lewpuls's blog

This is something that should be obvious, yet despite everything I’ve written about beginners designing games I have not said it explicitly. And I know from my teaching experience that to many people it isn’t obvious. It is especially important for people who want to design video games rather than tabletop games.

When you set out to design a game it’s important to know what you want that game to do, what the impact will be on the players. But it’s much more important to know how the game is going to do that.

The Britannia "game system" has been used in other published games such as Maharaja (Avalon Hill), Hispania (Azure Wish), Rus, and most recently Italia (Phalanx) and China: the Middle Kingdom (Decision Games). Some people categorize these and other games such as History of the World as “sweep of history” games. The original game of this category may have been Ancient Conquest, which was recently reissued.

For a couple decades I regularly taught graduate computer management classes. One of the most important themes of those classes was that a manager/supervisor has to recognize what reality is, not what he would like reality to be or what he thinks it ought to be. If you don’t know what’s really going on, how can you make it work better? Yet a great many managers lose track of reality, and the really poor ones are often in what I call “cloud-cuckoo land.”

You might feel that this shouldn’t matter to game designers but in fact it’s very important. Game design in some sense is project management. Your project can’t come to fruition if you don’t recognize the reality of it, the true state of your game.

As some of you know, I recently signed a contract with McFarland & Co, Publishers, for a book about learning to design (video) games. I have just finished the "next-to-final" draft, which is being commented on by some people, and will need to submit the final draft by Oct 15. With luck it will be available next year. (Keep in mind how long these things can take.)

Gamers are often surprised at how long it takes for games to be published. Mayfair recently published a game that one of the principles thought they had had for eight years. Once I decided to revise the Britannia took three years to revise it and get it published. The Dragon Rage reissue took a similar time, though much of that was because it was a startup publisher. I have a game with Mayfair now that they originally saw it PrezCon 2008, if I recall correctly.