Mecha Musing

While cleaning up some old files, I came across notes on existing mecha gaming systems that I jolted down late last year. I suppose it’s stuff I wrote down to keep in mind while working on my own rules. Let me clean them up a bit for publication — check back tomorrow.

UPDATE: see the text after the break. Keep in mind that these are notes to myself, not actual rules.

BTECH

Heat: though it’s one of the most beloved feature of Btech, Heat has always annoyed me. If ‘Mechs were really running that hot, the only weapons used would be heatseeking missiles (a 1950-level technology). I understand the tactical aspect of the heat scale, which forces players to make constant trade-offs, but I wish they had used another way to describe it. Maybe a power scale, with heatsinks being capacitors that allow a ‘Mech to fire more weapons but leave it with reduced capacities as they recharge. Or, keep things as is, but with heatsinks being truly “sinks” — they accumulate excess heat for later discharge when the battle is over. The only change would be that when hit they would cause damage or perhaps a “to hit” bonus for that round.

Structure: it’s only recently that I started to consider that maybe the structure of a ‘Mech is too complex, leading to more bookeeping and longer games. Do we really need to keep track of /both/ legs? Once one takes too much damage, the unit can’t move anymore, and the remaining leg serves as little more than a free sink for damage points (don’t get me started on “yes, you can stand up on one leg”). A single “Legs” location would be simpler. Same thing for side torsoes — if the ‘Mech has taken enough damage to rip out the side of its body, I have a hard time believing that the rest will continue to function.

Autocannons: A/Cs have always been an issue in Btech because of their high weight, especially compared to their damage output. The only reason to take them is from a heat-management point of view — in most cases, you’re better off taking a PPC and two heatsinks than an AC/5. There are two ways to tackle this issue: one, make them lighter by at least half. Or two, give them all multiple ammo types (like the AC/10 of later publications) for free and maybe added rapid-fire damage, implemented in a fashion similar to the missile table. (My very first Btech game featured that rule, since we didn’t notice you could fire only once a turn — boy, that Shadow Hawk killed a lot of units that night!)

Missiles: I understand that the designers tried to model anime and its swarms of missiles, but fitting hundreds of rockets within the hull of a ‘Mech just stretches credibility to the breaking point. I liked the rules that were published in Mecha-Press #4, whereas reloads were largely a thing of the past, but individual missiles caused vastly increased damage. It made light ‘Mechs dangerous again, if only for a short time (the Commando was understandably popular).

ECM/AMS: the presence of either or both these systems would go a long way explaining the vastly reduced ranges of the game’s weaponry and the survivability of something with the silhouette of a skyscrapper. Instead of just being assumed, both should be present as actual systems on the crit table. Lose the ECM slot, and your opponents receive a massive bonus to hit you. Lose the anti-missile system slot, and missiles just became an even deadlier threat.

Armor: the way armor is modeled is probably responsible for half the length of a typical Btech game. Ignoring the occasional head shot or critical, nothing much happens until all units on the table have been stripped of the bulk of their plating. My suggestion here would be to have different weapon types treat armor differently. For example, ballistic weapons could subtract the current armor from their damage total before applying the rest directly to the internal structure. In many cases, this would mean that larger ‘Mechs would be immune to machineguns and AC/2 or 5 at the start of the game, and that’s fine. Why? Because heat weapons, such as lasers and PPC, would boil off armor (as they do right now). Eventually, you get to a point where internals take serious damage, and this before armor is gone. Couple this with an “internals hit = 1d3 critical(s)” rule, instead of the current critical rules, and you get a much deadlier game that’s also faster and more tactical.

MEKTON

Construction: scaling, while a neat idea, never worked for me. There are too many sweet spots that can easily be abused. Likewise for space efficiency, a haven for game lawyers if I ever saw one. Why bother with this level of detail in a game — we have control over all the parameters anyway. My suggestion would be to get rid of all the size classes and the entire concept of spaces, and just buy everything as needed. So if you wanted to build, say, the Gunbuster, you would not buy a 3K main body and scale it up to x100; you’d just buy 300K for the main body (presumably, for 600 CPs) and go from there, adding armor, weapons, accessories and so on. Don’t bother with efficiency — if it needs to fit, the engineers will make it fit somehow! At the end, you’d total everything to find out the mass of the machine, which you would use to buy movement modes (we’re assuming here that the engine can move its own mass). To simulate higher tech machines, you could “shrink” them down (at additional cost). That way, no need to mess with efficiency or scaling, and you still end up with relative costs to help balance fights. It would also free us from the “mass category = movement rate” issue, which has always been a pet peeve of mine.

Components: Naturally, I’d make the same suggestion as for Btech, and buy legs (or any movement system, in fact) as a whole unit. It simplifies the record-keeping and speed up play.

Writing for Video Games

That’s the name of the panel that Lucien Soulban (Rainbow Six Vegas) and myself will be presenting this weekend at RoyalCon 2007. If you’re a gamer and you’re in Montreal this weekend, come say hi.

Play This Thing!

Play This Thing! is a cool new blog that features one interesting computer game per day. About half seem to be free, and quite a few of the rest have some kind of free play “trial” option. Every Tuesdays, a tabletop game (board, roleplaying, or card game) is showcased, too.

Things they won’t cover: releases from the major commercial publishers; mobile games (alas for me); and casual games, unless it’s a really good one.

For a game designer, it’s a great place to get inspired.

Disenchantment -- More Common Than You Think

So it’s not just me that can be affected. Even Dungeons & Dragons star designer Monte Cook saw and faced the same back in the old days. Burnout and disenchantment are sadly common in the tabletop game industry.

(Though I’m sure that if the company had taken off wildly, like Wizards of the Coast did in the Magic/Pokemon years, I would probably still be with DP9. It could have been as simple a difference as not signing with Target and doing the Activision deal by ourselves. We would have been forced to do our own marketing and would probably have had better results in the long run. Sure, the TV series probably wouldn’t have happened — but is that good or bad?)

Hits and Misses

If you’ve read this blog for a while, you know that I’m a big fan of the Canadian prog-rock band RUSH. I have just about all their albums, and I’ve been to every Montreal show since 1991. So yes, big fan. But, I’m not going to be at the 2007 tour stop at the Bell Center, even though it’s right near my place. I missed the beginning of the tickets sale period, and by the time I got online I found I just couldn’t bring myself to spend $100 on mid-auditorium tickets. While I love to hear the classics live, I can do without about a third of the songs they are surely going to play: those from their newest CD. To say I was underwhelmed is putting it lightly. It usually takes me a couple of plays to “get” a new album, but this one (Snakes and Arrows) just doesn’t gel for me — and for a lot of people out there, from what I can read. Am I disappointed? You bet — we generally only get a new RUSH album every two years or so. I loved Vapor Trails, and now I have to wait another two years to possibly get another great album. Does this mean I don’t like the band anymore? Not even remotely. Everyone has their bad days, and I don’t expect the group to bat .1000 each and every time. Sometimes, even the greats stumble. You just got to shrug and move on.

I’m telling you this to put things into perspectives. I’m a glutton for punishment, apparently, because I just read an entire thread bashing CORE Command on RPG.net. CORE Command (CC from now on) was one of my last projects at DP9, and the one I feel most conflicted about.

On the one hand, there’s no question it’s the most wretched piece of professional gaming material I ever had the misfortune of being associated with. On the other hand, however, there’s also no doubt it could have been a spectacular game/setting; it certainly contains many gems and ideas that will eventually resurface somewhere in my future works (hopefully, there will be future works). On the gripping hand, there’s not much I could have done to make this game better, given the circumstances when it was produced. I’m not sure I can write this out without it sounding like a lame attempt at defending the undefendable, but please bear with me – it’s late and this is strickly stream of consciousness.

First, time for a detour down memory lane: we need a short history lesson to put the game’s genesis into context. CC was first elaborated in one of the new products’ brainstorm sessions near the beginning of the company (edit: DP9), when everyone – Jean, Phil, etc. – was still there (that was early to mid 90s). The writing team had a basic concept – big SF! – and we just threw random ideas at it, trying to make it gel into something cool. Ghislain Barbe and Bobby Burquel made a few sketches for aliens and ships, too; you could see some of them on Bobbi’s Web page (which seems to be gone, alas). At the time, Heavy Gear had just been published, and the business plan was that we would generate well defined game lines of 10-20 products every two or three years, both to keep development focused and fresh (avoiding the “splat of the month” syndrome) and to build up an impressive portfolio of intellectual properties that we could license for computer games, TV shows, and so on.

Well, the plan sort of worked. It probably would have worked better if HG hadn’t taken off as it did, putting us on a threadmill of publishing that saw the original 36-products-and-we’re-done schedule mutate into a ten-year, 120+ titles monster. See, the RPG industry has never been the most fertile ground for business, and once a motherlode was found it was safer to stay and dig rather than go out to explore new grounds.

We were so busy with Heavy Gear and Jovian Chronicles, that we had to put our work on other settings aside. We were riding the tiger, and we couldn’t spare a hand to work on anything else. So, into the file folders the protogame went. By the time we got ready to publish a new setting, we had decided to venture into fantasy to broaden our offerings and avoid being pigeonholed as “the robot/SF guys,” and so Tribe 8 was born. And later still, when a bit of extra capacity came up, it was safer to go with Gear Krieg, which the gaming public was already clamoring for, than go for yet another pure science-fiction setting.

Fast-forward to 2002. Most of the original Podders have moved on to other, hopefully better, things. Those were lean times – between collectable card games, the d20 bubble and the Internet slowly eating retailers and distributors alike, the company had to tread carefully to stay afloat. Sales of existing lines were stagnant at best, paying the rent but not much more. If we were to make money, we’d have to do new stuff. There were tentative motions toward cards and boardgames, but these were just too expensive to produce. Another RPG it was, then, but it would have to be done fast and (if possible) cheaply. Also, it would have to be double-statted, since that was almost a requirement to get picked up by the distributors — never mind that I’m no fan, nor expert, of the d20 system. A trip through the folders yielded the fragments of a cool setting: these would have to do.

Alas, at the time I was facing serious doubts as to my future in the tabletop game industry. Not only that, but I was pretty much alone to keep the creative side of the machine going, getting manuscripts for the existing lines and handling much of the company’s PR and outside relations. When you spread jelly too thin, eventually you don’t taste anything – or worst, you tear the bread. Any surprise we ended up with a first draft of a game? Not publishing wasn’t a possibility: printer time was booked, revenue had to come in, and the show had to go on. Worst games had sold in the market, and perhaps we could improve things with supplements if people liked the setting. It’s easy to say “you know, this is just not good enough” when your daily bread (food again – I must be hungry) is not in jeopardy. Why else do you think there are so many obviously bad shows on TV? So we got a great concept delivered in a mishmash way. Not along after, I moved out of the tabletop game industry, into computer gaming. Not the greatest way to go out, I’ll admit. But I like to think that I’ve learned from it: since then, I’ve refused to work on any project that doesn’t completely raise my enthusiasm, or that lacks the resources to be completed successfully.

That said, is CC a complete waste of time/money/effort for the modern player? I say no, because there is still a whole lot of useful stuff in there. Ignore the mismatched stats and the typos for a second: read the descriptions, and look at the pictures. I’ve heard of people using it as a source of ideas for lots of science fiction games such as Star Wars, and if you’re willing to put in a bit of work converting to another system more suited to the scale of the game (such as BESM3, FATE or any of the “rule light” heroic engines available out there), you can end up with a surprisingly cool little game!

Small World

My employer hired a couple of new game designers earlier this week, and as they were making the introduction rounds, I was surprised to recognize Francis Larose as one of them. Francis was one of the guys behind Steamlogic, another Montreal-area tabletop game company. They did Mechanical Dream and the French version of DP9’s Tribe 8 game. We chatted a bit and I learned that he had moved to the computer game industry a few years ago as well. No money in tabletop gaming anymore, at least not enough for a viable career.

W00T!

I mentioned the other day that we had launched the new version of Tetris that I had been working on for the past year or so.

Well, the first official review is out, and… 9 out of 10! It’s my personal best and also one of the best scores the Montreal studio ever got.

Big congratulations to my team, who spent a great many hours on this, and to the Los Angeles team for their work on the server component. We rule!

Interplanetary Logistics

Engineers create SpaceNet, an hypothetical near-space supply chain.

As Steve Jackson said, there has to be a boardgame idea in there somewhere.

Here We Go!

You know that sickening yet exciting feeling you get when a roller-coaster starts the drive down the track from the first peak?

Yep, I’m the producer of the new Tetris for mobile.

I’m keeping my fingers crossed that nothing’s gonna go wrong (so far, so good). And, once more, big props to my extraordinary production team, who did most of the heavy lifting!

Book Browsing

Went to Indigo (a Canadian bookstore megachain) at lunch. They’re preparing for Christmas, it seems — plenty of nice new shiny books. I loooove books…

I saw lots of keen “concept art” books (“The Art of XYZ” or “The Making Of…” types). I often prefer concept art to finished pieces, because my mind’s eye tends to see more details in the concept.

It’s certainly something to keep in mind for future works…

Mammoth Concept Art

As we finally get the furniture we need for storage (bookshelves and the like), we’re clearing out the stacks of boxes in the secondary room. In the process we come across stuff we didn’t even remember keeping, such as old notes and drawings. This is one of them.

It’s a very rough three-quarter rearview of an early concept sketch for the Mammoth strider from Heavy Gear. At the time it seemed a natural idea to use V-engines (an internal combustion engine with a peculiar layout — see the game) on the striders as well as on the Gears. Here, there was one in each side torso, oriented vertically. I don’t quite remember why we didn’t go with that design; it may have something to do with wanting to have the Gears keep a special look. I kind of like it, it looks like scale on the back of the machine.

(Also added to the Heavy Gear concept art page.)

Priorities

I was reading a thread on innovative game mechanics on RPG.net, and I realized that a bunch of the games named were, though not unknown by me, at least relatively obscure.

It got me thinking about the amount of effort I should be willing to invest in the Projects, should I create rules and stats to go with them. Do I really need to do mental contorsions to design something clever for the handful of people who will both come across the work and be willing to use yet another ruleset, or would it be better to spend that energy doing useful stuff such as story seeds, world elements, and so on? I think the latter: people can always adapt things to their favorite game engine, but they don’t always have time or inspiration to come up with that kind of detail.

And besides, I’m way past the need for the glorification as a game designer. I know I’m not Robin D. Law or Richard Garfield, but I can turn out decent, utilitarian rules, and that’s good enough for me.

Busy busy

Ever wondered what I do for a living? Here’s a Gamasutra article that gives a pretty good description. In mobile, the budgets, teams and production times are a little smaller, but otherwise it’s very close. Yes, we’re that busy.

I’m in Beta with a fairly big title, and my energy levels tend to ebb at night. But they’ll come back. Those ideas won’t get out of my head without a bit of help.

Secrets of the Tabletop Game Industry

Steve Cole has been employed in the game industry for 30 years. He just wrote a free e-book on Running a Game Publishing Company. Now you too can get the whole ugly portrait! Keep it bookmarked because Steve replaces chapters whenever he learns a lesson, hears a lesson or a good story, remembers a lesson or a good story, is asked a question that has not previously been asked, or just thinks of something that people should know.

If it saves only one person from losing their shirt printing 3000 copies of yet another fantasy heartbreaker, it’s worth it.

A Problem with Earth

I was putting together story notes for something related to Project 7, when I realized that once more, the Earth is the bad guy in one of my settings. Well, not completely true — the government of a significan section of Earth is the bad guy, and the planet is pretty much under their thumbs.

I would like to note, for the record, that I do not hold a grudge against my birth planet. It just happens to make sense in the universes that I create (or help create).

At some point, I’ll write something where the Earth is the good guy. The home world does make an appearance in Project 6, but it’s not the main hero. One day…

Game Design Sins, Continued

I helped my wife play through the Chronicles of the Sword game mode of Soul Caliber III this afternoon. It’s yet another offender in the Game Design Sins category.

Note to budding designers everywhere: if the user has the time to read a magazine while playing your game, perhaps there’s some unnecessary waiting going on. While loading times may be unavoidable, there’s no excuse for making the gamer wait while a character “rests” or while the allied forces take down a fortress — especially so since nothing else is happening at the time! If the characters will succeed for sure at breaking down the door and do so without opposition, why show the process at all?

Don’t waste the players’ time!!!

(Previous entries on the topic.)

Game Design notes

Like most writers I’m always taking notes and sending mail to myself with “spur of the moment” ideas. I really have to get around to organizing them (and then of course developing something) — here’s a brief overview of what I have:

- Using multi-use core game rules;
- “Tags” to give characters and objects some special properties (think “object-oriented programming”);
- Detail levels (a way to customize generic rules to make them more suitable for specific settings);
- Useful character sheets (by content and layout);
- Equipment as modifiers, rather than self-contained items.

Anyway, that’s a sampling. I have to reluctantly admit that I’m not spending more than the odd moment on this, since the last thing the gaming world needs is yet another tabletop RPG rule set. But it’s fun to tinker.

Encyclopedic Format

Spent the night dealing with fixtures and an unruly dog. I had an idea today on organizing RPG rules in an encyclopedic format (basically, in bite-size rule topics), but I don’t have the energy to write a full post about it. Has it been done before?

Burn-out

I was just looking at the blogs/livejournals/web sites of some RPG game designers from the same “period” as me (1993-2003). A great many of them have moved on, either in the computer game industry or out of games altogether. It seems ten years is about the upper edge.

Not surprising — the long hours and low wages have a way of eating at you, no matter how much you love what you do…

aaarrgghhh

Dammit — I have a whole lot of stuff I want to put up about Project 7, but I did nothing tonight except take care of the dog (and get a finger ripped open for my troubles).

At least the explanatory spacecraft graphics are done… Hopefully the coming holiday (Easter) will allow me to catch up.

Missed the Boat, Alas

I just read that there will be a RPG based on the Terran Trade Authority books. The company was — emphasis past tense — looking for writers. I simply missed the ad.

It’s really too bad. The French translations at my local kid library helped to get me started on sci-fi. I now own three of the four books (only missing Spacewrecks), thanks to Ebay.

But it’s alright, I guess. It’s hard enough finding free time to work on my own stuff, let alone others’.

Still…

Game Design Sins, Continued

Why, oh why do some game designers insist on frustrating the players under the guise of providing a “challenging experience”?

There should always be more than one way to reach an objective. There should always be a way, preferably cool looking, to salvage a mistake (Ubisoft’s Prince of Persia had it right), especially in high danger environments where precision timing is required. In games with fixed save points, there should always be a progress checkpoint to respawn to before each major challenge, so that the user doesn’t have to repeat minor gameplay.

The average game player probably experience frustrations daily in his “mundane” life. He doesn’t need for his games to do the same.

New Fiction

Firefly Games has just put a preview of the newest CyborGladiator supplement on their Web site. As usual, I wrote the fiction. Take a look, tell me what you think.

More Concept Art

I posted more sketches in the Resources page of the site.

Half are from settings I’m working on, the other half are ideas for Tau models for a Warhammer 40K army I’m working on.

Feedback welcome!

Another Game Design Sin

My wife is currently playing Onimusha 3 on the PS2. I was watching her battle a huge cerberus last night and I saw another of my gaming pet peeves. One of the dog’s attacks is a freeze breath. When hit (and it’s near impossible to dodge because the fighting area is too small), the character freezes for several seconds, unable to escape the dog’s subsequent strikes. This has caused her no end of frustration. (She did beat the dog, eventually.)

I saw something similar in the Flash game Dad & Me: at one point, you meet a ganster whose gunshots kick you back out of control. He can also kick you repeatedly into the air if you come too close. The problem here is that while you’re being shot or kicked, you have no control, and hence cannot dodge the next attack. Basically, once he starts on you, you spend about ten seconds watching him kick you around with no chance to escape.

Never, ever, take control away from the player. He’s supposed to be playing, not watching, the game.

(In both the above titles, if the idea was to make the player’s avatar take massive damage in one attack, it would have been better to just do so and allow the player to get back into the game right away.)

Subtle, Space Boy...

This is so subtle — like getting hit in the face with a brick.

It’s a sort of Tamagotchi/mascot for your phone. When you get called, it dances with joy; when you get an SMS, it gets a letter; when the battery is low, it gets visibly tired. Apparently there’s all sort of stuff and toys to unlock for it.

You see where this is going, right?

Yep, the more phone calls and the more messages you get (and the more stuff you download, I’m sure), the happier the little fellow.

And your carrier’s bank account, of course.

Monkey Training

My wife and I are currently completing Final Fantasy X on the PS2. It’s a great and gorgeous game — although the story’s very linear, there are many sidepaths and mini-quests you can discover.

We’ve gone through them all and are currently trying to obtain the characters’ hidden ultimate weapons. We don’t really need them for the final boss, but hey, we’re completists. To do so, one must first accomplish a number of tasks, none of which are obvious (indeed, for most of them we had to refer to a game FAQ — there was no obvious hints as to their location, or even existence).

Several of these mini-quests involve what I call “monkey training,” which (IMHO) is one of the worst sins a game designer can commit. Monkey training is a game sequence where an exact control input sequence is requested of the player, with no choice or decision involved, and little or no error allowed.

I offer two examples: to get Tidus’ weapon, one must win an obstacle course with a Chocobo (a sort of riding bird), dodging left and right. To get Lulu’s weapon, one must dodge (by pressing ‘X’) 200 lightning bolts in a row, with no saving and no interruption.

Basically, if you can build a simple mechanical or electric device that inputs the right sequence in the game controller with the proper timing, you win. If not, you must learn the sequence by rote play, until you can do it by heart. And, you don’t get any reward (or game progress) until you do.

Sorry, but that’s not fun gameplay.

It is, however, very easy to design, which is why we sometimes see it in commercial games.

Another grave offender of Monkey Training was Coolboarding 2001, which I had gotten for the PS2. There’s a mid-point in the game where you have to complete a specific alpine trail to move on with the new events. After repeating the same track around 50 times, I was able to do the first third of the trail without even looking at the screen(!). By that point, I gave up on the game altogether.

I think we all got better things to do with our time than rote-learn “X, O, X, X, Right, X, Left, Left, X, etc.,” no?

Sausages

What do sausages, politics and game software have in common? According to the old saying, if you like them, you should never see them being made.

Fortunately for me, I love digging into the nitty gritty aspects of game design, even if it’s something as mundane as a list of programming tasks or a detailed project schedule. I’m elbow-deep in the stuff right now.

(You know you’re a Producer when you chortle with glee because you just found you’ve got two weeks more than you thought, then wince as you learn that one of your main resources is leaving for an extended vacation right smack in that period. Que sera, sera.)

New Bottled Lightning is Up!

The subject line says it all. The newest issue of the Bottled Lightning newsletter is up on the Firefly Games Web site. It features Part 2 of my short story Metamorphosis. Subscribe and check it out!

(Another reason to subscribe: I have a pulp-inspired short story lined up for a coming issue. Hubba hubba!)

Pressure

Veering off from politics for a second, and back to gaming.

I just saw an interesting post on RPG.net about Setting “Pressure” — i.e. the amount by which a game setting encourage the players to “make something happen.”

I need to keep this in mind when creating my new settings.

New Fiction Available

Patrick just let me know that Bottled Lightning #4 is now available. It contains Part I of my new
CyborGladiator game fiction piece, “Metamorphosis.”

The conclusion will be found in next month’s issue, and the story will continue in the new supplement, Invincible, once it’s released.

Professional

I’m now a card-carrying member of the IGDA — the International Game Developers Association.

Kewl.

Cell Phone Industry News

I wanted them both to make some mobile games, and now they’re gone. A Korean company got both the Transformers and Civilization licenses.

Dammit.

Still on the subject of cell phones, read this interesting post by John Carmack (of Doom, Quake and Armadillo Aerospace fame).

This should give you an idea of what kind of technological limitations we work under in the cell phone gaming market.

More concept art

Packing up our stuff entails a lot of cleaning up. I’ve once made the mistake of just packing and transporting everything I owned to a new apartment, just to end up unloading half the models and books on eBay not two months later. Not again!

While doing some triage in my drawers and file folders prior to moving, I found some more concept art I made back in 1992 when we were designing Jovian Chronicles. These are really, really early work, back in the time when Jovian was supposed to be a serialized hard science novel in the pages of Mecha Press magazine!

Enjoy, and let me know if you like them.

(And yes, those are the drawings that triggered the idea I mentioned here. Draw your own conclusions.)

Jovian

Some nice mentions of my first book ever on the RPGnet Forums. Glad to see people liked it.

Hope they will feel the same about my new efforts.

Re-imagining

I was watching an episode of the new, “re-imagined” Galactica series and thinking what a great job they’d done, when inspiration struck. (Ouch.)

Seeing all those old sketches of mine from back in 1992 reminded me of what exactly I wanted to accomplish back then, and how production and commercial realities forced me away (sometimes drastically) from my goals. But now, neither of those apply, and I’ve got twelve years of additional design experience under my belt.

I made several sketches last night and started putting stuff together today. It’s been awhile since I’ve been this excited by a design project. Watch this space!

Back in the Game

I’ve been thinking lately of getting back into the roleplaying game design arena. One thing I don’t want to do, however, is just reproduce old patterns. Been there, done that, don’t want to write another set of detailed rules for everything including how to let a character floss his teeth.

A couple of months back, I read a journal entry by Mike Pondsmith (of Cyberpunk fame) where he said that computer games let you jump into the action right away, why can’t tabletop RPGs do the same thing? And I couldn’t help but agree.

I just don’t have the time anymore for the extensive preparation of a game. I know that the players will supply much of the banter, plot and fun of the evening, and they just have to show up. Why should I be the one to spend hours preparing maps, balanced encounters, and so on? I’d much rather think of plot hooks and prepare my own characters (the NPCs). So the system would have to be fast, user-friendly, story and action-oriented, and be able to support a variety of themes (and be customizable enough to properly represent them).

So what would this hypothetical game engine be like?

- The core basic would fit on one page or less (maybe two, if examples are needed). This is all the users, both players and GM, need to read to get started (not necessarily play a long-term campaign, but get started).

- Limited character types: this would reduce the workload on the GMs, and require less rule-referencing. After all, this doesn’t bother computer game players: if you play Halo, you play Master Chief — you can’t play the ship’s captain.

- Multi-purpose rules: rather than have a rule for every piece of equipment or situation, have a set of rules that can be bent to cover all. The goal is to have a ruleset that’s no longer than the average console game manual (the 16- or 32-page half-size booklet that comes with the CD).

- Tons of (well-organized) info on the character sheet: I don’t want players to spend time digging through the rulebook for stuff that’s used often. Even some character generation info should be built right into the character sheet.

- Include GM Rewards: the rules would include rewards for the Gamemaster. What those are is still being worked out, but could include story tokens, temporary boosts for the NPCs, etc. I was thinking of an overall pool of “play tokens” that continuously exchange hands between players and GMs for cool effects.

I dug through some of my old game concepts this week and will try to put something together.

At some point.

Once we’ve moved.

Watch this space.

The Story Continues

I just turned in Part 2 of the serialized short story I’m writing for Firefly Games. You should be able to read it in about three weeks — if you subscribe to the “High Voltage” fan club, of course.

The Firefly crew is small but very professional, and their games are fun to boot. I urge you to look at their Web site.

New material up at Firefly Games

To start the new year with a bang, Firefly Games has launched their new revised Web site, along with a fan club (High Voltage) and a newsletter (Bottled Lightning).

The first issue of the latter includes part one of a short story I wrote last year, set in the world of Monster Island. It’s free for the time being, so check it out.

Freelance Game Development

The place where I work (Airborne Entertainment) outsources a lot of “grunt work” to outside studios. This follows a general trend in the computer gaming industry.

It has occured to a lot of people that a similar model could very well work in the tabletop game industry, now that Internet connections are able to transfer large files in a decent amount of time. For example, there’s no reason the layout of a game book absolutely needs to be done in-house, if a cheaper freelance contractor can be found to do the work.

In a more extreme case, a developer could produce an entire game book, writing, art and layout, and then deliver it as a ready-to-print computer file to a publishing partner. The revenues would be split between the two according to an agreed-upon model (ex.: 50/50 rev share, straight IP sale, etc.). This has big advantages for both parties: the publisher doesn’t invest any time or money before the game is ready (eliminating some overall risk, plus virtually all the costs of development delays), while the developer doesn’t have to deal with printing, stocking and shipping. (Trust me, after ten years of helping out in the shipping room once a month, I never want to pack orders again.)

I was planning on publishing some games on my own after leaving DP9 last year. I didn’t do so because I couldn’t see a way to make it profitable (even with PDF publishing — the cost of art and layout on such small sales would have wiped out the profits). Doing specialist design work, however, would work. Maybe I should be looking into it.

Once I get some stuff on paper, of course. [sigh] At least I’ve gotten started.

P.S. You can read my thoughts on the state of the tabletop game industry in 2005 here.

Concept Art

I’ve added multiple archive pictures of my design sketch books to the Resources section of my Web site. They include design studies for several well-know Heavy Gear and Jovian Chronicles units, as well as some upcoming material.

Please note that these are concept art, and as such are hurried drawings intended to guide the staff artists in their work. These were never intended for publication. Nevertheless, I think they offer an interesting glance at the design process. Enjoy!

Banzaidyne

Jason “Banzai” English has updated his Banzaidyne fansite and moved it to a new home. It’s not much of a change in address, but it’s in a cleaner location down the street. Along with the material that you’ve always enjoyed from Banzaidyne, he’s starting to post new SilCORE material (SilCORE was my last ditch effort at making the “perfect” RPG system before I left DP9. Didn’t succeed, but came closer). There’s not much now, but more will be coming over the winter.

Please update your links to the following address: http://www.geocities.com/banzaidyne2/.

2005 Predictions: Tabletop Gaming

My predictions for 2005 for the tabletop game industry:

- There won’t be another “big hit” in 2005. Wait for 2006, and don’t expect it to be a traditional RPG, card or boardgame.

- There will be significant shrinkage in both the manufacturing and retail tiers, and possibly in the distribution tier as well. A lot of people will close their doors or go part-time.

- The companies and game stores that do survive the shrinkage will become stronger.

- The companies and stores that do survive will make efficient use of e-commerce (and online communications in general).

- No new game company without big investors to back them up will make it big. The age of the basement startup is over, at least outside of the indie publishing scene.

- Diversification will be a key to survival (publish RPGs+Cards+Boardgames and have licenses for novels, video games, trinkets, etc.).

- Excessive diversification will hurt (e.a. having several RPG lines, several dozen boardgames, etc.).

And finally:

- No one will make it rich except the market leaders in each given category. (Others may make a decent living, but they won’t get rich, and they won’t be able to get off the publishing treadmill, either.)

Wireless Game Design

I got a query about how what I do now is different from the tabletop game design I used to do at DP9. Obviously, the media itself is different — rather than going to a printer to publish a book, I get a bunch of coders to write up a piece of software.

Wireless game design is very different from creating your average tabletop roleplaying game. There are three main concerns when sitting down to craft a computer game that will fit on a wireless device such as the average cell phone:

1) Limited physical resources;

2) Limited code flexibility;

3) Limited usage time.

The first concern is obvious: you can’t expect a handheld wireless device to perform as well as the latest desktop computer, and the screen is only a couple hundreds of pixels across — on the high end models, that is. In many ways, these limitations bring us back to the early days of computer game design, when all programs had to fit under 64Kb or 256Kb, and graphics required considerable imagination to reconcile with what was printed on the box’s cover.

Phone manufacturers are getting better all the time, though. The recent J2ME models and many phones capable of running the BREW language (see below) have surprising capabilities, some equal to 1980s video game consoles. There are 3D chips and miniature multi-gig-sized hard drives in the work for release in the next two years, too. But I digress: given that a game has to be distributed (what we call “ported”) across a wide variety of devices, we can’t design for the top-notch stuff. We have to keep in mind the lower range handsets, too. Usually, we have a “Fat” and a “Light” version, the latter missing a few monsters, levels, or features to fit the smaller phones.

The second concern is linked to the first one. We work primarily with two programming languages, Java 2 Micro-Edition (J2ME) and BREW (Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless devices). For the time being, neither can handle 3D work very well, and we’re limited to 2D sprites and animation. Even worst, we can pretty much control only position, transparency and collision for those sprites — the languages don’t support efficient (i.e., quick) mirroring or rotations. (The new 2.0 versions do, but too few phones have the software yet.) This, obviously, further limits us because we have to draw all the positions if an element needs to rotate, further cutting into the available memory.

The third design limitation is a little more abstract: limited play time. A cell phone is primarily a communication tool. It was only recently that manufacturers started adding features that let them be used as day planners and mini-agendas — or game machines. People will use their cell phones for entertainment mainly when they have no other alternative: in the subway, waiting in line, and so on. These situations have one thing in common: they are unlikely to last for very long, and thus the user will play the game in sessions of five or ten minutes at most. During that time, we designers have to make sure they get their money’s worth and have the feeling they have accomplished something. In short, forget two-hour scenarios; the player should be rewarded every few minutes at the very most, either with a completed level, a power-up, or something similar.

So, the idea is to make a game that fits within those limits, and yet is memorable enough to be enjoyable to play. It’s a considerable game design challenge, and one that I find myself delighted to tackle.

Space Propulsion

This is an interesting (if short) article about unusual ideas for future space travel. Nothing new for me in there, but it did link to a Robert Forward novel I didn’t know about. And the metastable helium rocket sounds very interesting, though more research is required on my part…

And it did made me wonder why I didn’t put more cyclers in the Jovian Chronicles universe. After all, they already have colony cylinders, it would be logical to have a Nomad nation that plies the space lanes between planets on endlessly looping orbits.

(The JC universe doesn’t really need the solar boiler drive or the lightcraft, however, given that they have magsail and fusion drive technologies.)

Now an IGDA member!

Speaking with Jean over lunch (another ex-Pod Person), I realized that I forgot to announce that I’m now an official member of the IGDA — the International Game Developers Association.

I figured that it was time (after fifteen years, duh!) to officialize my career. What can I say, I love games and I hope to keep on making and writing them until my last days.

Roll that Thing

We had a ball (‘scuse the pun) this weekend playing Namco’s new PS2 title, Katamari Damacy. The goal of the game is simple: you’re the Prince of the Cosmos, and you roll up random items in a ball to make new stars. No violence, kickass music track, and funny cartoon graphics. My fiancee loves it.

This game is a great example of “out of the box” thinking, when it comes to game design. Of course, the technology had to catch up to it, first.

(It kinda reminds me of the Democratic party, too, except that the latter rolls up random Causes, not objects.)

Game Works

I can’t tell you much about it, but I’m working on a guest stint in something Firefly Games is brewing up. These guys are doing a lot of fun stuff, and they deserve to be better known.

I’m also working on a big secret project with a well-known game company, but I can’t (yet) reveal what it is.

Giant robots are involved, of course. Come on — it’s me you’re talking about.

Perfect for Wargaming!

One of the major problems with miniature tabletop wargaming is how to represent rivers and other bodies of water. Unless you’re willing to build up the rest of the terrain, you usually have to make do with flat paper representations, or speedbump-like banks.

Well, not anymore.

Of course, the price would buy a lot of lead miniatures, so I guess it would be restricted to wealthy gamers. (Does that exist, anyway?)

More CyborGladiator stuff

There are new reviews of CyborGladiator over at RPG.net and d20 Magazine Rack.

I was very pleased to see that both reviewers enjoyed the fiction (which I wrote). They also liked the game, which more than deserves it.

The Matrix: Pulp Superscience

The last thing you remember is sitting in a room with a large, dark man who asked you to chose between a blue punchcard and a red one. He smiled as you inserted the red card into the slot of an elaborate computator, and then everything went dark…

“Welcome to the real world…”

The Second World War raged on, each side holding its own as best it could. The widespread use of superscience weapons and weird talents was much to blame for this sad state of affairs, until one day the surface of the planet, and especially Europe and Asia, was nothing but a burnt, charred plain. Other places did not fare much better, and eventually most of Mankind was forced underground into deep bunker-like caverns, many kilometers below the surface.

To conserve resources and allow as many people as possible to survive, both sides developed cold tanks where the population could be “stored” until the conflict was won. To prevent them from going mad from sensory deprivation, all citizens were fitted with a Tesla helmet that used rapidly shifting magnetic fields to induce images and sensations in the brain. By connecting all the storage tanks together via great mechanical computators, everyone was free to live his life, albeit an imaginary one, in a peaceful way.

No one knows exactly how long this state of affairs lasted, or what exactly transpired. But at some point, the forces of the Axis managed to gain control over many of the Allies’ bunker-cities, merging their population with their own. To the inhabitants, nothing had changed, except that they now lived in a somewhat stiffling, fascist version of their original society.

A few people managed to get away, thanks to glitches and mechanical mishaps, and they started a resistance movement. With the help of the few remaining Allied cities, they now wage a desperate hit-and-run war from their highly modified combat Zeppelins. Reaching datalines through old, forgotten service tunnels and back doors, they use pirated Tesla helmets to slip into the make-believe world and fight it from the inside, using their knowledge of the system to perform incredible feats of daring and agility.

The forces opposing them are fearsome. On the surface, Axis armored stormtroopers and automated mechanical horrors stalk them at every turn, while in the shared hallucination of the Matrix they are pursued by the insidious forces of the MeGestapo, complex human-like defense programs designed solely to help maintain the illusion, no matter the cost.

Undermanned and overgunned, the Resistance faces the forces of the Axis with courage and smarts, the only weapons at their disposal. These two-fisted heroes are the last hope for liberty and justice in a world gone mad!

The Matrix: Mecha Combat

“There’s another one over the next hill. Looks like a standard BT-25, nothing too threatening, and we could use the organics.” The pleasant voice of Anna, callsign “Trinity,” was heavily distorted by the complex ECM waves projected by her Slave Rider.

“…Mister Anderson… How nice to see you again.”.

The slaughter was so devastating, it did not have a name. Survivors called it the War, and left it at that. The conflict burned away civilization from the surface of the Earth and wiped the skies clean. Nations fought nations first with conventional armament, then with nuclear warheads. In the end, it was the Slave Rider that dealt the final blow.

Fifteen meters tall, powered by a matter conversion unit and shielded by impenetrable composite armor, a Slave Rider was capable of shooting down any long range projectiles thrown at it, while replying with lances and particle emitters of gigawatt output. In many cases, battles were decided with hand to hand combat, neither adversary being able to burn through armor fast enough to inflict a killing blow at a distance.

A single human crewmember lay at the hearth of the great machines. He was not the pilot, however — each vehicle was wholly computer-controlled. The crew’s sole function was to provide tactical creativity and autonomous responses. These actions were not even conscious: to prevent morale problems, each rider was neurally connected to a make-believe everyday world. The data was carried as an overlay to the tactical net shared by all Slave Riders, allowing crews to live out an ordinary life together with the civilians whose minds unwittingly powered the great factory-cities. Unexpected combat casualties were smoothly removed from the artificial world through traffic accidents, rapid illness, or plain sudden disappearance.

And so life went on, with war machines roaming the countryside, protecting their harvesters and the strange machine ecology that developed while their creators lived in a dream state. Automated factories would recycle the scraps of conflict, metal and organics alike, to create reinforcements and maintain existing units.

Time took its toll, however, and sometimes the neural blocks broke down. The rider within awakened, and was confronted with the truth: humanity was now nothing more than a cog within a self-perpetuating machine of its own creation.

In time, these awakened riders started to come together in small groups, working to free yet more people and to try and break the circle of violence that bound them to the great machines. They could use the neural connectors of their cockpit to immerse themselves once more in the illusory world, where their “awakened” status allowed them to break the programming rules to perform incredible physical feats.

The machines that kept the conflict going, however, cared little for the human thirst for freedom and happiness. They had been created to wage war, and knew nothing outside of it. They needed the human regulators as much as they needed steel and carbon to fashion the great combat vehicles, and so they put safeguards in place to prevent them from running amok. Each Slave Rider was receptive to a certain coded frequency that would activate a sort of internal military police program, “deputizing” the unit and turning it against its own. Over time, the highly efficient programs were widely believed to jump from one machine to the other over the tactical net, gaining a sort of personality as they evolved and became more efficient. These “agents” were widely feared by all, and rightfully so. Only a handful of extremely skilled pilots could hope to survive a confrontation against them, for they were hard, fast and totally without regard for the well-being of the body they rode.

As human bands of freedom fighters travel the countryside in their commandeered Slave Rider, there will come a time when an apocalyptic confrontation between them and the machines will be inevitable…

The article that never was

A few months ago, I was asked to contribute to the relaunch of the gaming magazine Games Unplugged, by writing two sections in an article on “Gaming the Matrix” (each section or genre being taken care of by a well-know designer for that specific genre).

Alas, as many of those deals go in the tabletop game industry, the whole thing fell apart before the first issue was published. (How bad was it? The publisher is in prison for fraud, albeit in a separate business venture.)

So, not wanting to let 1400-odd words go to waste, and not having any place to sell them, I’ll post them here this weekend. Enjoy!

New Reviews and Projects

I’ve made a couple of brief updates to my Web page:

- A complete (I think) list of my works (in Career);

- Some projects I’m working on (in Publications);

- Some new SF book reviews (in Reviews).

Check it out!

UPDATE (April 21): fixed the link for the Portfolio page.

Needs

On a tabletop RPG industry mailing list I’m on, people are discussing why gamers aren’t buying game products.

I think the problem’s pretty obvious — gamers don’t need what the game industry produces, so they don’t buy it. Every factor that has been thrown in the discussion as a possible cause (cost, value, hearing about new products, lackluster distribution, etc.) comes back to this. No really, think about it.

Gamers don’t need in-depth rules for, say, juggling underwater (how often is that gonna come up?).
They don’t need yet more Feats or abilities (GMs can’t keep up anymore, anyway).
They don’t need yet more classes, monsters, or whatnot (see above).
They don’t need yet another take on Genre X, Only with Different Dice.
They certainly don’t need poorly-worded fiction, or world stats and information that have no bearing on the game itself(1).
They don’t need adventures that are setting-specific, and offer little more than a storyline and a bunch of pre-statted NPCs.

I’ve been working on some game products of my own ever since I left DP9 six months ago. I haven’t published anything because none of my ideas have yet passed the “do my potential customers need this?” test. Back to the drawing board.

(1)There are exceptions, of course. Short sidebars with interesting unrelated tidbits that can be used to put players in the mood (for example, the first edition Heavy Gear featured two recipes based on alien food). The operating word here is “short.” I started that in the old 1993 edition of Jovian Chronicles, and went on with every other game I worked on. Too bad the sidebars became bloated after a while, destroying most of their usefulness.

Updating Archives

My listing over at the Pen & Paper RPG resource Web site has been updated. Though they still seem to be missing quite a few titles.

Amazing what ten years of hard work can produce. Mind you, some of it is good, some of it is bad, some of it is exceptional, and most of it was the result of great teamwork.

P.S. If anyone sees an omission or an error, please let me know! (Yes, there are some people out there who follow my career more closely than I do.)

CyborGladiators

Lo and behold, while checking my daily news, I realized that my interview for the CyborGladiators project is now up on the Firefly Games’ Web site (check out “Creator Q&A” in the left-hand menu). Though I keep saying Patrick and crew give me entirely too much credits — I only wrote a small fraction of the book, after all. (It’s still nice to be appreciated, though.)

If you haven’t checked this game out yet, do so now. It’s quick, it’s good, it’s not too expensive, and it gives you a reason to kitbash all those old action figures that were just laying about your place.

Readers from the Miniatures’ Page, welcome! Stick around, there should be more gaming stuff in the future ‘round these parts.

Format

Another winter weekend gone without snowboarding. This time, a cold epidemic among my riding folks is to blame. Seems like I might as well admit that it’s over for this season. Just when I was making some progress, too… sigh

Anyway… spent much of the weekend playing D&D on the Xbox, in the form of Baldur’s Gate II. We’ve already finished it once, now we’re unlocking hidden characters by playing at the Extreme level. Ridiculous — Level 34 Cleric with AC 180, and I still get killed in one shot. Maybe I need to learn to block.

Talked a bit with a friend that might be doing some new gaming stuff with me under the Vectorsphere imprint. We got plenty of ideas, the hard part is giving them a format that will be both attractive and useful. Attractive, because no one buys ugliness, despite those vocal gamers that clamor for tiny fonts and no pictures. Useful, because the market is so satured now that people are buying only what they can use in their home campaign. And then, only if it can be easily dropped in without requiring alterations, which require time that most people don’t have anymore.

Fortunately, I think I managed to come up with something that fits both requirements. Now the hard part is to take all those notes of mine and make something useful out of it. Ideas are a dime-a-dozen, after all, it’s actual finished products that bring in money. (And at this point, with the wedding and the house hunting in the picture, we’re certainly going to be able to use any cash that come our way.)

Home Alone

My beloved fiancee is out at the other end of the country on business matters. While I know that such trips are required by her job, I’m having trouble sleeping on my own. There’s something wonderfully soothing about the slow breathing of the woman you love lying next to you.

At least I’m not getting into any kind of trouble while she’s gone. Watched a nice episode of CSI (one of the few shows we watch) and some mecha anime to get me in the mood to create. Kept on browsing a huge mythology tome for ideas for a new sci-fi setting, which I’m hoping to make into… well, something. Not quite sure yet what. I’ve got dozens of short ideas jolted down in notebooks along with quick sketches or logos, and most are suitable for RPGs, novels, animation or computer games. Naturally, I’d prefer to set them down in a format that would a) let many people enjoy what I create and b) bring me a little bit of cash (holding no illusion of getting rich, though).

What doesn’t help is that I don’t want to recreate the wheel. If my story has mecha, I don’t want them to be Gundams with a different armor trim job (for example, kudos to the designers of Evangelion for thinking outside the box, mecha design-wise). So I’ve been exploring a few ideas to link form, function and story, usually starting with either a cool tech development (not “walking machines” — we have that now!) or a social concept, and see where that leads me. Hopefully somewhere interesting.

Gotta keep thinking about getting a scanner.

Shop Talk

Just got back from the IGDA’s Montreal chapter meeting. It was pretty interesting, with the main talk being by the producer of the excellent Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. I went with most of my game team, and I must admit we smiled when the producer said porting the game across four platforms was a chore (we routinely port our wireless applications over a dozen different phones).

Maybe I should join the IGDA at some point. Part of being a professional game designer and all that.

News and Games

I’m freelancing a bit to keep a toe in the tabletop game industry. Here’s one of my latest efforts. I wrote the chapter fictions; the prolific David Pulver and the Firefly crew took care of the rules, based on Gold Rush’s Action! system.

Meanwhile, the first game project I produced for Airborne Entertainment has gone gold (well, the Series 40 version did) and should be available on various wireless carriers in a few weeks, if it passes technical QA testing without problem.

An Emerging Market

This type of buying frenzy is one of the reasons I chose the wireless industry as my entry point into the computer game market. I’m not going to be lacking for work anytime soon, and my skills will grow as cell phones become more and more capable and widespread.