Post by Judge Sam on Mar 25, 2009 8:08:48 GMT -5
Designing Spies is so different than doing Survivor. It's good in a lot of ways and worse in a lot of ways. I guess to compare the two it's best to talk first about designing Survivor games.
From what I recall in doing Survivor the 'main' part of design work was incorporated into doing the challenges. With my games, there were 13-18 challenges every game (even more with Wonderland w/ Sidestory and switching puzzles and way more with Asteria) which were the main set of work. Before the game you would pump out as many Immunity Challenges as possible. Now lemme tell you about creating ICs, they are measured on 2 things:
- how long it takes for you to make it
- how 'good' it is either in terms of a successful game or it working out smoothly
The first part is very important. For example, I could spend 10 hours creating a race through boards with passwords. Each board has a unique puzzle I create myself, test, workout the rules, fix so it isn't immediately solvable but not impossible, fix so it can't be googled, then make sure it has an answer that can be put into a password box and be good to do; i.e., everyone gets the same one or two word answer that is not like a number 1-10 because then they could just input all those numbers until they get it. With those restrictions and a time limit it can be pretty tough.
Anyway I can create all these puzzles (and actually for this game am quite aways along of doing that for one challenge here). Then lets pretend this is the Final Five of a Survivor game, four people show up, one person stops at the start cause he gets stuck and in 20 minutes one guy races through and wins. Everyone else stops.
You can see how that would be an absolute disaster lol, to say the least. And I have done exactly that before, one example off the top of my head is the Final Four of Survivor Paradise where I created like 10 unique puzzles. I seem to remember this happening a few times in Wonderland too.
One Spies example would be like the Choose Your Own Adventure Imprisonment. That took forever and a half, and yet maybe 15 max people got through it in 10 minutes.
So when you put the time into a challenge like this you really want to make sure that there's a lot of people who will actually do most of it. Which is why I'm currently rethinking the aforementioned planned puzzle.
Anyway, you would think that the more time a host puts into a challenge the better it always is, and that is true in a lot of ways. It definitely helps a bit. But the holy grail is something that is simple in execution but very fruitful for the players, and a lot of those types of things do exist.
Then again I have noticed in most other Survivor games I see a LOT of challenges that take very little or no time to create which are also crappy haha which I am trying to avoid.
So anyway, with Survivor I would guess that is the main construction there. There is of course creation of the board and art (a lot of time goes into that believe it or not), the flavor aspect, and hours and hours of advertising but that's common to all games. For my games I would have an additional sphere of activities called Parlor Games - those took a bit of time but not many could be worked on before the game started. In Asteria I also had Maps which I drew and people moved upon which was another sphere to tackle, as well as write up instructions and tribal council posts but again, that took place during the game.
The other main thing is the design. I like doing the design. A lot. That was always my favorite part of things - scheduling out the gameplay, configuring unique twists, imagining possible playouts of the game and making it all work. I loved doing that.
So this brings me to what my perception of Spies would be before I did Spies 1. My idea would be that it would be less work - like 1 or 2 challenges max! Yes I would have to write Imprisonment stories but that would kinda be like tribal council posts except I could do them before the game started! So it'd be less work, the games would go quicker, and most importantly... it would be more design. More design problems to solve with roles, with twists, and all that good stuff. It was also a whole other level of design... after exhausting most of Survivor's possibilities I was eager to tackle a new game.
And I was right on that point - the design aspect - is extremely fulfilling. It is extremely complicated and complex but working through is very rewarding and entertaining. Actually, and I never thought I'd hear myself say this, it might be *too* much design lol. Holy crap it's giving me a headache how many new things I need to design on a daily basis. Okay let's go through what I had in Spies 1:
3 roles.
a few activities which actually took a bit
the basic numbers game of mafia
Ok. But now look what I'm doing in Spies 6:
at count 9 roles. NINE ROLES! Each one, since they tend to be completely new, is a tangled web of possibilities and balance. Most importantly that doesn't even count all the design work on the... *counts*... I'd say 3-4 roles I worked a bunch on before throwing them out because they didn't work or were too powerful. This is so much, especially when you need to consider it with the twist and the activities and the spies and stuff. Thankfully for this game I decided to reuse a bunch which saved me some time.
the twist. I guess I should have seen this one coming haha, since I don't have 1 twist but 6 voting twists. This is usually pretty fun but in this instance, the 6 voting twists, it's so much it's giving me a headache. It's like designing 6 separate games and figuring out all the loopholes and stuff is tough.
activities. I know I need to do 'less is more' and I am but still, oh man so much, especially with balance concerns and prizes and all that stuff. Designing a full game or challenge is one thing, but also designing the prize to make it appealing, balanced, yet enticing (people will flat out not try your hard-worked-upon challenge if the prize is not good enough) is a whole other thing.
number balancing. holy moly this has warped into like a work of art haha. so many numbers. thankfully after 6 iterations of this I think I'm at a point where I've nailed all the strange possibilities into a range of numbers I'm okay with but every game I discover something new with this and then of course I never have any idea how many applications I'm going to get so it adjusts near the end and w/ roles and stuff.
that's so much designing, especially when you take them in context with each other. that would be enough to do to prepare for a game but there's also making the board, 30+ hrs of advertising, and writing so many imprisonment stories.
The plan at the start was to create quick, simple games on a regular basis but that didn't turn out. Mostly because of the amount of work it takes to get things started. I mean creating 25 aim names, board names, finding 25 appropriate pictures, resizing them twice, creating 25 confessionals, etc takes sooooo long. I couldn't do that every 2 months. Part of it is that I'm a perfectionist I guess.
And I also have plans to reduce the amount of work involved and I have cut a lot of things for this game. But the truth is a game like this with this high quality takes more than one person to run and I can't find people seriously interested in it at all so I guess this is the only acceptable pace.
Anyway, so Spies definitely isn't the beast I thought it would be when I started it. I never knew mafia could get so complicated, and I guess advertising has gotten harder and more involved. I kind of miss the ease of design. That's why I've kinda been thinking of returning to Survivor - if only for a game or two.
I dunno, we'll see how this goes I guess. I really tried this time to do so much more before the game started so I'm not so constantly stressed during it but we'll see. The usual 'omg i've been working 50+ hours with no one to talk to on a game I don't even know will start' feeling is about to kick in haha. And there's still lots to do. So I guess we will see.
From what I recall in doing Survivor the 'main' part of design work was incorporated into doing the challenges. With my games, there were 13-18 challenges every game (even more with Wonderland w/ Sidestory and switching puzzles and way more with Asteria) which were the main set of work. Before the game you would pump out as many Immunity Challenges as possible. Now lemme tell you about creating ICs, they are measured on 2 things:
- how long it takes for you to make it
- how 'good' it is either in terms of a successful game or it working out smoothly
The first part is very important. For example, I could spend 10 hours creating a race through boards with passwords. Each board has a unique puzzle I create myself, test, workout the rules, fix so it isn't immediately solvable but not impossible, fix so it can't be googled, then make sure it has an answer that can be put into a password box and be good to do; i.e., everyone gets the same one or two word answer that is not like a number 1-10 because then they could just input all those numbers until they get it. With those restrictions and a time limit it can be pretty tough.
Anyway I can create all these puzzles (and actually for this game am quite aways along of doing that for one challenge here). Then lets pretend this is the Final Five of a Survivor game, four people show up, one person stops at the start cause he gets stuck and in 20 minutes one guy races through and wins. Everyone else stops.
You can see how that would be an absolute disaster lol, to say the least. And I have done exactly that before, one example off the top of my head is the Final Four of Survivor Paradise where I created like 10 unique puzzles. I seem to remember this happening a few times in Wonderland too.
One Spies example would be like the Choose Your Own Adventure Imprisonment. That took forever and a half, and yet maybe 15 max people got through it in 10 minutes.
So when you put the time into a challenge like this you really want to make sure that there's a lot of people who will actually do most of it. Which is why I'm currently rethinking the aforementioned planned puzzle.
Anyway, you would think that the more time a host puts into a challenge the better it always is, and that is true in a lot of ways. It definitely helps a bit. But the holy grail is something that is simple in execution but very fruitful for the players, and a lot of those types of things do exist.
Then again I have noticed in most other Survivor games I see a LOT of challenges that take very little or no time to create which are also crappy haha which I am trying to avoid.
So anyway, with Survivor I would guess that is the main construction there. There is of course creation of the board and art (a lot of time goes into that believe it or not), the flavor aspect, and hours and hours of advertising but that's common to all games. For my games I would have an additional sphere of activities called Parlor Games - those took a bit of time but not many could be worked on before the game started. In Asteria I also had Maps which I drew and people moved upon which was another sphere to tackle, as well as write up instructions and tribal council posts but again, that took place during the game.
The other main thing is the design. I like doing the design. A lot. That was always my favorite part of things - scheduling out the gameplay, configuring unique twists, imagining possible playouts of the game and making it all work. I loved doing that.
So this brings me to what my perception of Spies would be before I did Spies 1. My idea would be that it would be less work - like 1 or 2 challenges max! Yes I would have to write Imprisonment stories but that would kinda be like tribal council posts except I could do them before the game started! So it'd be less work, the games would go quicker, and most importantly... it would be more design. More design problems to solve with roles, with twists, and all that good stuff. It was also a whole other level of design... after exhausting most of Survivor's possibilities I was eager to tackle a new game.
And I was right on that point - the design aspect - is extremely fulfilling. It is extremely complicated and complex but working through is very rewarding and entertaining. Actually, and I never thought I'd hear myself say this, it might be *too* much design lol. Holy crap it's giving me a headache how many new things I need to design on a daily basis. Okay let's go through what I had in Spies 1:
3 roles.
a few activities which actually took a bit
the basic numbers game of mafia
Ok. But now look what I'm doing in Spies 6:
at count 9 roles. NINE ROLES! Each one, since they tend to be completely new, is a tangled web of possibilities and balance. Most importantly that doesn't even count all the design work on the... *counts*... I'd say 3-4 roles I worked a bunch on before throwing them out because they didn't work or were too powerful. This is so much, especially when you need to consider it with the twist and the activities and the spies and stuff. Thankfully for this game I decided to reuse a bunch which saved me some time.
the twist. I guess I should have seen this one coming haha, since I don't have 1 twist but 6 voting twists. This is usually pretty fun but in this instance, the 6 voting twists, it's so much it's giving me a headache. It's like designing 6 separate games and figuring out all the loopholes and stuff is tough.
activities. I know I need to do 'less is more' and I am but still, oh man so much, especially with balance concerns and prizes and all that stuff. Designing a full game or challenge is one thing, but also designing the prize to make it appealing, balanced, yet enticing (people will flat out not try your hard-worked-upon challenge if the prize is not good enough) is a whole other thing.
number balancing. holy moly this has warped into like a work of art haha. so many numbers. thankfully after 6 iterations of this I think I'm at a point where I've nailed all the strange possibilities into a range of numbers I'm okay with but every game I discover something new with this and then of course I never have any idea how many applications I'm going to get so it adjusts near the end and w/ roles and stuff.
that's so much designing, especially when you take them in context with each other. that would be enough to do to prepare for a game but there's also making the board, 30+ hrs of advertising, and writing so many imprisonment stories.
The plan at the start was to create quick, simple games on a regular basis but that didn't turn out. Mostly because of the amount of work it takes to get things started. I mean creating 25 aim names, board names, finding 25 appropriate pictures, resizing them twice, creating 25 confessionals, etc takes sooooo long. I couldn't do that every 2 months. Part of it is that I'm a perfectionist I guess.
And I also have plans to reduce the amount of work involved and I have cut a lot of things for this game. But the truth is a game like this with this high quality takes more than one person to run and I can't find people seriously interested in it at all so I guess this is the only acceptable pace.
Anyway, so Spies definitely isn't the beast I thought it would be when I started it. I never knew mafia could get so complicated, and I guess advertising has gotten harder and more involved. I kind of miss the ease of design. That's why I've kinda been thinking of returning to Survivor - if only for a game or two.
I dunno, we'll see how this goes I guess. I really tried this time to do so much more before the game started so I'm not so constantly stressed during it but we'll see. The usual 'omg i've been working 50+ hours with no one to talk to on a game I don't even know will start' feeling is about to kick in haha. And there's still lots to do. So I guess we will see.