droqen's forum-shaped notebook

- Credits! Kudos to people who made the game, and who helped with the talk

- Describing: What is a Deckbuilder?

Kinda niche genre! So why would you care? Describing why in quantitative and qualitative terms. Who cares? "Lots of people like them, want to play them." "With these kinds of games, at least right now, someone is gonna pay some attention to it."

Interesting topic, not a fan of starting with "Why would you care?" but that's ok

EDIT:: Ezra asked, why am I not a fan? My answer was wholly insufficient, I don't actually remember, really, but i'll summarize my babbling thoughts as "Why is it good?" is a more important and more whole question! But I also think "Why would you care?" is sort of like a subset of something being good.

Enjoyable to design! That's fun

- Replayable, unpredictable. You have access to the same emotional content as the players.

You still need to playtest with players who are better than you, as well as players who are new, but you can still remain a useful playtester throughout development

Focusing on where we went wrong with Hellscaper, it's not as fun as it should/could be

(K)FUN
Raph Koster
K-Fun is the fun you get when you learn something.

The fun of learning is deeply tied to how much you can learn about something. (DEPTH)

The length of time it would take to express a winning strategy. You want people to argue forever about what the right decision is.

IDEAL : Multiple factors to consider, and none dominate.

Diagram of SYNERGIES...

On the left, little synergy 'wells' (Hellscaper) - Once you start down a path, there's little reason to diverge.

On the right, a much more spread out web (Luck be a Landlord)

COGNITIVE LOAD
People can hold 4-7 things in their head at the same time.
("Which is really low if you think about it?")

- Reduce busywork (e.g. What is 46 * 73?)
- Increase clarity

^ Rather than busywork and clarity I would prefer to frame as "Reduce cognitive load spent on unimportant/uninteresting things" and "This increases available cognitive load to spend on important/interesting things". Noise to signal? But it's up to you to determine what is noise and what is signal

When seeing a new card, balance between
- Lots of text, cool new mechanics
- vs Thinking about synergies, strategies, the future

You can use various languages to communicate/suggest how synergy works! Visual, text, etc.

"This next section is about..." -- Feel like there's a better way to introduce a section! More engaging/more fluid maybe?

marketing: a machine that is BOTH how you play the game and also how people talk about it.

> as always im a big fan of ALL IS ONE type thinking and strategies :)

My SYNERGY quest
The Collector - It's kinda like a relic, legendary, doesn't show up very often? Memorable moment, big shot of k-fun. Actually synergizes with Vampire (shh)

Q: DID YOU DESIGN AROUND PEOPLE WRITING DOWN LONG STRATEGIES?

A: Not that much! This is from Slay the Spire, not Hellscaper; we don't have a subreddit, haha. Mostly it was a small group of friends giving feedback. I wasn't evaluating based on length of strategy description.

Q: What's the line between removing too much busywork and not enough? Too much clarity and not enough?

A: not actually sure! need to make more of these games. as a designer in the past i was worried about reducing the busywork, but now i think that's wrong-headed. we can add more stuff for people to learn rather than try to obscure the things that are already there? more of an aesthetic choice though, cryptic games do exist that go for a certain vibe

Q: WHAT WOULD YOU DO DIFFERENTLY ON HELLSCAPER?

A: Great question. The main thing is, in terms of bang for your buck, we could have done better synergy? The process I used was starting from finished decks and working backwards, which produced very predictable final decks... could an unknitting process work? Should have embraced more organic chaos

(My thought: Dang, I don't know! I'm leaning towards the first myself, but, hmm. Topic to discuss with Ezra later. I'm not going to try and ask a non-question here lol)

(Nvm I have to ask)

My Q: HOW DID YOU COME UP WITH THOSE FINISHED DECKS? WAS IT AN ORGANIC PROCESS?

A: It was a chaotic process haha. We designed a bunch of cards, then identified groups of cards that we thought would work well together, and then added them in big chunks.

Q: WILL YOU MAKE MORE?

A: Yes I have a lot of ideas.
reminder to self: send ezra https://store.steampowered.com/app/1642010/h8machine/
sent!

A2: It was going to be a minimalist citybuilder, but we pivoted to deckbuilder (!!!). This is my first deckbuilder, yes.

Q: OTHER INTERESTIGN DESIGN REALMS?

A: Game that asks you questions that you respond to. Heist game. More deckbuilders ofc. Horror kick.