Episode 85: On Game Design

Transcript

I often feel like every genre or category of game that I've really loved and dove into throughout my life are all of the genres and categories that I guess because they didn't show, you know, grand scale success tended to like just sort of fall off and they aren't really created anymore or at least they're not created in the way that they were.
I'll give a couple examples.
For instance, one of the first types of games, genre is not really the right word, it's more category of game, that I got really into was the adventure game.
So these would have been, for anyone familiar, there's a company, Sierra, that made a bunch of these.
It was like King's Quest and Space Quest and a few others.
King's Quest being sort of their headlining, you know, franchise.
And the general idea of these games was you would walk around a world and the way it was introduced to me was from a friend of mine at the time who was like, oh, it's sort of one of these things where like you start the game with an orange and you like trade the orange for a socket.
And then you trade, you use the socket to open a door where you then inside the door, you find a chest and then the chest can be traded for a thing.
And like it's sort of going through this path where one thing and there were some puzzles along the way, too.
But one thing takes you to the next thing, takes you to the next thing.
There's no combat typically in these games, at least not any combat that you as the player really engaged in.
Sometimes there was like a little, you know, clip scene or cut scene of combat, but it wasn't something that you were, the combat was not part, it was not a focal point of the game.
It was much more puzzle oriented and more, can you figure out how to put the right pieces together?
And the early ones were pretty unforgiving.
You know, if you somewhere in the beginning of the game had made a wrong choice, you might not be able to beat the game, but you might not figure out that you're stuck for like another three hours of gameplay.
Like they were pretty, they were pretty brutal in some ways, much less forgiving than you would find today.
And so you would end up with a lot of save points along the way, or you could go back to a point where, you know, maybe you'd gotten stuck or whatever, or you made the wrong choice.
But these games have almost entirely fallen out of favor.
You don't really have games like that anymore, probably for good reason.
And as I've looked at some of the critiques and stuff of that, like there, there's, they were super frustrating.
And then I think, and there wasn't much game there, I suppose.
Like a lot of it was just you sitting around trying to figure out if you can click on the right place on the screen that, cause that, you know, there was no highlighting or anything.
So it was like, Oh, can you just like find the right thing in this infinite sea of screens to click on?
But I always really liked them cause you could have unfolded this story as you went and, you know, again, they, they were quite challenging in a lot of cases, even if they weren't challenging in all the best ways.
There are other mist was in a similar vein.
Mist was a little bit different and there have been, I think that the first person version of this category of game has stuck around to some extent,
but also the whole idea of, you know, games have gotten more advanced, right?
So there's not, you're not usually sitting on just a particular screen and then you move to another particular screen.
That's very static gameplay by today's standards here.
It's much more open world.
And once we got into 3d and all that kind of stuff, this type of game, I think for a whole number of reasons, just sort of fell off.
But I do miss this type of game.
It's a shame that I think it's a shame that there's not many of these created in that way.
And the ones that do often still have, or the ones that are kind of similar often still have a, a pretty big slant towards combat.
But I, you know, it's just fallen off over the years.
Another type of game that I got, you know, I was always really into was the kind of classic real-time strategy.
So this would have been your Warcraft, Warcraft 2, Warcraft 3, Starcraft, Starcraft 2, um, you know, your Warcrafts, your Starcrafts, uh, Red, um, Red Alert was like the, uh, Command and Conquer, uh, I guess was the, the actual thing.
But Red Alert was, was sort of the, the one that had a more refined gameplay.
Anyway, these real-time strategy games were another, is another one that I think has largely fallen off.
And I think it's because they evolved out of themselves.
I was actually, I've, I've, I've been actually set up some computers for me and my, my kids to play Warcraft 3.
Because Warcraft 3, of all of the real-time strategies, is the one that I played the most of.
I, like, I, me and some friends really loved this game.
We played it a lot.
So I set up some computers.
They've made a remastered version at this point of the game.
So I set up some computers for, like, me and my kids to start learning to play the game.
Which has been fun.
But I was explaining to them this story of, you know, a lot of the big games now have their roots in the Warcraft series.
And in particular in Warcraft 3.
Like, that's where Dota came from.
Dota was essentially a custom map and a custom mod inside of Warcraft 3 that spun out into its own full game.
Dota, of course, spawned League of Legends, ultimately.
So League of Legends has its roots in Warcraft.
And then you have some other games, which I'll talk about a little bit more in a minute.
But now what you see is not so much the real-time strategy.
Because these game lengths were typically, let's say you play, like, a 3-on-3 in Warcraft.
That game would usually take somewhere in the ballpark of 20 minutes.
Anywhere between 15 and 30.
But, like, 20 was probably an average there.
And you don't see a lot of that anymore.
I see real-time strategy games, many of which have evolved into just gotcha mobile games.
But they tend to be much shorter, much more bite-sized to get you from game to game to game to game.
And that's one of the trends that I've seen both, you know, both in the adventure games I was talking about and also these real-time strategies.
That, like, patience has, I guess, waned a bit.
You need, games need to be more bite-sized.
Both of these types of things were longer.
And 20 minutes isn't particularly long.
You know, and if you compare that to, like, a League of Legends game that can easily go an hour or 45 minutes at least.
You know, the real-time strategy doesn't seem all that long by comparison.
But I can't really, I understand why adventure games kind of fell out of favor.
I understand much less why the real-time strategy fell out of favor.
Like, why there isn't a Warcraft 4.
And why there weren't more, you know, they made StarCraft, StarCraft 2.
And I kind of understand why that franchise stopped.
But why haven't there been others that are not from Blizzard?
Like, why didn't other people make these kind of games?
I've never played Civ.
But Civ, as I understand it, is sort of in this vein.
Although it's much more macro level.
It's almost like a combination of a real-time strategy and, like, a sim kind of thing.
But I've never played it, so I could be really off-base about that.
But I don't understand why there isn't more of these.
You know, a 15-20 minute game length seems pretty reasonable to me.
And the games were really fun, again, to me.
And seemed to have a pretty good following.
So I've just never understood why there weren't more of them.
They, you know, also really lend themselves well to online play.
Another game, this is kind of where I branch off, I suppose, is Magic the Gathering has been a game for a long time and still is and is still very popular.
But I far preferred the play style of yesteryear compared to the play style of today.
And I also have designed a few games.
I haven't published any of them, but I do enjoy designing games.
In fact, one of the things that's almost always rolling around in my head is trying to design something.
And a lot of times that design centers around some sort of card game.
Like, game that you'd play with cards kind of thing.
Not playing cards, but, you know, more like a Magic-style game or something like that.
And if you ever, so Magic was designed by a guy, Richard Garfield.
And if you ever hear him talk about his initial intentions for Magic, in some ways, Magic spiraled out into something it was never meant to be.
His original intentions were that cards were quite rare.
And that you wouldn't, um, you wouldn't have ready access to just any card you want.
You know, you, you part, a big part of the game was like, or the experience was supposed to be going to a store, buying a pack, a booster pack of cards that are, you know, randomized.
And that becomes part of your collection.
There was never this concept that every person would own whatever cards they want.
And as the game got bigger and bigger and bigger and more and more mass produced, and then the, you know, the web and the internet really came into popularity, all of a sudden people had ready access to everything.
So, it became more about optimized gameplay than it did about interesting deck building.
Now, obviously, that was to the benefit of the game.
Like, if the game actually had been what Richard had wanted it to be, it never would have become the juggernaut that it is, right?
But I have long thought, tried to think to myself, like, how could one design a game that is more like that?
And I thought about it in a bunch of different mediums.
Like, how could one design a game where the play experience is always new and novel and you don't know, like, people who are, see, there's a difference in games between someone who's like an enfranchised, entrenched player, someone who really is keeping their finger on the pulse, versus someone who plays very casually and only once in a while.
So, to people who play casually and only once in a while, these games are often, you know, new and novel on every experience, because they're not sitting around reading about it for eight hours a day or whatever.
But I've often thought to myself, how could you make a game where even enfranchised players always have kind of a new and interesting experience along the way, but still make it like a sustainable game and business model?
So, with all this said, one of the newer, and I guess at this point it's really not that new because it goes back, I think, 2017-ish or something.
But one of the newer games, and it's a mobile game, and as it has evolved, much to my chagrin, it has become more and more of a gacha-style game.
I always liked Clash Royale.
So, not Clash of Clans, but it's by the same company.
Clash Royale, because it is essentially a mobile-first experience, a modern-day experience of a real-time strategy game.
So, you can tell in this game, you know, there are roots in those Warcrafts and Command & Conquers of the world.
But it's been streamlined so that you only have, like, the most essential components to that experience and the ones that work well with a mobile touch device.
Now, with that said, the longer that that franchise or that game has gone on, in the beginning it was pretty friendly if you didn't want to spend a bunch of money, and that became less and less friendly over time.
I think recently they have turned a corner where they're not being quite as player-hostile as they were for a little while there.
But it is a money-making machine.
I mention all this, well, in part to say, you know, if you were a real-time strategy person and you never tried that game out, it's worth a look.
But that aside, they now have a new game mode.
One game style that I didn't mention so far are these auto-battlers.
Where I was introduced to these through auto-chess, which again has its roots back into Warcraft because it was like a mod of, I think, Dota that was originally a mod of Warcrafts.
Like, even these auto-battlers, like auto-chess, came out of, you know, the Warcraft thing.
But anyway, separate point.
I like auto-battlers a lot.
Auto-chess is a really fun game.
One of the problems with auto-chess, and again, if you haven't checked this out, like, you know, go take a look at it.
I really enjoy it, if you like the kind of macro-strategy kind of thing.
But one of the problems with it is the game length is very long.
It's not unusual for those games to go, you know, 45 minutes to an hour.
So, you know, Supercell with Clash Royale has made a new game mode within the last couple of months, which is an auto-chess, auto-battler, they call it merge tactics or something.
But it's an auto-chess variant, or spin on an auto-chess game.
And I really like it.
And here's why.
Number one, at least so far, there isn't really a pay-to-win path.
It's just a game mode that you can jump into and have fun with.
So I like that.
Number two, the game length is short, right?
It's the same thing that they had done with the real-time strategy, where they took the real-time strategy game length of 20-30 minutes,
and they had cut it down in their base Clash Royale game down to, you know, two to three minutes.
And still with a very, you know, very strategic and tactical kind of experience.
With this, they've taken that 45-minute-to-hour auto-chess game and brought it down to maybe, I'm not sure, I haven't really tied in the games, but maybe five minutes, something like that.
And it's fun, and it holds up.
And I didn't love it at first, coming from auto-chess, because it felt a little rushed.
But the more I've played it, the more I realized, again, they've stripped all the choices down to a bare minimum.
And so what you're left with is, like, the core experience and core experience only.
And it's much easier to sit down and play a game of that for five minutes than an auto-chess game for an hour.
But the other thing, and this, again, goes back to some of the game design principles that, as I design games, I think about quite a bit.
So I'm going to try to tie, I know some of this has seemed a little disjointed, but I'm going to try to tie a few of these points together.
One of the things I always thought Magic the Gathering should do is have, instead of just a straight rotation, where every so many months the format rotates.
So your standard format, you know, might be two or three years worth of cards.
I always thought it would be good to have seasons, where every, let's say, six months, you've got your giant card pool.
But they produce, instead of just going to the latest couple of sets or whatever, that from across their range of cards,
maybe they choose a thousand of them or two thousand of them, and now that becomes the format for six months.
So you could have these really interesting, and then they would publish that list ahead of time.
You get a chance to look through it.
Now, there's a lot of problems with this idea, right?
Because you can't get a hold of old cards very well.
It would very much favor old players.
I bet it would alienate it in, like, a whole bunch of people out of that game.
So I don't think it would be very successful, but I would think it would be fun.
And if people were willing to open their mind to the idea of, like, and if there was some way, again, to set up a supply chain that actually worked,
instead of just having to pull from the latest sets, which can get very frustrating and stale,
to be able to pull from a larger array, but have it be able to be grabbed from, you know, these hundred cards and those hundred cards
and, like, just this huge spattering of things might, and then it would inspire more, I think, novel games.
Gameplay, right?
Where you would go to, say, and again, some of this is before the online play was quite so pervasive,
but you'd be able to go to tournaments and see, like, a brand new meta pulled from cards that, you know,
didn't just tune and tweak over time, but a whole new pool, and be able to do that regularly, I would think would be really fun.
I bring, and I think about when I'm trying to design games in my head, like, how could you do something like that?
And the Clash Royale merge auto chess game is doing this, and I wanted to give this accolades, right?
So, every, their seasons are, like, a month long, and granted, it's a lot easier because it's digital,
and they can just, a lot of this stuff just gets automated away from your, you know, your view.
But what they've done is every month in the auto chess, they bring in a whole new set of pieces,
they move all kinds of stuff around in terms of synergies, they put new rules into play.
Okay, so every month that I've played this so far is, like, a brand new game to experience and learn.
It's a way to not just evolve a metagame slowly, but to totally flip it upside down every season.
And I love it. I love the way they're doing this.
Now, what I'm hoping, it's a new game mode, so what I'm hoping is, this is all part of their plan.
What I'm hoping it's not is just the beginning, and they're still adjusting stuff, kind of like a beta.
And that eventually they're going to zero in on their exact set of things that they want to do.
I'm hoping it stays like this forever, where it's just different all the time, because I love it.
And when I think about trying to design games, that's what I think about a lot, is, like, if you want a game that can really scale,
and really become a whole thing, like Magic has been,
how can you build in the idea of sort of seasons, or what I think of as seasons,
where you can produce almost an entirely new game,
where enfranchised players have a whole new thing to explore,
as part of the baked-in game design.
And how can you do that in a physical format,
like a sit-down-around-the-table-with-your-friends card game kind of thing,
that doesn't just alienate players,
because of the inability to either keep up with it,
or the inability to gain access to cards that are no longer being produced,
or something like that, like those kind of ideas.
But anyway, long story short here,
some of this is just food for thought, like if you're a game designer,
have you thought about any of these kind of things?
What are your thoughts on them?
Like, these are the things that I often am thinking about when I'm kind of working through game design in my head.
But secondly, and it's just a small plug, I guess,
if you haven't checked out the auto-chess variant, the merged thing in Clash Royale, check it out.
I really like it. It's a lot of fun.
It's kind of giving some new wind in the sails.
Like, I don't really even play the standard Clash Royale game mode anymore.
I've just found it to become too grindy over time and too, like, pay-to-win.
Again, that's getting better than it was maybe three years ago,
but still a bit more than I care for.
This game mode, definitely cool. Definitely fun.
And we'll see if this type of game lasts the test of time,
or just trails off like so many other types of games that I seem to enjoy that fall out of popularity.
And we'll see you next time.