad. However, you can do far more in terms of design if you went up to a squad-based scale. Let me give you an example:

1 ? Individual Soldiers ? Equipped Items such as weapons or armor are easier to use with individual soldiers. The players quickly understand that a rocket launcher needs to be stuck to a single guy instead of a hundred. Pretty simple there.

2 ? Squad-Based ? However, it is more (dare I say) heroic to push against another player with dozens of soldiers fighting tooth and nail alongside dozens of tanks. Squads can be fed via ?Supply Lines? and they can also feature dramatic movements to other locales, suffer casualties (and detrements there-in), and be grouped to form Batallions.

So if we?re leaning the way of Squad-based, which I am as I write this (and I?ve flip-flopped about a dozen times on this issue in my head), you can also have powerful Commanders which may or may not begin in play. These Commanders can give you bonuses and/or abilities that you wouldn?t normally have, and there are gameplay trade-offs made by using powerful Commanders with consequences.

However, with individuals you can really personalize the characters, create relationships within them (such as tying one character to another), along with the more grounded sense of each player trying to take their rag-tag army home to victory.

When you think of scale in terms of CCG, the second secret is simplicity. While this is the first rule of combat, it is the 2nd rule of scale. Once you know what is important to control (secret #1), you need to know how to control them, and you want to keep that simple (secret #2). So by doing both of these, you?ll give yourself a great jumping off point to designing winning conditions, resource control, and combat.

That ends today?s short blurb. Tomorrow we?ll elaborate on some ideas here, and perhaps throw around the importance of good winning conditions.