Ezra's Hellscaper postmortem

[droqen]

Regarding Ezra Szanton's
Hellscaper postmortem
(given live on a video call)

[droqen]

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

- Describing: What is a Deckbuilder?

[droqen]

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.

[droqen]

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

[droqen]

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

[droqen]

(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.

[droqen]

IDEAL : Multiple factors to consider, and none dominate.

[droqen]

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)

[droqen]

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

[droqen]

^ 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

[droqen]

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

[droqen]

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

[droqen]

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

[droqen]

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 :)

[droqen]

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)