I'm really excited about the progress of several of the games I'm working on, and I'll start with 3colors. I consider myself to be a pretty talented game designer in most things, and an absolutely abysmal designer when it comes to creating game wrappers. 3colors was no exception, as I was honestly considering having the game play out with just the colored circles that I made from the Youtube video.
Even though I know that I would have been happy with that game, base mechanics with no story are not what make excellent games. They make excellent prototypes, and that's what I had. In my mind, the prototype involved matching things in your bank to things on the board, so I tried for quite some time to think of a wrapper involving that. What kinds of things could be in the bank that would make sense to match on the board? Food? Monsters? Animals? AngryBirds? At the time, I had quite the list of things of things that one could match up, but none of them seemed to work because they would all be randomized in the bank. If your foods were peanut butter, jelly, and bread, then what happens when you have bacon, lettuce, and tomato? Would you end up with peanut butter and bacon (potentially delicious)?
Instead of having sets of things that match, I moved on to random things, like monsters or animals. If these groups of items are random, however, why are you matching them? Why are you matching 2 dogs and a cat? Thus, my problem: going towards sets of things wouldn't work because they would mis-match in the randomizer, and going towards random things wouldn't work because it would never make sense why you were matching totally random things.
I was stuck, so I talked with Corrinne Lewis--one of the EAE advisors--about what kinds of wrappers I could develop for the game. Her approach was excellent, and the core concept of this blog post: Instead of trying to think of a wrapper for the mechanic that I couldn't get to work, try to find a different core aspect of the game to base a wrapper on. Good games tell a story, she said, and you need to find a wrapper that explains the mechanics so that people will understand your game faster than handing them the prototype.
What is the core mechanic of your game that you want to use a wrapper to convey? Clearly, matching isn't working, so she suggested exploring the "capture" aspect of the game. What kinds of things are people used to capturing? Territories, like in Risk? Companies, like in Acquire? What about capturing ships? Now you're playing as a pirate, trying to capture all the ships on the "ocean", and each ship has a different sail that changes when you double capture it. Excellent.
I shared this with the team, and Derek Higgs--one of our engineers--suggested using Tiki masks that flipped upside down when you captured or un-captured them. This led to what our game is now by showing a new core mechanic: toggling a grid of points. I'd never seen this because I went too narrow in my initial design by calling this action a "capture", which limited the design space of what we can tell a story about. Now that we were thinking about flipping things back and forth, it was a short walk to come to flipping different colored turtles from off their backs. Its satisfying, its something that everyone can relate to, and most importantly, its a wrapper that enables people to understand the mechanics of our game far faster than anything else could.
I'm excited because its the best wrapper-creation process I've been a part of, but also excited from the lessons that I learned from it:
- Explore several different core mechanics of your game to develop a wrapper for, don't get stuck on one that isn't working, and
- While making a prototype, always describe things in the most generic way possible. Un-necessarily defining things limits the creative ideas of how to describe the game later on.
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