I was fortunate enough to be able to attend this years Game Developer Conference (GDC). Whilst there I had the pleasure of attending its Game Design Workshop.
The Game Design Workshop took place over two days. Both days included a general session, and an elective. I attended both Day 1 & Day 2. The following is a brief account of the experience. If you are an aspiring designer, and have the opportunity to attend the workshop this is a must do event!
Day 1
SiSSYFiGHT
On the workshops first day we played SiSSYFiGHT. After playing a few rounds, we were asked to come up with a new theme for the game. This involved each team member writing sticky notes, grouping them then voting on a theme.
With a theme of ‘artists vying for attention in the art world’ we added a steal mechanic. The steal mechanic would allow the attacking player to gain the points the other player lost. We quickly found that this mechanic made the game go on infinitely.
We then changed our chosen mechanic to Favor. The Favor mechanic gave a single point to the player of our choosing. This mechanic was better balanced, and encouraged cooperative behavior.
Game of Games
The first elective I chose was Game of Games run by Marc LeBlanc. For the elective we created a system (we did a card game) with a single rule. Our rule had players first play two cards of the same suite. Then play another two cards which had to add up to the higher of the last played two cards. We then were instructed to merge our game with another.
Fortunately the merge was easy as the other game employed a rule that was similar to ours (it was another card constraint rule where the total of the two cards needed to add up to an odd number). We repeated this system merge process four times, until finally we had to merge sixteen different systems.
During this ‘ordeal’ the hardest part was merging a card based system with a dice based system. Our first attempt to tackle this merge was setting up two asymmetric games which were played simultaneously against each other, but this was not a satisfactory outcome.
We continued to struggle until Marc LeBlanc allowed us to cut from the system during merging the only constraint being to keep the core components (the dominoes, dice, and cards). At that point we brainstormed and came up with a method of dealing with this which was to combine the system through a medium they all shared, which was numbers.
What we created was a game which involved matching numbers based on eleven dice that were initially rolled, and remained fixed throughout the game. Cards, and dominoes played sequentially, and had to get a pair of numbers that matched the dice’s number to be able to claim it. The winner claimed six out of eleven available dice.
By the end of the workshop Marc LeBlanc introduced the MDA Framework, an awesome way of design a game.