Doug posted about one of my "imbroglio notes" posts today, which spurred me to have a little read over them again and reminisce. Obviously there are 16 of these, in keeping with the 4x4 numerology, and so I was surprised when I reached number 13 (from May 2018) and there were no more! I had been meaning to get onto finishing number 16 sometime - probably when I finally get around to releasing a PC version - but I had completely forgotten that I'd never even posted numbers 14 and 15.
It's really interesting to me to look back at this game, it feels central to my career: my masterwork (in the sense of the piece of work that marks the transition to being a master of a craft). That's not to say I hadn't done good work before that point, but it was a definite step up in scale and complexity, and I gained authority over the process. Part of that is the design was much more elusive - as evidenced by how much I've written about it - I really had to wrestle with the ideas to bring them through. This game also spanned a transitional period in my life: I started it in Scotland not long before our residence expired, worked on it while travelling, completed it back in Aotearoa, and then made the expansions early on in our time in Portugal. My father and father-in-law both died during that time. (These events are partly responsible for the severe delay on the the PC release.) Inevitably this won't be exactly the post I would have written back then, but it looks like I left myself substantial notes to work from, so let's get into it!
As I said in the Mizzenmast announcement post, I'd expected to make 4 expansions, but to maintain quality I merged the last two. Surprisingly many of the remaining weapon ideas I was experimenting with had a nautical theme - it wasn't clear how this fit into the setting of the game, but seemed surprisingly hard to avoid! I would just be trying out a new weapon idea, maybe it can be in such-and-such expansion, sketch a picture for it thinking about how to explain the mechanics.. oh it's a giant octopus tentacle, I GUESS I'LL THROW IT ON THE NAUTICAL PILE THEN. I just had to run with it.
Cruel Pirate Rodney
The first version of the vision disadvantage let you see a 3x3 square regardless of walls. I was very impressed with how large a 4x4 grid could feel when you only see some of it. The character was called "Blind Blacksmith Brenda", with the power to feed her weapon (which eventually made its way to Charlie). How this felt to play was very similar to the final version, but it had several problems. The interaction with ranged weapons was awful: you wouldn't know if a swipe was going to be a move or an attack (this was before there were arrows displayed to indicate attacks, but even with those you don't know what you're attacking). You probably end up not using ranged weapons at all and that's already Harry's disadvantage. Plus it's just generally very hard: you don't know where the gem is so you spend extra turns going the wrong way (similar to Simon, or even Johnny), plus you sometimes move into an attack from a hidden enemy. Also I wasn't sure how I felt about naming a character's disadvantage after a real life disability? I'm right into the blues, guys like Blind Lemon Jefferson and Blind Boy Paxton I have incredibly high esteem for, I think I could write this respectfully, but it's always worth being sensitive because you don't know what someone else's situation is and you don't know what someone will feel who doesn't know where you're coming from. So I took that character out - Molly went there - but eventually returned to the idea because I'd been so pleased with the sense of space. I made ranged weapons reveal their targets and that was so much better that it just fell into place: vision should be proper line of sight! This also also removed some situations where you'd move into an attack (while leaving others, when the enemy is around a corner), and let you sometimes see the gem sooner. Playing it out, it felt like this was now "balanced". I really liked the mix between closed and open spaces instead of being all claustrophobic all the time, I really liked how it made the wall layout really matter. It felt natural enough that this could be how the game was meant to be all along - I'm always happy when a variation is plausibly the alternate-universe standard ruleset. This is pretty close to how vision works in many roguelikes - I'm also happy when rules that are standard in other games become weirdly oppositional in mine (compare with 868-HACK's "super melee attack"). And then of course making him a pirate with an eye-patch explains the reduced vision in a way that's less likely to offend anyone, while tying it into the nautical theme: perfect.
(Present day note: 868-BACK's "advanced graphics" powerup is essentially the same as this at a pure rule-mechanism level, but the display feels completely different.)
Starshine Sea-urchin
I clearly remember when I found the seed of this idea, walking along the coast of Fife past the old salt factory. I was pondering how to make different board-construction challenges for the different heroes: I already had Harry, Susannah, and Ixxthl's basic restrictions on the set of weapons, I had ideas how to increase the challenge of enemies and mazes, and I wondered if there was an interesting way to modulate the weapons themselves. With the weapon description language it's easy enough to make substitutions and rewrite them in a systematic way - replace all instances of "when this kills" with "when this hits" or something, but those types of effect get very fiddly and the subsets of weapons they affect feel very arbitrary. Ideally you want to affect at least a quarter of the cards in a clear and meaningful way. What's something that most weapons have? Well they all deal damage, and half of them have more than 1 damage. How about just "all weapons always do 1 damage"? This completely invalidates damage-only weapons like Cleaver, Broadsword, Brazier; maybe modify it to "weapons have -1 damage (minimum 1)". The neat thing about removing damage is how it shifts the focus to what rules a weapon has, to making combos - so I tried pairing it with Jeska's cursing power to fuel combos, but it felt terrible to kill her Broadsword interaction. Shuffled it around a lot, ended up not using it.
I came back to it for this expansion. I didn't like the implication of "don't use weapons with extra damage"; especially with the extra expansion weapons making that too obvious to play around. Might as well be a "no damage weapons" restriction - but that completely loses the original idea of rewriting weapons. Maybe I give weapons something else to compensate for reduced damage. Maybe they sometimes get the damage still - so I thought of using random damage, maybe the damage is a die roll like this is an normal RPG or something! A 2-damage weapon rolls a d2, 3-damage rolls a d3. It's nice that damage still matters even though reduced, and it's neat to add extra uncertainty to combat. In practice how you play this is still "no damage weapons" and that's a shame. So I make it more extreme. Damage starts at 0. Now even 1-damage weapons are diminished, they're no longer the safe option that avoids the penalty, it gets interesting. It's too harsh because you die whenever you get a few misses in a row (the correct play almost becomes "only damage weapons" to maximise your rolls but even those aren't enough). But it's getting somewhere, almost hitting that feeling of "this could be how the game was meant to be all along" just failing by not actually being good. I tried some different ways of hacking the odds - maybe it's weighted towards higher rolls, maybe it guarantees alternating hits and misses, maybe it rolls in the range [0, damage+1] - all of these kind of work for balance but the added complexity moves it away from the sense of being the primal "could have been all along" rule.
Maybe you roll damage before attacking so you know the outcome to make an informed decision. Adds some complexity. Intriguing how this adds tactical value to having open space to kite enemies while rerolling. Sometimes feels better because you reroll until you get the hit - spending turns but not taking damage. Sometimes feels worse because you don't have a way out and you know a turn ahead that you're guaranteed to miss and die. Feels really bad when you spend time rerolling and still get zeros. Okay what if it only rerolls when you attack? This is bad because there's no escape from a low roll. What if it rolls for all the weapons at once? Now the positional tactics are very clear because you can see where has damage and make an informed choice to go and get it, rather than just taking chances. Also allows me to weight the rolls favourably without having requiring extra complexity in the written rules because you can explicitly see the spread. It doesn't quite have the naturalness of "let's just roll dice like dungeons and dragons" but the clear visibility of outcomes makes it work.
Her active power went through lots of versions too. I really liked "swap your ♢ and ♡". This let you take some damage and then swap to keep fighting, distribute the damage to optimise heals from gems, use Spears to heal ♢, or spend ♡ on wands... but all these cute effects were very situational and 90% of the time it was a bad wait. Rodney's remote attack effect was here for a while, but fit better with his disadvantage so he got it. Because her disadvantage is so complex, her ability wanted to be strong but simple. I ended up back at "restore ♢". This might seem too much like a repeat of Harry, but it plays out pretty differently because it powers different things. In particular it helps enable mana-cost weapons which I'd been feeling were a little underused, and that fits with how her disadvantage is pushing you to focus on weapon powers more than their base damage. Once I'd settled on the random rolls being shown in advance, I tacked on a reroll and that made the power feel less generic and mitigated a lot of problems of reroll-on-attack: if you're stuck with zeros, "heal and take damage" is better than "miss and take damage", while "heal and reroll and wait in place as the enemy moves to you" is way better than "move next to enemy, take damage, miss, take damage".
Castaway Charlie
I really like the hero disadvantages that restrict weapon availability because they give such strong direction for constructing different boards, instead of the less clear situation where you can play any board but different boards are optimal. But there just aren't many simple rules to distinguish subsets; red and blue worked well, "no ranged" wasn't great, "no damage" and "only damage" had sucked; what else even is there? When I started making expansions I tried a "no base weapons" hero, Leon suggested this could be the Shopkeeper - she only has expansion weapons because that's what's in her shop. But this didn't play well; the more-complex expansion items want to be mixed in with the simpler ones from the initial set. I loved the Shopkeeper idea though, so what if she only has the weapons that are left after everyone else has bought theirs? This is straight from 868-HACK - "Favoured Progs" bans the abilities you've most used in the current streak, forcing you to adapt. I really like this idea of restrictions tailored to a particular player's style. Eventually a different concept fit better for the Shopkeeper and this became (in nautical theming) a castaway who's making do with scraps. There's a bunch of messiness here: you can't straightforwardly share his boards because we have different best scores, if you get a top score with him you can't replay the same board. I saved this for the final expansion so that there'd be plenty of score information already to stabilise it.
The Shopkeeper
I didn't even consider the shopkeeper as a playable character until long after I'd drawn them for the button, but of course with such sparse worldbuilding it just made sense to use this one person that we'd met! As above, for a while they had Charlie's disadvantage. Jonah suggested "minotaurs use weapons" as a weird probably-not-viable idea, I tried it anyway, it took a lot of reprogramming to make it work but I loved it. It was too minor just on Minotaurs though so I extended it to all enemies.
Their runepower started as re-randomising the walls, generating a new level (like Zaga-33's "quake" item). Then I thought - scoring a gem triggers that effect, so why not simplify that to a power that scores a gem? Which is obviously really good. It ties several effects together to make a very flexible ability - use it to get past bad wall layouts, to heal, with curses for the ghost effect, or find weapons with gem triggers to make a weird combo. Or maybe simply as a scoring effect! So that was okay, but led to degenerate builds where you could stay in place on a rune-generation weapon, felt quite similar to the old Dream Wheel combos. Leon suggested teleporting to the gem to break stay-in-place builds, this lost some of the feeling of a merchant just buying points but solved enough problems to be worth it. Still you could save up a lot of runes and jump jump jump, so I went for the same solution as with Dream Wheel: it only works half the time. (The opposite half from the Wheel, so they can cover for each other!) A two-part power is complex but acceptable for final expansion; the night-time aspect is kept as simple as possible.
And that is plenty for tonight! The deluxe-sized expansion deserves two posts.
No comments:
Post a Comment