More on SCG4
Friday, May 27, 2011 at 6:23PM While my main job right now is finishing up Flash Duel: Raid on Deathstrike Dragon and the Puzzle Strike Upgrade Pack (and after that, the full Puzzle Strike Expansion and Yomi expansion), my hobbies are "Sirlin Card Game 4" and the Fantasy Strike fighting game.
I told you guys a bit about the fourth card game before, in painfully vague terms. I think I have to keep that up for a while unfortunately, but I can tell you more about how designs develop, even without the details. The last time I mentioned this game, I said how it was like Magic: the Gathering, but with some major new thing, and that even with that thing completely changing the whole game, you still have Llanowar Elves or whatever. So I had two "big ideas" on the table to push the game into even newer territory (in addition to the original big idea that really makes the whole game work in the first place). I also mentioned how I talked to Soren Johnson (Civilization 4) about it, and though we only talked that one time, I'll use his comments back then as a point of reference.
Big Idea #1
One of the two ideas he liked a lot, so I developed it more. I was concerned that it was too mentally demanding, especially in the first turn of the game, but it added a lot of flavor and also potential for strategy. The mechanics of the game in general suggest a certain theme and this idea played right into that theme, so it's easy to see why Soren liked it. After more playtesting with and without this mechanic, I have to say the game is just smoother and more fun to play when it's not there. Sometimes you have to cut good ideas. Even a good idea has to pull its weight and add more to the game than it subtracts. (Here, the subtraction was too much to keep track of and too much think about without it quite justifying the extra strategy and flavor.) I still keep this idea in the back of my mind though.
Big Idea #2
The other "big idea" was something I had tried to make work for a long time, and it never really did. Soren wasn't excited about it to begin with, but he said maybe there was potential on this one if it could be leveraged as a way to simplify the presentation of the entire game. It reminded him of something in Civ (as well as many other games, but he worked on Civ after all). I wanted this idea for flavor reasons and because I had a vague sense that it could somehow improve gameplay, I just couldn't figure out how. I hadn't thought of Soren's take that it could maybe ALSO simplify things, though. There's a lot of information you have to be aware of during this game, more than at any given time during a game of Magic, and he was very concerned about this. So he proposed a way to use this particular idea in a way that lets him only focus on a subset of all the stuff at any given time. Or at the very least, only have to focus on a subset of it all during the first couple turns. He said that if you can access more stuff as the game goes on, it feels less intimidating and it can also be good for strategy.
Soren's particular suggestions of how to implement this didn't work, but the concept was sound. I found a different way that does work and it turned out to be an incredible advancement for the game. Improvements to a game might come in the areas of a) accessibility, b) strategy, or c) flavor. It's rare and amazing that
