GameDevBlog

Notes on Search For The Emperor's Treasure and Battlelore

Been playing fairly geeky boardgames with Cathy lately.  An old favorite - Search For The Emperor's Treasure [originally published in Dragon magazine way back when] - which we played for a while before we were married (and on our honeymoon) recently made a comeback, and heard good things about Battlelore lately and Cathy grudgingly agreed to play that with me as a sort of Father's Day present.

These games actually have a fair amount in common:

Short session length:  both these games can be played in under two hours.  Good for short attention span adults like ourselves.  I've also noticed something about my own gaming habits - I can play several sessions of a short session game for hours and hours (I'll play three games of Catan back-to-back, no problem) but will get bored to death by a one-session game of the same length.

Rolling lots of dice:  for all I know, Tom Wham may have invented the whole roll-lots-of-dice -and-x-is-a-hit system - it was in his games that I first saw it.  Just watching my daughter reminds me how fun it is to play with lots of dice;  even though she's only two and a half she likes to play with my dice.

High variance:  I've mentioned that I tend to lean against variance in my tastes.  Richard Garfield, on the other hand, is a huge fan - he wrote a whole article for Game Developer on why it's Good, which I can't find a link to.  It definitely has its applications - one of which is it draws Cathy in.  She really likes to win, tell you what.  With a high variance game, you are spared the painful knowledge of where you actually stand - you can always say, "I rolled really badly that game."  (In fact, it's quite possible she's the good player and I'm the crappy one.  She wins the majority of our Emperor's Treasure games and we're split fairly evenly on Battlelore.)  Cathy seems to have grown fairly fond of Battlelore - at first, she would say, "I'll play Battlelore with you if you fold the laundry," and lately it's been, "I'll play Battlelore with you if you get the mail."

Despite the fact that both these games are clearly accessible enough to bring my wife in, they could be even more accessible.  In Emperor's Treasure, you draw a counter, and then have to look up what the counter does in the rules.  In Battlelore, there's a symbol and color on your miniature, which you then have to look up on a set of cheat-sheet cards arrayed before you.  Since usually the question you're asking is "How many dice do I get to roll?" it seems like that information could have been printed on the miniature itself.

And, in some ways, these games are very different.  Emperor's Treasure is cute and nonthreatening - my wife was immediately willing to try it just because of the cartoony art, only to discover that a fairly complex D&D-lite was under the hood.  Battlelore looks like a grognard game with its armies of miniatures, hexes, cryptic dice and playing cards, so getting her to just try it required negotiation.

Emperor's Treasure is low budget, entirely composed of cardboard and paper.  Bring Your Own Dice.  Battlelore is a high budget extravaganza where the cost of goods must have been very significant.  One of the first and most obvious ways to differentiate products is Budget and Gourmet;  Metagames in the eightes and James Earnest's Cheapass Games lately are quintessential examples of the budget game.  ("We were able to bring you cheaper games because they take less shelf space."  "We were able to bring you cheaper games because we're not including any actual components.")  Then, on the other end of the spectrum, we have games like Battlelore where you get All This Stuff, and the price of the game is sending a message:  "At this price, it's got to be good!"

So...what if?  You could do a high budget Emperor's Treasure where the map hexes are interchangeable or even lock together, you have miniatures for the heroes, lavish playing cards for the monsters, a "Lost City" model, and special dice marked with shields and swords and fairy dust.  Add a marketing budget to match and maybe I wouldn't be the only one I know who remembers the game. 

And a low budget Battlelore with just one map, printed on paper, cardboard counters for your units, perforated sheets of paper for your playing cards, and you have to bring your own dice and just remember that 1 = retreat, 2 = magic, 5 & 6 = a hit.  You could possibly even make it cheap enough to print in a magazine.  Would it still be as succesful?  (I don't actually know how succesful it is...seems to get a fair amount of word-of-mouth, but where do you look up board game sales?)

The next step would be to apply these thoughts to digital, and make the videogame that I can play with Cathy...

Speculative Generality Casefile

Thinking back to Die By The Sword reminds me of what was possibility the worst case of speculative generality / premature abstraction I ever indulged in.  Pete told me that we were going to have a lava pit in one of the arenas - most of the characters would get burned when they entered it, but a couple (the skeletons and Magmar the rock elemental guy) would be immune.
I dove in and started coding.  Brandishing the ideal of data-driven design I said to myself, "I don't want this to be some kludge.  I want this to be extensible and abstract."
So here's what I did -
* Any polygon you could stand on had an associated temperature.
* All the creatures had a temperature endurance.  Magmar and the skeletons could stand very high temperatures;  most people got uncomfortable around 90 degrees centrigrade. 
I forget how I propagated all this information into the data files and whatnot.  There may have been a table or two in the source-code itself, immediately throwing one of the advantages of data-driven design out the window (designers not having to touch code files and all that.)
What was I thinking?  No idea.  Was I imagining that someday a desinger would want to put in some kind of "medium-hot" surface that some third class of creatures - not as tough as the skeletons or Magmar - would be able to walk across?  Or maybe a "superhot" surface that would destroy even skeletons?  Of course, there were no changes to that code after it was written, and a simple
if(( characterflavor!=MAGMAR) && (characterflavor!=SKELETON)) BurnTheCrapOutOfThem();
would have been just fine.  And what I could have coded in minutes took a day.

TSTTCPW!  Lived and learned.

Hey, as long as we're sharing, do any of you have good premature-abstraction stories?

Dell - sweet

We've been using an old Dell laptop of mine as our autobuild machine.  I've had it for almost three years...it seemed like it was on its last legs:  the battery doesn't hold a charge, the touchpad no longer worked, some keys are missing, the hard-drive is fragmented to hell.  Just a few days ago the screen went out.  I went to their online support chat, not expecting much - a Dell desktop that I had for less time melted down and I simply had to replace it - but they told me I still had a couple weeks left on my warranty, and they sent a tech to fix it.  (And they fixed the touch-pad to boot.)  I vaguely remember now - when ordering the laptop, through work, there was some discount if I got the long service plan that made it seem worth it.  (I'm normally a "For God's Sake Don't Get The Service Plan!" guy.)  Getting it fixed was so unbelievably painless, such the complete opposite of my horrendous experience with the company formerly known as Hewlett-Packard, that I'll probably go with Dell for all my computing needs in the future...and get the service plan.

More Die By The Sword Props

Although in my earlier post on DBTS I talked about Mark Nau's level design contributions, the truth is that it wouldn't even have had levels if it wasn't for Chris Busse.   We thought of it as a fighting game - two guys face off, one lives to face the next guy.  Then, instead of going home to his family, Chris spent Christmas making a prototype level, proving it would be more fun as an adventure game.  I'm a little ashamed for having forgotten - it was many years ago, and once you've been working on a game for a long time those early design decisions start to seem 'obvious' and you forget how much people agonized over them - but basically, Chris invented Die By The Sword as we know it.

Manager In A Strange Land: Wisdom of Crowds?

I read *Wisdom of Crowds* a while ago and was taken in by its arguments...
The basic idea being that for a lot of decision-making, getting an average or composite of a group opinion is better than a vast majority of the individual opinions.  Whether it's counting jellybeans or investing in the stock market, Joe Whoever isn't going to do as good a job as the average.  This has led me to be maybe a little more willing to build consensus and compromise than I should be. 
Because here's the counter-argument:  we don't care about whether the wisdom of crowds is better than the wisdom of the random individual.  We care about whether the wisdom of crowds is better than the skilled individual.
A question I have not heard asked:  does someone trained in jellybean estimation tend to beat the jellybean estimating crowd?  Or - in a series of jellybean estimation exercises, do we tend to find that one or more people consistently beat the average?
I ran a little experiment with some friends at Treyarch a few E3's ago.  We played a game where I gave them a list of games that were being shown at that E3 and we all looked at them and guessed what their gamerankings scores would be.  Just like with jellybean estimation, the average guess tended to be better than the random individual guess.  Here's the thing - one guy (Alex Bortoluzzi) - was right on the money every time, consistently beating everyone else and the average.  Our sample size was too small to draw any really scientific conclusions (from a list of 10 games only 6 ended up ever shipping!) but when I wanted to know how Spider-Man 2 was going to do in the rankings, I didn't run a decision market.  I just asked Alex.  He turned out to be right.  (A lot easier to do than run a decision market, also.)
A more famous example is Warren Buffet.   He consistently seriously outperforms the S&P.  Although he's humble - in *The Essays of Warren Buffet* he makes it sound like anybody could do it -I'm not about to start picking individual stocks, because when it comes to the stock market I'm Joe Anyone and the average is likely to beat me.
So maybe the question we should be asking when making game design and business decisions is probably not, "What does everyone think?  Can we come to an acceptable compromise?"  But rather, "Who's our Warren Buffet?  And what does he think?"
Of course, if you're in charge, and you decide that you're the Warren Buffet...then you've just taken a step down from being the Level 5 leader to being the Level 4 one.  (Or maybe even lower...) 
So that gives me a good opportunity to do the Socratic thing.  What do you guys think?  Compromise?  Blindly Follow The Leader?  Or Is There Something Better?