Puzzles have always fascinated me. My first puzzle was a little book filled with 9 piece pictures of construction vehicles. I have found that I enjoy gaming partially because with every new game comes a new puzzle. Card games which require you to build your own deck in particular fascinate me. Even when I don't particularly care about the game play I enjoy wrestling with the puzzle of how to build a good deck.
Deckbuilding in Magic the Gathering especially scratches my puzzle itch. Finding the puzzle I want to complete and then working from there to find the pieces that I can slot into my puzzle is a unique kind of challenge. My favorite Magic the Gathering puzzles come from deckbuilding for the format called Elder Dragon Highlander(EDH) or Commander. What draws me to this format is the requirement that your deck focus around a single special card, your Commander, as well as the restricion of a single copy of all cards in the deck. These restrictions help make each deck a new puzzle filled with fascinating challenges.
The first step for me in deckbuilding for EDH is to find a puzzle I want to complete, most of the time this is simply finding a Commander I want to figure out but sometimes I find a mechanic that compels me. Once I've got a puzzle I start looking for the edge pieces, the main walls of the deck which the rest of the deck will be supporting. With the edge pieces in hand I dive into my puzzle box and rummage through all the pieces I have looking for the ones that seem to fit. Once I've found everything that seems like it could fit I'm left with a massive pile of cards, far more than could fit in a legal deck, so I return to the walls of the deck. The walls of the deck help me focus in on what is important for the deck to be doing and how it is doing those things. The focus of the deck becomes clearer over time as I fill in more pieces of the puzzle, the extraneous pieces going back into the box. Finally once I've removed all the excess cards the deck is ready to play.
The culmination of the deckbuilding process often sets me up for a new puzzle when I find a fascinating card or combination that does not fit within the deck I'm currently working on.
Showing posts with label Design. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Design. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 5, 2019
Tuesday, September 8, 2015
Week 1 - Ideattion
Senior Team* Week One (8/31-9/6)
This last week I spent more concentrated time on my couple of ideas than I ever had previously and I think I came away with a better system for planning out projects than I had previously used. I started by spending an hour just spewing out ideas on my own, at the end I was left with about ten nuggets. over the next couple of days, whenever I had an hour or two free I would spend worrying away at one or another of the nuggets, thinking about what made it interesting and unique. On 9/4 my senior team had a meeting to decide on which ideas we liked and would present to the class on 9/7, of my nuggets, two were chosen and I picked my favorite of the remaining eight to be my third idea. I took these three nuggets and delved into them, by 9/7 I had grown each of them into a solid game idea.
This process took a lot of the pressure out of coming up with the ideas. Instead of each idea having to stand on it's own right out of the gate, I could churn out several stories looking for mechanics or mechanics looking for stories. By allowing the two parts to be separate I was able to develop the nuggets first and discover the parts I liked and disliked about each nugget. By the time of the team meeting I'd already dismissed three of the ten nuggets because of flaws that overshadowed their strengths.
Once the nuggets started growing I had a better idea of where each was headed, such as one of the nuggets the team ended up settling on, The Escaped Finnish Slave**. The initial nugget was based on the Farcry series and an article I found online about the Baltic slave trade in the Middle Ages. As I nurtured the nugget it became clear to me that the game didn't want to be the murder-fest that Farcry games tend to be, but rather it wanted to be a game about survival against the odds where living from day to day meant avoiding fights rather than picking them.
*Senior Team is the first semester of a year long graduation game project
** You play as a Finnish slave who has escaped his captures and is fleeing home, also not the final title of the game
This last week I spent more concentrated time on my couple of ideas than I ever had previously and I think I came away with a better system for planning out projects than I had previously used. I started by spending an hour just spewing out ideas on my own, at the end I was left with about ten nuggets. over the next couple of days, whenever I had an hour or two free I would spend worrying away at one or another of the nuggets, thinking about what made it interesting and unique. On 9/4 my senior team had a meeting to decide on which ideas we liked and would present to the class on 9/7, of my nuggets, two were chosen and I picked my favorite of the remaining eight to be my third idea. I took these three nuggets and delved into them, by 9/7 I had grown each of them into a solid game idea.
This process took a lot of the pressure out of coming up with the ideas. Instead of each idea having to stand on it's own right out of the gate, I could churn out several stories looking for mechanics or mechanics looking for stories. By allowing the two parts to be separate I was able to develop the nuggets first and discover the parts I liked and disliked about each nugget. By the time of the team meeting I'd already dismissed three of the ten nuggets because of flaws that overshadowed their strengths.
Once the nuggets started growing I had a better idea of where each was headed, such as one of the nuggets the team ended up settling on, The Escaped Finnish Slave**. The initial nugget was based on the Farcry series and an article I found online about the Baltic slave trade in the Middle Ages. As I nurtured the nugget it became clear to me that the game didn't want to be the murder-fest that Farcry games tend to be, but rather it wanted to be a game about survival against the odds where living from day to day meant avoiding fights rather than picking them.
*Senior Team is the first semester of a year long graduation game project
** You play as a Finnish slave who has escaped his captures and is fleeing home, also not the final title of the game
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)