Plankton Games Journal

Risky math

2012-01-24T10:01:00.000-05:00

Risk battles, thoroughly quantified. Takeaway: Even for evenly matched armies, the attacker gets more likely to win the more each side has.

Big cards from TGC

2012-01-12T08:56:00.002-05:00

New jumbo card template
(from TGC site)

TheGameCrafter.com announces a new big card size (they call them Jumbo cards). At 3.5" by 5.5", they're about the size of a photograph. My mind jumped to Dixit - the only game that I came up with quickly that uses super-big cards. In Dixit's case, I think it's for two reasons; one, because the cards are the focus for all players simultaneously, so everybody needs to be able to see them, and two, to show off the beautiful artwork by Marie Cardouat.

Neat-o Dixit art
(from a review by
Tiffany Smith on BGG)

I'm always happy to see new options there, but I can't immediately figure out how I'd use this. Still, it could be fun, and now that it's there, I'm sure I can make my way toward it in future designs. What I'd really like to see is mini-cards, but of course those are much harder to make in a print-on-demand format. The cutting doesn't get any more precise when you shrink the cards, so you have more and more of the card edge needed for a safety buffer.

Game in progress - Wordy

2011-12-31T20:17:00.000-05:00

Wordy in mid-game - bonus points for
anyone who can tell me the last word...

I spent a chunk of December working on a JavaScript-based game. My wife and I had enjoyed playing Zynga's WordTwist very much, but Zynga canceled that game earlier this year. So, I decided to recreate it, or something like it. This is not a very original concept - Word Whomp is basically the same thing, and there are numerous others - but still a fun way to exercise one's mental muscles, and I learned some cool stuff about JavaScript and browser-based games.

I'm still working on it, but give it a try if you want. I haven't done much interface work - e.g., no instructions! But it works. We've played a bunch of games of it already. To play, type any words you can make out of the letters provided, and try to get them all in the time limit.

I built it using a little PHP and a lot of JavaScript with a bunch of help from the CraftyJS game library, which I'd recommend to anybody. The dictionary I used was a subset of Kevin Atkinson's SCOWL project which was super-useful - I didn't want to use the whole Scrabble dictionary with all the really obscure words, but I wanted it to be mostly complete, and SCOWL let me decide what level of obscurity I was comfortable with. I'm still editing my list as I discover words it doesn't have (or words that it does have that it shouldn't!).

Anyway, give it a try, and let me know what you think! The game is here:
http://planktongames.com/wordy

Helpful post on the bidding and manufacturing process

2011-12-31T19:51:00.002-05:00

There's a post from Mike Lee at Panda Game Manufacturing over at the Tasty Minstrel Games blog which goes through the steps of getting a game manufactured in China (or elsewhere overseas, I suppose). A very helpful post covering the whole process, a process I've only taken a couple steps into.

One of the quotes I got for manufacturing Diggity was from Panda, and they were competitive; their products are high quality, at least the couple of them I've seen (e.g. Pandemic, Train of Thought). I'd definitely recommend them.

TheGameCrafter offers hexes and square cards

2011-12-09T16:49:00.001-05:00

TGC Hex card template

TheGameCrafter.com is now offering hex cards and square cards. The hexes are 3.5" the short way, 3.75" diagonal, and the squares are 3.5" on a side. They're printed 12 to a page (regular poker cards are 18 to a page), and a page of printed cardstock in whatever form you choose is $2.29 at TGC, so if you make your deck divisible by 12, that's 19 cents a card - pretty great.

This is a really cool new feature - I love it when they add new printed options. This one is especially good because it allows for map-building games (although the tiles are the standard thick glossy cardstock, so not too thick). I don't think either of these will fit too well in the new tuckbox or printed small box options TGC offers, but they'd go in the big all-purpose 10"x10" boxes they use.

Here are links to the particular description pages with templates for designers:
Hexes here
Squares here

How not to handle Kickstarter

2011-12-02T02:09:00.001-05:00

Chris Norwood over at GamerChris has a detailed takedown of a project he recently supported via Kickstarter. The details are in his post, but it sounds like the company in question made two bad decisions - first, they sold copies of the game to random convention attendees before sending them to their Kickstarter supporters, and second, they included materials that were supposedly "exclusive" to Kickstarter supporters in every game of their initial 5,000 game print run.

The game got funded, and a 5,000 print run is terrific, especially if it sells out, but I'm betting their next Kickstarter project (running now) might not draw too much support from those who, like Chris, feel justifiably betrayed. Part of the fun of supporting something on Kickstarter is being in at the beginning and feeling like you're doing something special; Chris' post is a great warning that the perks, though usually minor, are still really important to those who've done you the great favor of supporting you. He's got some good advice for others who go this route, too. Something to keep in mind if I try a Kickstarter-funded project in the future.

More printed boxes at TGC.

2011-12-01T20:47:00.001-05:00

TheGameCrafter.com medium box (from TGC site)

TheGameCrafter.com adds another box size. This is a bit bigger (and heftier) than their tuckboxes, and is apparently fully customizable like the tuckboxes. The foam insert is an interesting touch. At first sight, it seemed a little cheesy to me, but I haven't seen one in real life, and the more I think about it, the more I think it might work well. I'm just used to cardboard or plastic inserts rather than foam. The design seems pretty flexible, but it also doesn't allow a ton of stuff to fit in the box - each of the four bays can hold 68 cards or a small stash of plastic bits. The box can't hold any of their printed boards other than the 4x4 mini-board size, but it does allow the custom 1.25" token chips with stickers, which are a super-flexible option for many games.

This is maybe more attractive than their full-size box for small games with only cards and bits (no boards). At $4, it would be a significant fraction of the cost of a game, I'd bet, but it could also look pretty sharp if you print all over the box. The closure might not stand up to repeated use, but games don't get opened all that much, and I shouldn't judge it before I see it in person.

More on SuperiorPOD's new service

2011-11-23T23:18:00.001-05:00

In an earlier post today, I mentioned SuperiorPOD's new distribution service, and I said I couldn't find much detail on what extra parts they offer. Well, further research has revealed this page which has a good summary of the other stuff they offer.

The bottom line: more printed products and components and generally cheaper than TheGameCrafter.com's current offerings, especially for game boxes, but still a fairly maddeningly opaque site with hard-to-find templates, details, and pricing. If you're willing to write and ask, it looks like you can eventually work out what you need, but some folks in the forum above indicate a pretty slow set-up process (extending to months). I'd rather have it readily available and clear, like TGC does. As of now, it looks like you can't have both things (good prices, more extensive printed component offerings, and possible game store distribution of SuperiorPOD vs. straightforward, easy-to-use interface, easy storefront site, and numerous plastic parts of TGC).

Distribution service

2011-11-23T14:35:00.001-05:00

From a new e-mail I got this morning - SuperiorPOD is trying to bridge the gap between print-on-demand, direct sales (which TheGameCrafter and SuperiorPOD itself provide) and getting games into actual retail stores. The service they've set up is here - Adventure Game Source. It looks like what they're doing is creating a wholesale style distribution service, similar to what traditionally published games use, that retail stores can order from. They also claim to have printing capabilities for lots of different parts and packaging.

Key things I don't know yet:

How does the MSRP for a game get set? Given that they're offering a 45% discount off this price for distributors, and that print-on-demand costs are generally far higher than printing a whole bunch of a game at once, this could be tricky.
How hard is it to get listed through the service? They only have an e-mail address to send your stuff too, and that makes it look like they need to look over your game and approve it for their model. I'm not sure how hard it is to be accepted to the program.

One thing that has always frustrated me with SuperiorPOD's site is that, even though they seem to have some pretty neat publication options and a lot of flexibility, their site is difficult to navigate, and key pricing or design information is hard or impossible to find.

So, I don't really know what to make of this. I got some copies of my games from them a while ago, and the quality was excellent, although the timing and communication left a lot to be desired. The merge and then un-merge with TheGameCrafter has left these two companies as rivals. From my point of view TGC has some advantages - clear, relatively easy-to-use website, consistent service, clear lines of communication, and lots and lots of standard game parts - but cedes ground to SuperiorPOD in other areas, like cost, variety of printed parts and packaging, and now this distribution option.

I see that Andreas Propst has moved Elemental Clash to this service, so he must have found an advantage there. Maybe I'll see what they can do with Diggity.

More navel-gazing about Kickstarter

2011-11-17T15:03:00.001-05:00

In response to this post, reader Wordman says the following:

Grant's critique rings hollow to me. Not because his analysis is wrong, but because... well... consider this...

You live in a world that has games, but Kickstarter doesn't exist. A magic man appears and says "if you open this magic box, the world will transformed into a place that has many, many more games for you to choose from. Many of them might be worse than games you have now. A few of them, though, will probably be awesome." Do you open the box?

I would. I don't see the downside. I guess Grant's concern is that some people somewhere might be duped into buying a bad game. Or, perhaps that I, with my powers to choose for myself, might spend my money un-optimally on a game that wouldn't have had the opportunity to take my money if I hadn't opened the box. Why is that Grant's problem? I'd rather have the choice.

A good hypothetical. I didn't mean to indicate that I thought Kickstarter shouldn't exist, or that it was bad for boardgame designers - on the contrary, I think it's terrific that it exists, and it's great that people are having success using it to produce games. One of the biggest barriers to entry to the board game market is the huge up-front investment required for game production, as I've discussed frequently (e.g. here). Kickstarter and similar crowd-funding places smooth out that barrier.

My problem with it, and I don't really have much of one, is that it nearly completely shifts the burden of the process from the designer to the consumer. The model for traditional publishing normally like either of these:

Design a game --> Invest a bunch of money --> Produce and sell game --> Recoup money

Design a game --> Invest a bunch of money --> Produce game, sell hardly any --> Become poor and bitter
Obviously, the second part of that chain is the barrier, and the potential costs are borne by the designer or publisher. With Kickstarter, the designer benefits by not having to risk lots of money, shifting that burden directly to the customer. However, if the game isn't good, the bitterness is still present, but shifted to his/her funders. So, it's win-win for the designer/publisher, but a mixed bag for the funder. But for both parties, there is a dilution of both risk and of bitterness there, which is good - I'm less bummed having dropped $20 on a bad Kickstarter game than I am having blown $10,000 to get a game printed that nobody buys.

I think Grant's major complaint is not that Kickstarter is bad, but that because it's win-win for the designer, there's a much weaker filter for the projects in question. That means the average quality of published games will have to go down (perhaps precipitously so on Kickstarter) while the number of published games will go way up. A little of this is a great thing - Wordman rightly points out that with a bigger pool of games to choose from, more awesome games will be produced rather than sitting in desk drawers and hard drives, and we may see great games that would never have come out. There's a downside here too, especially if the barrier gets too low - it's like the Internet in general. Many more people have a chance to speak, but they don't necessarily have something to say.

So, I like Kickstarter, and I think on balance it's great for independent (a fancy word for unpublished) game designers. There's a downside, too, though, and there's a chance that if a bunch of crappy games all go to the well at the same time or over and over again, it'll dry up. But so far, it's been better and grown faster than I thought possible, so what do I know?

I do worry that, as sometimes happens at TheGameCrafter.com, if most of the projects aren't of very high quality, it will become difficult to find the good ones among the sea of crap. TGC actually created a very small barrier in a recent update - they require at least one copy of a game to be purchased before it can be published to the shop - and I think it has helped raise the bar a little bit.

Kickstarter for games - a critique

2011-11-12T00:16:00.001-05:00

Really interesting critique/rant by Grant Rodiek about using Kickstarter for game projects over here at Exiled Here. I've been aware of Grant's game, Farmageddon, on TheGameCrafter.com for a while, and it sounds like he's done some parallel things (and had parallel thoughts) as he's moved through the independent design/publishing realm. His ideas on Kickstarter mirror mine - a great opportunity, but one that's becoming very crowded and inconsistently good.

Oceans Elevens

2011-11-10T15:43:00.001-05:00

I'm guest-hosting the monthly Game Design Showdown over at Board Game Designers Forum. I required an ocean theme ('cause I'm a marine geologist) and a voting mechanic ('cause it's November). Eight good entries already, and there might be more before the day is through. I miss not entering, but it's fun seeing what people come up with. I was a little worried that I wouldn't attract any entries, but that's not been the case.

Warped pictures

2011-11-09T16:41:00.002-05:00

I took some pictures of one of my current projects, Warped, which I entered in TheGameCrafter's vehicle design contest and which I've now sent off to Hippodice's design contest. I'll see what Hippodice says - I should know within a month or so if it makes it to the playtest round.

It looks cool, although I don't think I'd ever actually play it on a table with holes in it - too many pieces to fall through. Pretty neat how much stuff you can get for under $20 - that's a lot of parts.

TGC offering actual gameboards

2011-11-09T08:40:00.004-05:00

Example new TGC board.
Image from their post (linked above)

See here. These look as good as regular gameboards, and I assume the printing and development interface will meet TGC's high standards. At $10 a pop, they add significantly to the cost of your game, but this is still a killer feature, allowing you to produce nearly any component via TGC.

They're originally 18"x18" and fold twice to 9"x9", which means they'll fit in TheGameCrafter's new standard black boxes. Pretty cool. I'm going to see if I can stretch/pad the Yoggity artwork to fit and then get one printed up. Hopefully it will also work for my product-in-development, Zombie Ball.

Social media presences of questionable value

2011-11-08T19:24:00.001-05:00

I set up a Google+ page for Plankton Games. Not sure what that's worth. My Facebook Plankton Games page has never been visited by anybody but me, as far as I can tell. But maybe Google+ will be different - it's tied to the search engine better, presumably. We'll see.

More Hex Tiles

2011-10-30T18:17:00.002-04:00

Zounds! It works! A hex overlay that will sit on top of other art. Nice. Now, if I were just a good enough artist to draw a top view of a cemetery arena...

Hex grid in illustrator

2011-10-30T16:10:00.005-04:00

A neat step-by-step tutorial for making a hex grid pattern in Illustrator. I'm working on better art for my Zombie Ball game (and maybe a better title, too), so I need this kind of thing. I'm going to give it a try, and I'll post the results.

I picked up Illustrator last year both for games and because I often have students who need to use it or something similar, and I figured it would be useful to learn it. I find it much more difficult than Photoshop, which I picked up mostly right away. The menus and controls seem much more cryptic (although Photoshop sure has some weird stuff).

Wrong takeaway

2011-10-28T16:01:00.000-04:00

From Kickstarter Funding by Days of the Week,
Richard Bliss, Purple Pawn, 10/28/2011

Richard Bliss over at the Purple Pawn posted some graphs of Kickstarter game project funding campaign success. He implies, I think, that starting your campaign on Sunday might make it more likely to be successful. I think that's a misreading of the data. I think the graph actually reflects merely the frequency of campaign starts per day, not the probability of success per day. If I'm right, that means most people begin campaigns on Sunday, which makes sense; you work all week and then use the weekend to put your finishing touches on the project, then post it on Sunday. To make the point the article suggests, what you'd actually need is a percent of campaigns that were successful plotted by the day they started. My guess is that this would be nearly flat.

I think the day-of-week thing is probably nearly irrelevant to project success, since most of the campaigns run several weeks to two months. If anything, you might actually want to AVOID a Sunday start so as not to be hidden by the deluge of new projects coming out on the weekend. Wednesday is your friend. Unless of course people only browse projects over the weekend too...

Design Contests

2011-10-27T17:10:00.000-04:00

The contest I entered Warped! in is over, with results here.

Short analysis - I didn't place in the top five, which is all the results they gave. I was sad, because the game is a lot of fun, is complex, and seems well-balanced, and some of the other entries that placed don't seem like they would be.

Long analysis - I found myself wondering, as I often do upon hearing contest results, why my game didn't do better. I've entered a number of game design competitions, and of these, Hippodice and the Rio Grande competition last fall were the only ones I've gotten feedback from. Occasionally I get some feedback from the monthly BGDF design showdowns (though not from people who've actually played the game, since the entry is just an 800-word description/rules document with a couple small pictures).

The feedback from Hippodice was very brief, although I was very grateful that they took the time to send it (I'll need to post that here sometime to show what they do). The feedback from the Rio Grande competition made it clear that the judges had left out a key component (trading) to the game they were playing (Yoggity), a component that changes the game from mostly luck-based to very strategic.

So, what did I learn from this TheGameCrafter.com competition? Hard to say, with no feedback other than not making it. If I've followed the progress of judging correctly, the final five were the only ones actually created and played by the judges. The rest (including mine) I assume were judged based on rules, artwork, and presentation. The standards and system they used for judging the final version wasn't in the original announcement of the contest, so there'd have been no way to tweak the game toward the judging.

I guess what I'm getting at is some advice to myself: don't enter the contests to get feedback about your games. The only feedback you're likely to get is very simple - you won, or you lost, or maybe, if you're lucky, some placement information. Who wins and loses depends on how good your game is, certainly, but it also depends on what standards they're using (which you don't always know), how the judges interpret those standards (which you can't know), and a host of other idiosyncratic factors, like whether the judges' taste matches your theme or your art or your complexity level, whether they've just played a bunch of games like yours - all stuff you can't know and can't control.

So, if you're not entering to get feedback (a lesson I need to learn), then why enter? The only valid reasons I can see are:

A reason to design a game, and a deadline to design it by
The thrill of the competition
A chance to gain free exposure for your game (very unlikely unless you win a prestigious contest)
A prize (seldom offered, but cool when it is)

#1 - a reason to design - is a good benefit for me - I like working on games, and having the restrictions and deadlines for competitions helps me focus.

I get a lot of #2, the excitement, also, although when the judging is seemingly more random (or maybe just more hidden) that tends to dampen the thrill. In many of these contests, too, it's very difficult to know what your competitor's games are like, which makes it difficult to evaluate the results - you don't know whether to feel righteously thrashed by superior design or bitter and unappreciated. That's one of the great things about the BGDF showdowns - you get to see everybody's whole entry, and they're short enough that you can read and understand them all.

#3 (exposure) and #4 (a prize) I haven't won enough to see. The BGDF showdowns, of which I've won a few, offer no prize and nearly no exposure. The bigger ones would certainly do more, sometimes even the holy grail of publication, but I've only entered a few of those.

So, I think I have to content myself with practice designing and the excitement of competition, and let the rest of it go. Obviously, as I've seen, even in a competition, people aren't going to have a chance to get to know your game well, and may not even play it, so it's not really much of a measure of how "good" it is. But good rules and good graphical presentation are key, because that's something that even the most rushed judges are going to take a look at.

Kickstarter > $1 million

2011-10-23T20:15:00.003-04:00

Really interesting article over at the Purple Pawn about success people have had using Kickstarter.com to fund boardgame startups. I've covered this here before and interviewed a few successful designers (see other posts with the Kickstarter label), but the total amount of money raised is pretty staggering. This is becoming a really good way for some people to fund the production of some games. The question is, are my games (and whoever I'd recruit to Kickstarter) good enough to get some funding there?

Warped in published form...

2011-10-23T17:30:00.001-04:00

Got my copy of Warped from TheGameCrafter.com, and it looks great, my crummy laptop camera notwithstanding. Still waiting on the results of their Vehicle Game Design Contest - they've announced results for the artwork and creativity categories there, neither of which I expected my game to win, but we're still waiting on the final winner.

The game plays well; I've played five games now, tweaking various rules, and it's a lot of fun. It bogs down a teeny bit with four (you have to wait more for your turn), and there's a lot of stuff to remember as you plot out your moves, but I don't think it's too complex. Definitely a game in the more advanced European style.

Zombie Ball takes 2nd

2011-10-23T17:23:00.002-04:00

My entry for the October GDS at BGDF.com took second. The entries are here - mine's #5. I'm happy about that - the first place game was very creative, and I voted for it.

I've played my game a few times now, and it's super fun. I'll post revised rules and some other stuff on here soon. I'm trying to make better art for my gameboards, but I need to work up my Illustrator skills some. And develop some sense of visual art.

Bones and more bones

2011-10-11T08:11:00.002-04:00

Ten entries in the BGDF challenge this month. The theme and restriction has made several of them seemingly similar within a couple broad categories - including "sort out body parts" and "undead things beat each other up." It'll be interesting to see how it's judged - the outcomes in this competition always seem a little bit random to me, although the winner is usually a good game.

BGDF contest for October

2011-10-09T22:31:00.000-04:00

Got my entry in, after sitting one out. This one's requirements are the dead and a Mancala-style choosing mechanism. We'll see how I do; I haven't made a game like this entry before. I'm hoping to get to playtest it some more with some friends this week. I'll report how it goes, and how it does in the contest.

Still trying to figure out what I'll send off to Hippodice this year. I might try this game, and I might try Warped, my entry in TGC's vehicle contest. Or, I might resubmit Yoggity with some rules changes I came up with over the summer. Hmm...

TGC Vehicle design contest submissions

2011-10-04T20:13:00.000-04:00

Vehicle Types

They got 28 submissions over at TheGameCrafter.com for their vehicle design contest. I looked through all of them quickly just to see where I stood. The most common vehicles used are cars, making up nearly half. The most common game themes involve racing (not unlikely, given the many cars-based games), trading, and war, with some simulations built in. It was somewhat difficult to distinguish some of these categories for some games.

Game Types

Most interesting for me was that of the space games, which were 1/4 of the total, most were space trading games of one sort or another, where you are visiting places and gathering goods. That makes my submission, Warped, seem not nearly so unique, and may make that whole genre tiresome to the judges as they wade through many sets of similar rules.

By my (admittedly idiosyncratic) standards, I'd say roughly half of the entries I categorized as flawed in some significant way and not a threat to win. This was not usually based on looking at the rules, although I did read through some of them. The problems included very crude art, very crude or simplistic design, poorly-written or incomplete descriptions, or other reasons.

My easy dismissal of these might be wrong - there could be a gem of gameplay in there, hidden behind bad art, in the same way that visually beautiful games can often suck in terms of gameplay. About 1/4 of the games had good to great art. My art isn't the greatest, but it's OK, and the game behind it is fun. I'm not certain the rules will make it clear how fun it is, and there are some complexities that I'm not sure I got across. The fact that I'm competing with six other space-trading games is troubling, too.

Well, we'll see how it goes. As usual, I'm sure I'm over-thinking this.