I've spent the first few posts describing the mechanics of Spell Valley, the shape of its board, and the heroes that bring it to life. But I'm a big believer in philosophy, and it's worth stepping back to talk about the larger principles that guide my design, principles that I think can help fellow game designers embarking on journeys of their own. The framework I'll lay out is not the only way to assess games, which are incredibly varied and can succeed along myriad dimensions, many of which are yet to be discovered. But I do think this approach applies to many games and can be clarifying for new designers who need to develop a meta-level understanding of the process.
It sounds simple, but one of the best ways to assess a game is with a cost-benefit analysis. People love playing great games, but it's not particularly likely that your game qualifies as such. To find out, players have to give you their time, up front, when they could be doing anything else. Your game has to compete with all the other great games on the market, with all other media, and with all the more immediately practical ways that people can spend their attention. We all come to the world with a limited amount of time, and to be successful commercially—much less great—your game has to earn time from people that have no obligation to you. It sounds transactional at first, but to conceptualize this up-front investment as anything besides a cost is a mistake. You have a limited window to prove to players that your pet project is worth their time, and until they can feel the satisfaction of goal creation and completion, they have little reason to expect that your game is any different from the vast majority of others that are not worth their attention. The faster you can explain the basics of your game, open a space for the player to pursue goals, and get the hell out of the way, the more likely it is that players will see the value of your product and decide to come back the next day, and the next day, and maybe even the day after that.
Lots of games have taken this competitive environment as license to engage in all sorts of gross short-term behaviors. Focusing on cheap thrills and addictive loops that keep the monkey brain engaged even when the cortex knows better. But this is ultimately a self-defeating approach. The most high-profile offenders are usually games that are genuinely good, and maybe don't believe it or don't realize that vapid mechanics and predatory tactics turn players off in the long run. If your players leave a week later, that's probably not going to cut it. Your game needs legs. It has to offer something of genuine value to players over time, or they won't keep playing. It has to grow and change and expand as the players do, showing them an ever expanding frontier of new ideas and possibilities. The best games change and evolve for years and decades, as geniuses revolutionize and redefine excellence, finding new tactics and strategies that somehow had been there since the beginning. Critically, this means you can't understand your game. Of course, you should understand your game's rules and rationale as much as possible, but the full implications of that system must remain forever beyond your comprehension. If you understand all the implications of your game simulation, how do you expect it to marvel players for years?
These two virtues, low costs to learn and high benefits to play, are often summed up as "easy to learn, hard to master". But I like to describe them as accessibility and depth. The easier it is for players to learn your game, the more accessible it is. If your game takes a lifetime to master, then it must be incredibly deep. Much is made of the dichotomy between casual and hardcore games. Casual games are easy to learn but aren't very interesting to hardcore gamers, who want a deep and intricate gameplay experience—even if that comes at the cost of accessibility. Amongst commercially successful games there are those that succeed more in virtue of the accessibility, and others which succeed more in virtue of their depth. But this tends to create the impression that game design is about making tradeoffs between depth and accessibility, about deciding whether your game will be deep or accessible. Frankly, this is a deeply misguided view. Any discussion of the tradeoffs between casual and hardcore games has typically already assumed that the games are successful. If you are an aspiring game designer, your game is not successful, and that's okay. Every game was unsuccessful once. If your game can be great, it's because it has the potential to become both unusually deep and unusually accessible. If your game design decisions are constantly trading off significant amounts of accessibility for depth, or depth for accessibility, then you won't make progress, and your game will remain both hard to learn and easy to master.
Luckily, life is not zero-sum and neither is game design. Great games became great because they were carefully honed into something that is both accessible and deep. The art of game design consists of decisions which make your game both deeper and more accessible simultaneously. If we look carefully at truly great games, then a series of patterns starts to emerge. Principles which, if followed, amplify both virtues.
A few that we follow at Bad Bishop include:
Push mechanics into the physics layer
Compress inputs
Build heroes not processes
Explain with archetypes
Monetize value
All of these topics deserve posts in and of themselves—in some cases several. Some are especially important to depth and some especially important to accessibility, but all enhance both. This blog is about Spell Valley, but it's also about the philosophy of game design, and I look forward to exploring all of these principles at length.