Game Design #2: Little

Little is the codename for a game I’m currently making. It’s in a really good state now; it’s testing well, and the iterations seem to be quite different from game to game. It hasn’t been a smooth road to get here though.

I started making Little around October this year, so the game has come into being relatively quickly. I was inspired after reading Jamey Stegmaier’s book on crowdfunding to create a game with minimal components, on the advice that your first crowdfunding campaign stands to be easier (and perhaps more successful) if there’s less to manage. So, I set about making an abstract card game, designed around a variation of trick taking. I dabbled with it for a while, getting periodically excited about the idea and how fast it was coming together.

Trouble was, the game wasn’t fun. It was technically a game, for sure, but there was nothing exciting about the game itself. I was getting excited about the prospect of having a very simple deck of cards that I could present in an appealing way to potential backers, which was entirely the wrong way to go about making a game. I knew this already, but I got blindsided by the drive to create something very simple.

What I should have done is to first and foremost be inspired by a concept. I usually don’t even put pen to paper without having a thematic starting point. Very rarely I will come up with a combination of mechanics that I love in order to spark a thematic skin. So the lesson that I will take from this, is to find an idea to be excited about first and then to find a way to represent that idea in as small a setting as possible.

I ended up abandoning the card game rather than to fight to find a way to make the game fun. It wasn’t themed, and although a game doesn’t necessarily need to be themed, I’m aware that my mind works best when it’s able to see connected threads between the real world and the mechanics that represent it. This is my working practice, and won’t necessarily be yours.

I turned my attention instead towards a theme I love: the classical four elements.

The Brain Dump

Four elements, four tiles. Seemed to make sense. I could have decided to use cards, but I followed the feeling that I wanted the game to be more tactile. I knew it was going to be an abstract puzzle game, and so I thought anything that can make the game feel more relatable was probably good. I tend to use Adobe’s Illustrator for all of my designs, at first by using pen and tablet to sketch out ideas and rearrange them, then later to create icons and component graphic designs. I find having a brain dump very useful. It takes the pressure off from having to understand from day one how the game is going to fit together. Then I write, and write, and write some more.

I know I won’t use everything, but I think it’s important to allow the mind to wander and be free of your own expectations of what the game is going to be about. Often when exploring one branch of possibility, a thought will occur about a separate mechanic, which will then lead down another branch of thought. By following these thoughts I almost feel like I’m on a boat on a river, taking a ride and watching the shores for hidden gems.

After sitting with the ever increasing brain dump document for a couple of days, I made a few core components and got them into Tabletop Simulator. I like using TS for this initial toying around stage, because once those core bits are up there the environment offers a bunch of pre-made components to add in, making the fact finding mission uninterrupted by the search for different physical objects to represent the ideas you want to explore. I love these first moments, the collision of how you thought the various components of the game would interact and how it actually feels. I’ve definitely found keeping an open mind in these first moments to be beneficial. Often as humans we miss so much when we aren’t being mindful.

The ideas started to coalesce, and I settled on an initial game flow of a common central playing area, where players would be contributing to a growing board (not unlike Carcassonne), gaining ownership of the tiles they place and getting points at the end of the game as a reward for the areas that they contributed to. A semi-cooperative, tile placement, area of control game. I knew this initial setting with no other mechanics would result in boring gameplay, but the initial aim was to set up the environment where the game could help show me what it wanted to be.

Tiling For Beginners

I decided to represent ownership of a tile with coloured player cubes, and that an area would consist of tiles that showed the same element. Players would draw tiles from a bag (blind), and have a hand of two tiles to choose one from to play on their turn. Because of the elemental theme, I wanted to have the game react to opposite element tiles being placed next to each other, so I created separate stacks of the four element tiles which would be placed over a pair of tiles, should opposites be played next to each other. This seemed to create an ability to interrupt another player’s attempt to grow an area, as well as offer a path to slicing up an area in your favour. In addition, the natural game flow seemed to become more complex and iterative, rather than a tad predictable.

Things seemed to be going well. I liked the initial integration of the concept and its game representation, but it still wasn’t a game. The pressure to play in a creative way wasn’t high enough, and as a result the responsibility to make the game fun and interesting seemed to be squarely on the players’ shoulders. I knew this balance needed to shift, but the path forward wasn’t clear. Was it the base idea that wasn’t working, or was it the lack of extra mechanisms and/or restrictions?

I decided that introducing personal player goals would help. At the very least I wanted to see the effect it had on gameplay. To begin with, these personal goals took the form of simple shapes made from various profiles of elements (a corner of three tiles made up of two fire tiles and one air tile, for instance). These goals would yield points immediately upon completion. The idea was relatively solid, but the result on gameplay oddly took it into a more isolationist state with infrequent opportunism. I wanted the opposite. So I devised a method of keeping players wanting to use the same tiles as each other by the introduction of a fifth tile type, the element of spirit.

Why It Went Wrong

Again, things seemed to be going well. I created a rule. Either you can place a tile on your turn, or you can discard a tile from your hand to turn a tile of the same type (already played on the table) into a spirit tile. Then came various versions of personal goals which had just spirit tiles in different arrangements, or combinations of spirit tiles and the other four elements. Problem was then, that the focus shifted too far away from the core mechanic of the game, which was supposed to be about area control, and no amount of points balancing seemed to be able to shift this back.

The issue was that completing personal goals was simply far more fun than competing for areas. The game worked fine when it was just creating areas, but it wasn’t fun. The game didn’t work with personal goals, but it was undeniably more fun. Damn.

I banged my head against the screen for a while and tried a bunch of different variations of these mechanisms and rules. I thought I was pretty close to having a good base ruleset, surely it was just the careful balancing of each part that was the key? If I have just the right version of this mechanic, just the right version of these tiles… I kinda knew it wasn’t going where I wanted, and a week later I did the right thing and stopped banging my head.

I really wanted the game to have a common play area, and really wanted players to be forcibly interacting with other players’ plans. It was this blind devotion that cause a lot of issues, which could have been solved a lot sooner. That said, the time invested in trying to problem solve threw up some really interesting things, which have made it into the final version of the game. Time is never wasted if you keep your mind open.

Elementary, Dear Player

“Simple is best” is true for all sorts of reasons. Sometimes, however, it can be very difficult to see what is simple.

Instead of a common playing area, each player was now to build their own, personal grid of tiles. This came with its own problems, but were much more easily surmountable. In playing by yourself, the area control mechanism didn’t work anymore, as why would you do anything but just grow four separate areas? I decided very quickly that the total playing area needed to be restricted. Fine. I wanted the game to only have square tiles, but the game needed player boards to give meaningful restriction to placement.

Personal goals no longer worked, because the time pressure to complete them was no longer present. So I flipped the thinking on this to create a common pool of goals that players then competed for. Good. Time pressure reintroduced. However, a new problem arose: a goal was only there until a player completed it, then another would take its place. This created a disconnect between players placing tiles and being punished for then placing those tiles. Not fun. Instead I drew inspiration from Bärenpark’s bonus tile system, where a stack of similar goals provides diminishing value, but importantly that the goal requirement stays the same. Fixed.

All of a sudden there was a game before me. This felt remarkably different to before. Now there was possibility, directions in which to give the game extra dimension as opposed to potential paths to fix. Now there was stability, the sense that the core of the game could withstand a bunch of different modulators being thrown at it and still be the same game. All of which stemmed from a decision to keep things simple, and to be sensitive to what the game needed rather than what I wanted.

So, It’s Done?

Playtesting inbound! If you’ve read this far and you’re interested, I would love to introduce you to the game and to get feedback. The game is suitable for one to four players, and plays in about twenty minutes per person. It’s only on Tabletop Simulator at the moment, but I expect to make physical prototypes after the next round of online playtesting (once points balances have been more thoroughly explored).

In some ways the current version of this game is quite different to its starting point, but in others it very closely resembles the initial design. I couldn’t be happier with this. It feels like I achieved what I set out to do, but it definitely didn’t lead where I thought it would. I’m really excited about sharing this game with the gaming community, and I hope you will be as excited to play it.

Thanks for reading!

Benjie x