The Beauty of Simplicity

So after having gotten my Newsporn post out of the way, I'm now back at where I left off: What to do with, and how best to design, my CCG.

There are many roads here, particularly at the early design stage, which will set the entire game going in a single direction. Now that direction can be a good one with gorgeous sunsets and chirping birds or it could turn out like a bad Stephen King novel. You just never know. Today I want to talk about Resources.

Resources

You see, each CCG has its own characters, locations, equipment and/or objects that define what that CCG is, does, and how it operates. But one of the most telling ways to see how a CCG is adequately designed is how to get those cards into play.

Let's begin, as I will probably always will, with Magic: The Gathering.

Magic expels its resources via mana, the magical fairy dust of the world they have created. Many objects, characters, and places can create mana, but the game began with Lands as their core mana source (don't argue with me about Moxes either, thanks). Lands have no limit as far as how many may be in play, but you can only play one per turn. They are not characters. They cannot engage in battle nor can they be "Defended" as it were. You tap them (meaning to turn sideways, that word also has a trademarked symbol associated with it: ) to produce mana.

All of the resources and characters, other than lands, require mana to come into play and activate. This mana requirement is the basis for the power level and pacing of the game, as all things have a cost of some sort, and the designers have expanded this cost engine to include life, cards in hand, and cards in your deck as alternative means of paying for things. But in the beginning, and even today, mana from Lands is the primary source of payment for things you use in the game.

VS. System has a very similar system, but quite different. You see, as VS. System was designed by Magic geeks (much like my own), they took the whole "my turn/your turn" thing and combined it into a single turn and a keyword: Initiative. Technically, initiative is used in pretty much every CCG in existence as a marker for whose turn it is and who gets to respond to something, but nevertheless, this is how they combined the turn structure.

VS. wants you to use a Resource Row, which is cards that are turned faced down in front of you, at a limit of one per turn (contrast to Magic, which has ways of laying many lands on a single turn). After laying a resource you then have a Build Step which gives you an amount of resource points equal to the number of resources you have in front of you. Take a look at this card:

Note that the number in the top left of the card ("6") is its Resource Cost. This means you have to be at turn 6 in the game before this card will ever see the playing field.

Now, based on how VS. is setup, Turns 8-10 see some crazily powerful characters. Basically they designed the game to never really last beyond turn 10, as the characters at that level are amazingly powerful and even though you have 50 Endurance (ie Life Points), this is a limit they've designed into the game to keep games short.

To compare, you would never see a 20 attack / 20 defense creature in Magic on turn 10, there simply isn't one and it doesn't exist. It doesn't need to exist for Magic. But for VS., this turn 6 12/12 is actually smaller than a lot of his counterparts.

What does this all mean? It means that I'm currently debating the best way to dole out resources for my game and I wanted to demonstrate how differences in resource control can completely affect the way that gameplay happens, how long games last, and the tempo a game has. It's all very perplexing and you never want to make the wrong choice. You also want to be different and have something fun, unique, easy to understand and (god help me) simple so that people can learn the game and not have to remember a bunch of rules or bring along extra equipment.

The best CCGs, in my opinion, are those that can be played without special counters or trinkets or what have you. Just sit down and play. That's my goal. If you know some basic rules, then you'll do fine. It is finding those easy to understand yet fun to play rulesets that is the challenge, and am inching closer in discovering every day.

Until then, I'll keep plugging away, waiting to see what works.

Commies Unite

Fuck you Bill Gates.

Cool flag via Boing Boing.

Newsporn

Okay guys, this has been on my mind for awhile, and it's time to get these thoughts down.

This whole Tsunami thing? How everyone is talking about it, how lives have been destroyed, how there are news specials, updates, investigative features? Pictures of the Wreckage. Pain in the Pacific. News at 11 of this boy's struggle to find his mother?

Newsporn, all of it.

You ever met those people who just can't get enough of those "Special Reports" that 60 Minutes piece "Live from the depths of Hell" and want to show you, and have a desperate need to communicate "Just what kind of suffering these people are going through"? Those people are addicted to news. Their news is their porn.

You see where I'm going with this.

TV as an entertainment medium has gotten more sophisticated in that it is planned, it is episodic, and the scandals and outrage are metered to an extent by which most people don't even notice. Particularly for the older people of America, they don't want to look at hard cocks or cumshots. They want to see just how bad the wreckage was. They want to see how much it will cost to fix. What professionals it will take to fix the damage. How long it will take.

There is something in raw humanity, whether it be suffering or struggling or sharing the grief and pain with everyone on screen...its liberating for some.

Remember the DC Sniper? Yeah, I can barely remember him too. But wasn't it exciting? Wasn't it so goddamn interesting to view? And now we have the Tsunami. We have thousands dead. We have horrible, awful things happening over there. Rapes, pillages, looting, riots, famine, starvation, sickness, death. The spotlight of the world shines where it can best get a shimmer. The shiny has yet to wear off on that region of the world, so to speak, but don't worry. In a month or two (tops), we'll be off on some other rant, some other event, something else to fill our Dateline NBC "news" stories with.

And they'll be heartbreaking. It will be a long struggle, a hard road, a glorious journey...but we won't be watching. Newsporn goes in fast moving cycles. I mean, how many times did you watch the plane hit the 2nd tower of the world trade center?

How many times have you seen the waves, water, fucking bodies of people floating dead in the surf?

This isn't say that people are jerking off to the news, far from it. But that intangible good feeling, one closely associated with sexual urges, it gets triggered. People who like this stuff really love it for reasons they probably can't explain. I'm just giving them a term for it.

So the next time a friend of yours is addicted to watching the carnage, the breakdown, the analysis, the talking heads discuss how awful it all is...it's okay, they're just into Newsporn.

It's not just news people, it's Newsporn!

Back in Action

Hello again, dear reader. I have returned to the world of the gainfully employed, and today I sit in my office waiting to spiel about the Latest Developments. So let's see what we have here.

First I believe it's important to note that blogging, as an information medium has finally hit the mainstream. Merriam-Webster have caught on, and ABC News really loves those people who throw down consonants like it ain't no thang. I for one enjoy the process, and it makes me a better writer as well as improving my perspective, as I can go back and read things to see where they fit in my existence.

Yes, it's all very spiritual when I go bitching about politics and discuss the intimacies of potty training.

Anyway, today's subjects will detail both Writing as an art (I won't get too into this I promise), and Game Design regarding my new venture.

On Blogging

So Blogging is just Web Logging your life or the things you see. There are companies out there I've been recommended to contact to do this on a contract basis. No, really, someone told me to contact this company as a possible revenue outlet. And just the words Revenue Outlet make me very happy. It's like Wal*Mart personified in two words. Well, two different words. You know what I mean.

But I digress. There is plenty of pay-for-blogging starting to happen, and companies are beginning to see that the web community finally found its news anchors: Everyone. Everyone is a reporter, everyone is an esteemed journalist, from the most well known bloggers in the world to the kids on LiveJournal. Each has their place, and when greatness shows up, it's usually recognized quickly.

What really changes the scope to me is XML and RSS. If these look like alphabet soup, worry not. They basically provide an easy-to-find and reach outlet to make your blog reading easier and more centralized. Looking up websites, typing in URLs, using bookmarks, trying to find the content within the banner ads? Yesterday's news folks. It's time you and everyone you know who enjoys the web to get an RSS Reader.

RSS is a syndication resource and the readers will cull this information from your favorite sites and put it into a nice, easy to read format. You can find all kinds, but ever since finding Onfolio I haven't turned back. If you haven't heard me already: The newspaper format is to die for. It makes me weep with user-friendly joy. Sure any RSS/XML Reader can have a column of sites you read, but can they format it correctly? Do they send you to the website, do they just have the blurb?

There are web-based solutions and there are PC-based solutions. Onfolio plugs into your browser (you are using Firefox, right? Okay, just checking), whether it be The Great Evil of the World or Firefox (your choice, really), and runs a little app in the background as all do to keep your info Up To Date. Blogging Time is basically Real Time for most intents and purposes. As I throw these characters on the screen to see which stick, thousands of others, millions by next year, will be doing the same. It's like the high school note-passing. "Did you hear about so and so? He wrote this really cool thing about..." etc. Links, discussions, comments, forums.

What blogging has become is a force to be reckoned with. XML and RSS readers centralize this information, and keep you well informed. Visit your favorite places and see if Onfolio can pick them up. Then visit their favorite places. Before you know it you'll have plenty of new interesting content to filter in, and then filter out. This is my little filter on the world, and if you don't have your own, go create a free blog with Blogger or Typepad or something. Questions? Just fucking google it (love that site, I reference it constantly on forums). You'll save yourself time + trouble, and that's never a bad equation.

Game Design Is Tricky

Aside: I'm creating little bold headers for todays entries because they're easier to read and skip if you don't want to hear me harp on either subject. Just keeping you in the loop.

New ideas have come to light (to quote Mr. Lebowski), and things are looking promising. To create a CCG you have to know the environment by which you're delving in. Me, I'm not working in the realm of existing copyright, so to create my own and to create a believable world for the players to work in...that is a very tricky thing. Most games ride on the edge of a knife: One slip and they could be doomed.

The most obvious example of this is Magic, as it is the most well known CCG in the world, and I've had plenty of experience with it. Let's take a few classic mistakes and see what went wrong:

1. Homelands
2. Urza's Saga
3. Mercadian Masques

First up, Homelands. This expansion was designed by two customer service reps at the company (this is an interesting look back at its debut). Italicized for your convenience. Because what the fuck Wizards of the Coast were thinking is anyone's guess. But after that awful, horrible, stupid expansion they got back to their senses and stopped letting the phone answers make major design decisions. Go figure.

So now, what they learned with Homelands they certainly unlearned with the entire Urza's Saga expansion. This was a major "Block" as they call it, consisting of a 350 card main expansion, and 2 smaller expansions of 150+ cards each. Where Homelands was stupid and crappy, Urza's Saga had cards of such power that they had the most bannings of any set in Magic other than Alpha. Apparently the designers got a good yelling at from the WOTC execs (and for good reason), by which they reacted to the players leaving with...

Mercadian Masques. A terrible, awful set, the likes of which hasn't been seen since the debut of Homelands. The entire set was based around legions of characters, and with no new keyword mechanics (mechanics are small game systems tied around cards, such as new effects and abilities), it broke their own "Legend Rule", something that was finally fixed years later with the recent release of Champions of Kamigawa. Now this is all fine and good, but this expansion drove even more players away from the game.

So what went wrong? Power levels. One of the most important things to keep in mind in collectable card design is keeping power levels in check and not to worry about one or two cards throwing you off. What is a power level? A power level is a relationship to how challenging the game is to how easy cards provide a winning answer. When one or two cards are really, really high on the power curve, then all of the others pale in comparison. If the entire playerbase is using nothing but those cards (or decks built around them), then you have a problem.

By most standards, a CCG is healthy when the metagame (the perception of the game as a whole) consists of 3-4 very powerful decks with rogue decks still being viable. This happens with almost every CCG, from Magic to Lord of the Rings to VS. System. Each has their own power cards, each has their own power strategies. But in the end, the power level should be consistent enough that if a player uses his or her resources and creates an interesting deck, and can still win with it.

One of the main draws to Star Chamber is that the metagame is very hard to discern. Since it is, primarily, board-game like in its design, the metagame is based on what types of decks and strategies are viable on different maps. Sure one card owns a single map, but no decks completely control the game as the playerbase knows it.

So what I'm focusing on for my game is to take the power level of good games (VS. System has an excellent power level, for the most part. Magic has stablized pretty well) and look at all of their core mechanics. I'm focusing on those mechanics that got the games going, not those that were added later, and finding out what is the right mix for me. I believe I stumbled on something last night that takes my favorite part of the Legend of the 5 Rings CCG and moves it into my game design.

But I've rambled enough. More on this tomorrow.

Scratch and Bleed

Throat hurts worse? Check. Head pounding? Check. Sinuses clogged? Check. Woke up to call in to work and can't get back to sleep? Check!

This is so great I just can't describe it adequately enough. Nothing like sickness. I contemplate going to the doctor. More than likely, I just need rest + fluids, you know, that old fashioned care that works most of the time. But I'm an American, we don't have time for that! We need Antibiotics, regardless if they would truly help or not!

I hope the kids won't get it at this point. Misery loves company, but two year old's and 11 month olds really don't need any sickness, for any reason.

Swallow, pain. That's the way you do it.

Let's see here: A few game design notes. As I'll try to mark my game design journey as much as possible, here's something I'm thinking about: How important are the Big Characters in your CCG. Here's a few other games and how they handle them:

Magic: Legendary Creatures may only be out by themselves. If anyone (including the one currently controlling the Legendary Character) plays the same character, both are buried.

VS. System: Unique characters have a lot of names and types. You have Batman, World's Greatest Detective and then you'll have Batman, The Caped Crusader. If you play another version, the old is buried. Both players can control one copy of a unique character. You can discard a card with the same name (not necessarily the same version) and "Power Up" the one in play, giving him +1 Attack and +1 Defense.

Lord of the Rings: Once you have a version of a character in play, you're stuck with him. You can discard a card with same name (again, like VS. you have "versions" of Frodo, etc) to remove a "wound" from a character (if a character loses a skirmish, they get a wound. Enough wounds and they die). If a character is killed, you can NOT play another version of that character. You're just stuck looking at those 4 copies of Legolas. Note that the entire gameplay is based around keeping Frodo alive, so it goes without saying they value their characters highly.

Which leads me to my current design which is leaning somewhere towards Magic and thinking along the lines of Lord of the Rings. You want the "Marquee" characters to be special and attain weight when speaking in terms of power level. I find it fascinating that so many choices are given to me, but at the same time I want to make the right choice. This is something that can truly be hashed out later but you simply want to make the best game possible and I fear that I'll make the wrong choice (nothing like self-doubt).

Anyway, I've templated a system that I'm probably going to revise soon, and in my mind I have a mechanic I want to incorporate for marquee characters I just need to figure out how to do so.

More on this As It Develops. This Game Design moment has been brought to you by Sudafed. I'm Going To Go Take Some and Then Lay Down.

A Network in search of a Solution

Well, thanks a lot Network Solutions. Who knew just logging in to their DNS control panel (to view our current information) meant taking away DNS propogation from our existing provider? I sure as hell didn't, and found out the hard way.

Excuse me, it's been a goofy day.

Speaking of things that piss me off, what is up with Samba? Where did the "Just install it, set a few parameters, and watch it work" system go wrong? Because it's sure as hell convoluted now. At this point I have to somehow see if I can get the thing to share files on my domain, and I might as well forget about adding it to the domain. That ship has sailed and I'm wondering if Fedora 3 is having some sort of weird video card problems with my hardware. Nano, a simple text editor (think a clunky version of Notepad) is messing up in a bad way in terms of buffer refresh, etc.

But, fuck, let's talk of more interesting subjects shall we?

First there is Star Chamber. I have two maps of mine to be included in Rebellions and they should debut sometime today with the new build. The first, Double Helix (or it might be called just Helix) is a neat little idea of mine that started with the idea of a ring with a bar in the middle of it. While that's been slightly changed, I still like the end result. But the winner is definitely Thorian Web, the first name from that title dragged from the Star Trek vault because Paul Dennen, the programmer/designer guy, is a big Trek geek. Not that there's anything wrong with that, and just "Web" was a pretty boring name. Like I told him when he suggested it: "Sounds spacey and weird. I like it."

How about Game Design? Well, I've decided to headfirst in yet another project, that is creating my own CCG. Yes I have my pet project that I completed (that is completely playable and balanced, warts and all), but instead of playing Revisionist, I've decided to hit the design text files bigtime and see what's available. It's shaping up to be interesting, but the further you push brazen ideas, the more uncertainty comes in. Can I do this? Is this a mistake? Hasn't this been done before? Are you just trying to copy Magic, Lord of the Rings, VS. System, Legend of the 5 Rings, etc?

Fuck, I don't know. I got a great idea and I'm gonna run with it. When I finish I'll look back over it and begin to mold it and play with it as best I can. Until then I will not stop until I get something complete, something worth showing my peers. There are plenty of delivery mechanisms, anything from selling development to a game company or self-publishing through various CCG systems. This post, like most blog postings, is a marker for the future. Where did my CCG originate? New years weekend. And I'm very excited about it.

Haunted rolls on, as we try to finalize just what we're looking for and what coding needs are necessary. A mod takes a long time to develop, from the resources, the coding, the art, the map design, it's a bucket of shit that needs constant attention and I'll see how much time I can devote on it this week.

Lastly, my throat hurts and in a perfect world it won't get any worse than this. I haven't been sick in a long time (at least, sick enough to stay out of work), and don't want to start now.