Justin Achilli

Category: design

3 March 2013

Working on a New Card Game

This past weekend, I began work on a new game. With Anarchs Unbound winding down (just about ready for the editor!), I wanted to switch gears and move toward a smaller, more concise type of game that emphasized short play sessions rather than slotting into a larger RPG-style campaign model. Card games are perfect for this sort of thing and they’re also good player values. You can buy the card game once and have infinite hours of play from it. With that in mind, I dove into a new card game design.

Going into the design, I knew I wanted a few specific behaviors, and those helped me define the experience as a multiplayer card format. In particular, I wanted:

• Multiple choices for actions on a single turn: Many card and board games restrict the type of action a player makes, but I wanted a more Magic-styled “here’s what you can do this turn — pick one” sort of approach. This works well for card games, as it makes the sequence in which you play from your hand of cards interesting, with the hand becoming a sort of micro-economy of actions.

• Table talk: Man, I love table talk. The art of the deal, running a hustle at the table, and convincing a friend of a specific course of action and then being able to honor that tandem or betray the alliance is fun stuff.

• Imperfect information: Games thrive, I think, when players have enough information to inform their decisions, but when they have to discern some of the secrets other players may be hiding. Poker and Magic are good examples of this, as you have to tailor your strategy not only to accommodate the cards you know you have, but also the cards you think your opponent has. And then, when additional players enter the mix — when it’s more than just a one-on-one experience — it really blossoms into intrigue. Lots of critical thought.

• Simple systems: Multiplayer games work well when the participants have several courses of action, each of which is straightforward, and the permutations of those actions offer a variety of outcomes. I didn’t want a complex system that pulled the player into its depths and effected a race to complete, I wanted a breadth of possibilities that could play out differently based on player inputs. The critical thought for the imperfect information shouldn’t become overwhelming in its technicality in this case.

• Lead with rules rather than setting: Pretty straightforward on this one. I wanted a fluid system structure up front, rather than having an abstracted narrative that I needed to design to fill. I can fill in the narrative later, if I decide I even need one.

I think that you think that I think that you think I have an ace. Now what should I do?

I think that you think that I think that you think I have an ace. Now what should I do? P.S. I’m James Bond.

With all of these combined, I built a playable prototype of a sort of political game. Each player has the ability to put a negative card on himself or any other player, which is the base interaction. The player also has the ability to hide cards in play in front of him, broadening the imperfect information aspect. Different cards allow players to move those allocations of negative cards, bolster them, protect them, etc. So, on your turn, you may want to play a negative card, play a positive card, hide a positive card, bluff and hide a negative card, or play a negative card on yourself to subvert the standard course. It makes for a sort of protracted social yomi that works well around the table.

As to physically printing the game, I’m looking into DriveThruCards, which both Gareth and Bates recommended. I’ll also put up the rules and prototype card sets here soon, in case you’d like to give it a shot.

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17 January 2013

Anarchs Unbound: Redlines and Rewrites

If you’re into Vampire, I’ve recently put up some redlined material from the forthcoming Anarchs Unbound book. A blog entry discussing the redlining process and the general production pipeline is here.

If you’re not into Vampire, perhaps you’ll enjoy this music video. It’s the song that will play at my funeral.

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10 January 2013

Toxic Community and the Illusion of Agency

Bioware has a reputation for storytelling, but it’s taken some hits recently. Over at gamesindustry.biz, I saw an article about the negative environment at Bioware’s social site, however.

Part of the negative attention Bioware has received lately I think comes at the intersection of predetermined narrative and player input. With the negative reception for the conclusion of the Mass Effect trilogy, I think this is a self-created problem for Bioware.

Plainly stated, certain single-player and quest-heavy computer RPGs cultivate the illusion of choice, that you’re in control of the character’s fate. Over time, as the player experiences the game, the illusion grows, but in the end, when the game (or trilogy) concludes, that illusion evaporates abruptly. The end — whether it’s a single ending or one from an array of multiple endings — happens and the player responds with, “What? That wasn’t what should have happened at all!”

dragon_problemAnd that “should have” is the point of divergence from player expectation and the game-as-product that was delivered. In a scripted storyline, as all narrative-construction games must be, because that’s how they’re coded, the player is not in control of his fate. In tabletop RPGs, the gamemaster can’t help but give a mutually achieved story result. In most computer games, particularly those that rely on scripted stories, it’s all but impossible. Marketing, positioning, and development promises for computer RPGs, however, very often posit just the opposite, that every decision the player makes ultimately collects to create a unique ending that is the culmination of his — the player’s — story.

This simply is not true. In any game with a scripted narrative, the best the player can accomplish is some amount of steering the story toward one of the pre-written eventualities built into the game during development. This has always occurred to me as a weird way to allocate development, as well. Your player won’t see a significant portion of the experience you’re paying to develop. It’s as much movie as game, and the player isn’t really telling his story, he’s only pantomiming his version of the permitted story. I remember seeing a marketing promise about Dragon Age’s story component: The claim was that it had as much “content” — a word that represents a loathsome reduction of the craft of storytelling to a product — as nine fantasy novels! Well, so what? If I wanted to read novels, I’d read novels instead of playing a game. And most of that, the player won’t even see, given that he’s making choices in game that wall off a distinct portion of it. “Features a ponderous volume of writing ill suited to the medium into which it’s been crammed, but don’t worry; you’ll never see most of it” makes for a poor bullet point.

The blame here, unfortunately falls on both sides. It falls on the side of the developer perpetuating the lie that the player controls his fate, when really, he’s in control of (meta)gaming his experience toward his desired result. It also falls on the side of the player for not adequately understanding what he’s buying, or, worse, willfully ignoring that reality. Certainly, the player is less culpable in this arrangement — he’s actively being lied to — but, as the old saying goes, fool the player once, shame on you, but fool the player twice, shame on him. For many players, I believe the potential of the outcome outweighed the inherent limitations of the medium, and then reality intruded.

Games that make this plain don’t suffer the same sort of hostility, at least with regard to the illusion of determination. You’re telling Niko Bellic’s story, or Ezio’s story, or Gordon Freeman’s story: There’s no misstatement there. But when the scope of the degree to which the player’s ownership of that story conflicts with what the player has been led to believe, when the amount of Shepard’s destiny that the player controls is at odds with the amount he’s told he controls, that’s where the letdown of expectations occurs. I’m not generally disposed toward the use of phrases like “entitlement,” but in this case the player has been told one thing and given another. So long that continues happening, especially in the epoch of eight-figure development budgets, the feeling of frustration will persist.

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4 November 2012

Ghibli-Style Storytelling

Yesterday, Madeleine and I went to see Nausicaä at the Ghibli Collection retrospective at the Carolina Theatre. It’s an excellent movie, my favorite of the Ghibli films, and one that works whether you’re a kid or an adult. On an immediate level, the conflicts are thrilling and visceral, and the characters are appealing or engaging — you empathize with the good guys and you love to hate the bad guys even as you come to understand them. The backstory, with the world-ruining Seven Days of Fire and the struggle between Pejite and Tolmekia, the Valley of the Wind caught in the middle, gives meaning to those conflicts, defining them instead of subsuming them.

This is the stuff of great gaming and storytelling. The immediate conflicts draw you in as a player or audience, and the setting serves as an engrossing backdrop and framing device that gives you context beyond the moment-to-moment action. The exposition helps the story instead of dominating it. At no point does the player/ audience member have to endure a narrator or gamemaster monologue.

Video game narratives are too often by people who would rather be writing something else — something in which their audience is captive and hangs on their every word. Video games don’t work like that. They’re of a nature interactive, and choice is what makes the game, not the story. The story is just that: a story. Whether done via text or engine movie, canned interaction in video games can be a reward, but it’s very often wielded as a cudgel. The more the player reads text or watches cutscenes, the less she’s actually playing the game, making the choices that define the interaction of the form. Just as a player doesn’t listen to music when she wants to read a book, neither should she have to read a book or watch a movie to play a video game.

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7 August 2012

Kickstarter from a Jaundiced Eye

Let’s start with a warning that everyone reiterates, but that many people don’t often consider: When you back a Kickstarter project, you’re not necessarily buying a product. You’re funding an attempt. Even if the Kickstarter you’re backing achieves its funding goal, there’s no guarantee that everything will go as planned and result in the thing you want to receive.

Kickstarter is a great service. It lets creative forces bypass the greenlighting processes that would otherwise encumber them in more traditional publishing models. It lets them go directly to the customer instead of having to wet the beaks of enough middlemen to inflate the prices.

One of the things it does not do, however, is ensure that the person running the project has any production acumen. Let’s say you find a Kickstarter project that’s a great idea. Maybe it’s a game you want to play or a book you want to read or an artist’s portfolio you want to enjoy. But until that work is done, the thing you’re pledging to support doesn’t actually exist. I’m all for creatives getting paid — it’s certainly how I’ve built my career — but the warning flags for me go off when there’s no actual thing yet in existence. It’s a safer bet to back if some aspect of the project already exists, because that leaves fewer promises to be broken if the project makes its funding. It’s the difference between “I’m going to make a game if you give me enough money!” and “I’m going to print this game that exists if you give me enough money!” The first pitch is full of rainbows and unicorns and laser helicopters made of angel-berry treacle (unless Matt Forbeck is working on it, because that guy is a machine). The second pitch still deserves a hairy eyeball, but I at least know that the pitching team has some experience in assembling a project and has some skin in the game already.

Who ordered a mummy?

I’ve got personal examples in the form of Onyx Path’s V20 material. In the case of the prestige editions of the Vampire titles that we’ve been publishing, those are books that are being developed for release in POD/ PDF format. Even if a Kickstarter fails for the prestige editions, those books will exist because we’ve written them; they’ll simply be available in non-prestige formats. In fact, they’ll exist before the Kickstarted prestige prints are complete, but as a perk for Kickstarter prestige backers, the release of the “unlimited” edition will follow the release of the prestige edition. Prestige backers get the fancier books, and they get them first. And if the Kickstarter project doesn’t meet its full backing, well, there’s still a book there, albeit in a different format than the prestige Kickstarter project intended to fund.

And that’s not the end of it. The reality of things is that it’s still really difficult to make all of the production logistics happen. The V20 Companion, for example, has existed now for nigh upon eight months. But the requirements of approving, printing, augmenting, and shipping a book has so many opportunities for things to go wrong that it’s impossible to ensure a smooth rollout. There’s an important word there: It’s not impossible to have a smooth rollout, but it’s impossible to ensure it. We’ve hit some snags with the Companion (we wanted them in players’ hands in April), but the process has moved inexorably forward (as you know if you’ve read Rich’s updates on the KS project). And Rich and I are guys who have over 25 years of cumulative experience printing books.

To be clear, as of this writing, the prestige editions of the V20 Companion are either on their way to the fulfillment house or at the fulfillment house. That’s a case in point. It took far longer to pull together and organize than was originally planned.

So the point here is that Kickstarter places you in the role of the venture capitalist, not that of a traditional customer. There’s no guarantee your project will hit its projected funding. There’s no guarantee that the final project will resemble the proposed project if it does make its projected funding. There’s not even a guarantee that there’ll be a final project. And even if everything does happen, there’s no guarantee it’ll happen as planned.

This isn’t to say that KS is full of hustlers. It’s full of people who now have a way to turn their wild ideas into actual creative endeavors. I backed Chris Engle’s map posters, for example, and they’re everything I’d hoped they’d be. I’m just saying that you have to know what you’re buying into.

I love Kickstarter. I’ve backed numerous projects that either wouldn’t have seen the light of day otherwise, or that I might not have heard about until it was too late. It’s a great way to add value to a project for the people who want it without holding the whole thing hostage for those who don’t care about the extra bells and whistles. I’ve used Kickstarter to help move the White Wolf business model from the publisher-distributor-retailer-player model of the previous century to the publisher-to-player model of the Internet era. It’s just important to know what Kickstarter is, and, just as importantly, what it isn’t. For me, the potential it offers is worth the unproven and nascent model, but key to that is knowing my relationship with the teams or individuals seeking backing.

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1 August 2012

Clans and Covenants as a Matrix

In working on Vampire: The Requiem, one of the things I wanted to offer players was a greater pool of character relationships than was available in Masquerade. In Masquerade, your character creation option is very linear. The individual pieces are broad, but by and large, a character’s clan defines a great deal of his interaction with Kindred society. Your geography largely determines your sect (a decision made by the Storyteller, in most cases), and within that sect’s framework, you pick a clan. Sure, you can cite exceptions, but for the most part, this is how it works because this is how the setting assumes it works. You can be the one Sabbat Lasombra in a Camarilla city if you want, and if the Storyteller agrees, but the social structures assumed by the Masquerade setting regard such a thing as a rarity.

So for Requiem, I wanted to expand that a bit, but I wanted to do it in a way that didn’t paralyze the player with the paradox of choice.

If only it were actually this simple.

Practically, I built a matrix that drew upon one of the parts people really liked about Masquerade: the ideologies. The romanticized arch-traditionalism of the Camarilla and the apocalyptic libertarianism of the Sabbat both gave people fungible philosophies that they could cleave to that gave texture to their storytelling, and those of the other sects did, too. We brainstormed and went back and forth a great deal about what concepts semi-organized groups of vampires organized around — the covenants. Religion, naturally, formed the foundation of two of them. More secular politics formed two others. The third became the weird theosophy of the Ordo Dracul, which had a distinctly Gothic tilt. (These didn’t just spring into being, however. We originally had a wheel set up that opposed certain ideologies and was sympathetic with others. When it came down to giving these cogent belief structures that balanced so neatly, however, well, that didn’t work as well. I think part of this came as a result of over-structuring the social dynamic. I wish it would have worked out smoothly because I love the visual arrangement of such information, but it just didn’t result in vampire doctrines that made any sense.)

The other axis of the matrix was a no-brainer. That was where the clans went. The idea of vampire clans is so central to White Wolf’s take on Vampire that I knew I wanted it to carry over from Masquerade into requiem. (Whether that’s actually true is another discussion, but I still stand by it.)

The combination of these character-definition keystones lent themselves to good mechanisms for narrative drama. What do you think and what do you do about it? What are you “born” (clan) and what do you “choose” (covenant)? In parallel to other roleplaying games, what’s your race and class? The result is a matrix of 25 possible character archetypes instead of a subset of a spectrum of 13.

Clan x covenant = a breadth of character options.

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31 July 2012

Some Hunters Hunted 2 Redlines

Lubricating the development of Vampire since 1998.

Good evening, my darlings. I’m hard at work on Hunters Hunted 2 for Vampire: The Masquerade and I wanted to pull back the curtain a bit and show you a draft in development.

Click here to download Chapter Three: Tools and Tactics

This is Black Hat Matt’s Tools and Tactics chapter. It’s a first draft, meaning that Matt has written to a close approximation of his word count, and covered the topics I’ve requested in the outline as well as exploring material that, during his writing, he’s thought critically about and decided is worth discussion. There’s a little extra room for Matt to round out his word count in the final draft, but this says almost everything he anticipates saying.

You’ll notice my markup in the margins, making some grammatical changes and asking a few leading questions that can help fulfill the full 15K word count that has been allocated to the chapter. I may ask for more of some material or I may ask that he pare back on a concept that doesn’t quite fit as well as I’d like.

Some of my changes are minor but significant. Things like word choice go a long way toward making Vampire evoke the gothic-punk flavor you expect, and maintain a consistent feel throughout the line. For example, I change almost every use of the word “day” to “night,” unless the writer is actually talking about the sunlit hours. Vampires don’t “live to see another day,” for example — they’re undead and rise when the sun sets, so that’s the sort of thing I’d change to “survive for another night.” Similarly, unless the word “friend” is literally the best choice, I usually change those, as well. When you’re a deathless corpse returned from the grave to steal the warm blood of the still-living, do you really have any “friends”? Maybe you have allies or contacts or acquaintances or people you know, but “friends” don’t really figure into the Kindred condition.

Other changes are more significant. Sometimes I excise an entire paragraph or subsection if it deviates from the theme, mood, and purpose of the book. Sometimes I ask a writer to take a greater look at an idea to retool it or rewrite it entirely. Sometimes I really like a single reference the writer has made and ask him to spend some of his word count expanding that solitary idea into a more substantial discussion.

It’s also worth noting that this draft is particularly clean. It’s solid conceptually, it’s well written, and it evidences Matt’s many years of experience in not only writing for Vampire but writing for me in particular. You may think, “Wow, that’s a lot of markup,” but you should also note that it’s mostly positive feedback. And, well, it’s actually not a lot of markup. First-time writers for me usually see a lot more red, but that’s to help us both. They improve their craft a bit and I get the draft I want. It’s worth spending the time to build the relationship because, over time, the writer knows what I want, how to format it, and how best to communicate it in a consistent Vampire way. I’m rarely driven to drink more than a fifth or bourbon or gin by the time I’ve worked with a writer three or four times.

Take a peek through the draft here and note not only what Matt says in his manuscript, but what I ask him to polish, remove, or expand. You’ll be able to see firsthand how I do my work.

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5 July 2012

Children of the Revolution: Full Text Available

(Crossposted at the ChilRev blogsite.)

The full text of Children of the Revolution is up here:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/18J5p636V-OrGcF1ZI4c3pfV7m_mwNPLjK8X3oE-97oA/edit

Feel free to share with friends and leave a comment.

The book is in layout right now, and the art is (I believe) in CCP’s hands for approvals.

This was a trying book to work on. It fell right in the middle of my many moves (Atlanta to France to Corpus Christi to Dallas to Raleigh-Durham) and lurked like an omnipresent shadow on my doorstep, no matter where I moved that doorstep. Still, the Kindred within are of a kind with the books that inspired Children of the Revolution, those being Children of the Inquisition and Kindred Most Wanted. Depending on which character you read, you’ll experience a variety of approaches, from first-edition wonder to second-edition conspiracy to revised-edition grit to 20th anniversary edition practicality. I also took your feedback to heart, adding a few lines here and there for clarification or exploring some of the concepts you wanted to shed more light on. The back-and-forth was a bit different this time from the V20 Companion, as the balance of systems-to-setting wasn’t to be determined. I missed that a little bit, and I think it suffered somewhat in the moves(s). That said, I’m looking forward to your feedback as we move into development work on Hunters Hunted 2. Until then, though, enjoy the fruits of our mutual labor: the 18 Kindred who distinguish themselves as the Children of the Revolution.

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17 June 2012

Design Academy 2012

This morning, we checked into the Château de Châtenay, in Châtenay-and-France, just outside of Paris. I’m here for the Ubisoft Design Academy, which will take place all week, but hasn’t yet started — so I took advantage of the opportunity to walk the grounds and take a peek. It’s a really inspiring environment, removed from the bustle of Paris, where we can all sip vin rouge and talk about what we think makes for great games. I have a presentation to give on cooperative activities in virtual worlds, and the 15 other designers and creative directors in attendance have their presentations to give, too, which I’m really looking forward to hearing, in addition to the curriculum planned by the academy instructors. If I can post the presentation here, I will.

Some of the photos are up at Facebook, if you’d like to see. The guys from Bucharest, Kiev, and Montreal arrived, so I’ll leave you now and meet up with them.

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14 June 2012

Up-to-Date Draft Development

I wish they would have called it “OSX Cougar.” I really do.

One of the things that has me most excited about OSX Mountain Lion is its built-in sharing. This doesn’t sound like much on the surface — in fact, as everything continues to update, it’ll become downright mandatory — but for right now, I like that it’s integrated into productivity applications. For me, that’s great. When I finish a chapter of Hunters Hunted 2, say, I can post it to Facebook and Twitter and share that in-progress chapter directly from the application itself. Right now, I have to cut-and-paste from a word processor into a WordPress blog that’s not my primary WordPress identity, then manually cut-and-paste the URL into Twitter and Facebook separately. Yes, I know there are other apps that handle this (talk about first-world problems), but the integration is the key part of all this. It’s part of the native application itself, and part of the whole OS UX.

This is a huge production boon to me, as the more work I do, the more that goes to players for Open Development consideration. I also like that it’s active use. It’s less about “Look at this video I watched” and more about “look at this thing I made.” That lies at the epicenter of today’s game designer’s role.

P.S. I got Rickrolled at work today. Not Nickelbackrolled, Rickrolled. And Luc did it to me after I got indignant about a “Booth Babes of E3″ video.

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