Two days ago we finally agreed upon the aesthetic goals of the board game that we are creating. We also began working on the wiki-page that we are going to use for the project. If we manage to get the game as we want it to be I believe it will be exciting. Since we don’t have that many details about the game ready yet I’m not going to write about it here, but instead I’m going to write a little about the process we used to get to the idea of the game that we currently have.

Aesthetics

We began with trying to define some aesthetics, we wanted people to trade, we wanted them to co-operate and we wanted resources. After a fairly long discussion, trying to build some sort of basic prototype we quickly saw that it wouldn’t work to do it like this. As it turned out we didn’t really go for the aesthetics at all, instead we started building something that looked more or less like a deviation of Settlers of Catan, which wasn’t really surprising as we used the tiles, resources and everything that came along with the game. We decided to clear our minds, stop what we are doing and just start the whole process over again, because we figured out that right there and then we didn’t want to make Settlers of Catan, we wanted to make our own game.

After having cleared our heads, we just started thinking about how the players should feel when they play the game. We came up with certain keywords like paranoia, feeling like a prey and other similar words. The good thing here is that we while we talked about all of the things that the players should feel we didn’t have any rules in mind. That was the important part, reason for that is that once you start going into the rules when you have an aesthetic you get lost into a type of game, most likely one you are thinking of when you say the aesthetic goal, but also you create rules making it difficult to get more of the aesthetics down. So when we started with rules we just stopped people and didn’t move forward.

Once we had enough goals we started thinking of how can we achieve this for the players? What can we do to enhance certain goals? What kind of groups in the Bartle system do we want to play the game if we look at the keywords. What we came up can be a very good board game if we succeed in making the movement system good and make it balanced. The thing we need to do now is to figure out how to balance it, our first iteration of the paper prototype is something we need to agree upon and start to build, and we also need to look into having a set map or not. Of course we want to in the first prototypes just create a basic map, but that we can have that in mind even if we aren’t going to use that in the final prototype. We will most likely not be a 100% done with the game when it is done, but if all goes according to plan, I hope we are able to have a map with a balanced movement system by the first week. Then we can have someone look at making the map pieces modular, while the rest work out the combat system.

In any case, it is interesting to see how working with the aesthetics instead of the mechanics can be so different, and gives us a system that is better than what we thought we would be able to make. The game probably isn’t that unique in the grand scheme of things, and although we could identify at least 2 games with the same kind of mechanic, we have reversed the mechanic. This is the bread and butter of the game, so if we get the basics down, we hope we can add some goals to the game to make it more exciting and to add to the aesthetics that we have.

Another thing that I believe we have done right for now is that we haven’t locked anything. We just have a basic idea going forward, while that is both good and bad, the good part is that for now it allows us to be flexible. The bad thing is that it may be difficult to get a coherent view of the whole project. However I’m personally willing to sacrifice a little bit of coherency for flexibility at this point, because we need to be able to reiterate fast and change something that might be dull and/or bad.

What I’ve learned is also to see the creation process in a different light. For me it has been really hard to begin thinking of how the players should feel when playing without thinking of rules, but looking at it now, I don’t see why I have had such a hard time doing that, because I’ve always had a tendency to look at rules while thinking of how people should feel. For instance: We want the player to feel triumphant. I’ve thought ok, so you need to have a combat system where the person feeling triumphant should kill hordes of enemies using a combat system like …. etc etc.. and the whole thing derails fairly quickly into specifics. Although this following statement might sound like it is easy, it is not, but in reality it is “just” a matter of teaching yourself to look at the creative process and figure out what do we want players to experience? Why would that particular feeling be any interesting in a game? Without thinking of how to accomplish it. It is hard, but for my part I think I’ve just made it harder than it needed to be, because it is easy to derail into thinking of specifics. If you haven’t put down all your aesthetic goals and have enough to work with, try continue with goals you like.

Next step is to see how you can get something to feel like the feeling you want the player to achieve. It could be that the feedback the player gets make them sad, and that is what you want for instance. How to make the player sad by gameplay? What can we do to make the player sad? Why would the player be sad when you put them in this or that position? Even if it is an aesthetic you want in the game, sometimes you might have contradictions and need to sacrifice something. Basically the three most valuable questions are what, how and why.

Now it might sound like I’m expert, by no means, still a noob in game design, but it is nice to see that I’m starting to understand that although you can create a game based merely on rules, it is good to see that you can do it the other way as well, and that more often it might be a better game because of it. Starting with mechanics might be something you have to do at some point. Our teacher (in serious games) gave an example which was a good one, if you have a certain hardware that you need to make sure the game works for, you have to start with the mechanics. You have to figure out how to use the particular device and how it can be fun using it. I can mention two examples, first is a gamepad. If you have to use a game pad to play your game, you have to think of what its limitations are, how you can go about the limits and create an experience from that. Of course a gamepad isn’t that unique and you can do all sorts of games suited for it. Let’s stretch that a bit further and look at the Wii mote. The Wii mote is operated in a different way, you can use it as a gamepad, but if you want to extend the possibilities you can look at what kind of stuff you can do and how can that Wii-mote be interesting to use in a game? Will you swing it like a golf club? Will you swing it like a sword? Are you going to mimic how you play tennis? In those cases you might look at the mechanic you have for the console and create a game around that. That said, I don’t see why it wouldn’t be possible to start with the aesthetics in those, but you have to know when creating certain aesthetics that there’s a limit for what you can and cannot use. So that if you want the players to feel like they are surfing on the beaches of Malibu, the game might need a Wii-board and for other systems that might not be possible unless you create the hardware for it.

If you are at all interested in our board game in progress the wiki for it is here: http://hemmalaget.wikidot.com/ .