The first link is an incredibly detailed write up by a hobbiest board game designer on the lengths he went to to publish his game Viktory II from early ideas, through play testing, and into production.
In a spirit of full disclosure I actually brought a game of this based solely on this write up. It got played once and if I'm honest I was not that impressed. He did achieve a lot of his design goals however and it's a much better game then Risk.
Years back some of the first game design I did was based around trying to work out "my perfect MMORPG" - obviously never went anywhere but it was an interesting thing to do. However I did a lot of reading around the subject and came across a really interesting blog about MMORPG design and it's still worth a read as his posts are an interesting and detailed view into computer game design. One post in particular - balancing for awesome. A piece of solid advice about how seeking balance - perfect balance - can really damage the fun in your game. And your much better producing balance by making things big but different - in board game terms I think Glory to Rome has this in spade. Every time you look at a card you think - how broken is this? - but when everything is broken nothing is.
If I'm honest with myself GSH is not balanced for awesome - I'm actually just trying to balance it - perhaps a mistake but one I'm comfortable with. After all - producing balance in some sort of ymmetrical game design is much easier then in anything asymmetrical.
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