I’ve made a sort of protracted mistake in managing the Escape the Nightmare Kickstarter campaign, at least for the last month, arguably for longer. I’d like to use today’s game design column to go into that and think about exactly what went wrong to help myself and others avoid similar situations in the future.
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Hi everyone! After a relapse I am finally (mostly) recovered from spine things. I’m not allowed to fight anyone for a bit, but I’m up to walking and talking so I’m going to be bringing 3DTotal games to the UK Games Expo 2016
…so apparently now that I’m able to blog again something has broken the blog site so that image uploads don’t work. Alright, image free version of the post then…
One of the things that people like about Escape the Nightmare is that it’s extremely fast paced. I never thought that I’d get a reviewer to write something positive about losing a game in seconds but there it is. However the manner in which Escape the Nightmare manages to set its pace is something of a bludgeon. Causing players to lose if they don’t do things fast enough is a very artificial way to set pace, so lets talk about other methods of setting a pace.
Recently I’ve identified a problem with my ability to successfully communicate emotion and it’s potentially causing some fairly significant problems, so I’d like to take the time to explore my mistakes and hopefully help you to avoid similar ones. It started while I was chatting with Morten about an apparent conflict in the fundamental nature of my latest game. On the one hand it’s themed for tension and difficulty, but on the other hand it presents as a party game and the audiences for these things are almost entirely mutually exclusive.
So Escape the Nightmare has launched and we’re only a few days in but it looks like it’s going to be a close run thing. There were some tricky issues in the launch (some of which are still ongoing) and I’m sure at some point I’ll dissect those so that we can all talk about how they impact on things – but today I’d like to talk about ways of seeing the future and their impact both on me as a creator and on strategic decisions taken about the project as a whole. I’ll get onto the impact of a prediction later, first let’s talk about the method:
I’m coming towards the end of my latest set of blind playtests for Escape the Nightmare. The testing was divided into three waves and the feedback from each wave lead me to change things for the next wave – one of the things that changed every time were the questions that I asked. I thought that it might be interesting to share the questions that I’ve ended up asking the third and final wave and have some discussion of how our choice of questions influences the quality of the feedback that we receive as designers.
The Magic: The Gathering design team design team uses a concept called the colour pie. This is the notion that each colour specialises in particular kinds of effects and so when designing cards those effects should primarily occur in the appropriate colour. Most magic players would score significantly above chance if asked to predict which colour a given card would be, just from its mechanical effects.
I’ve been working with a graphic designer on the cards for Nightmare and have been treated to more of a close up look at the process of designing the cards than I’ve seen before. I wanted to talk about textures because I was particularly impressed with what a stark difference they made to the cards. I don’t have an image of the untextured card, because we didn’t save that one, but it looked something like this:
I’m a big fan of awful prototypes. It’s very much my preference to translate an idea into physical form and start playing with it as fast as possible and I really don’t spend much time agonising over how to lay things out neatly before creating *something* that will do. Generally this approach is great, ideas can get a “reality check” pretty quickly and there’s always time to refine later. It’s also pretty quick because every card that I design is essentially the same.
