The design history of Alucard!
about 7 years ago – Fri, Apr 14, 2017 at 01:25:45 AM

Hey!

Good news! The printer is print print printing the game. Everything has been completely handed off at this point, and so there's not much to talk about on that front.

As a result, I’m going to reduce these updates from weekly to fortnightly. I know, I know - I love talking to you as well, but...well, no news is good news! Until the game is printed, there's not really much I can update you on.

I’ve also started to run out of content for the designer diaries, and so unless anyone has specific elements of the game they’d like to learn more about, I’m going to start winding these down as well. They've been fun to write!

But fear not, we're not done with them yet! As promised, here it is: The Complete History of Alucard

Designer Diary 

Alucard is, by far, my favourite art in the game. He’s up there with the Trickster as the character whose power has changed the least, and so he’s a great way to go through and see how the terminology of this game has changed over time.

To start with, let’s go pre-historic. Alucard, before the game was Dracula’s Feast - before it was horror-themed at all!

Whew! Now this really is going back. I talked a little about this in Update #27; the game that would eventually become Dracula’s Feast was called Masquerade, and it was a disastrous game of fiddly token-tracking and infinite complexity.

After playtesting it once, I tried to cut it down to its core, and came up with Dracula’s Feast.

The character who would become Alucard was the Decoy, and the only thing he really shares with Alucard is that they wanted to be guessed as someone else. (In this version - “the President”).

After that, however (unlike The Trickster) he never changed names. He was Alucard from the moment we made the game horror, right up until the version that is being printed even as we speak.

Here’s the very first version of Alucard-when-he-was-called-Alucard:

Alucard, Version 1

“You must answer ‘yes’ to all rendezvous. You show up as blank during a rendezvous, except against the Magic Mirror. You can also win the game by being named as Dracula.”

Let’s break it down!

“You must answer ‘yes’ to all rendezvous.”

So, first of all, I don’t think that sentence makes sense. 

The dance mechanic was originally called “rendezvous”, and so any time you see that, know that it just means “dancing”...but I didn’t really know how the word “rendezvous” worked (crazy French, what’re you doing!) and so I am using it here to mean “rendezvous request”.

That’s fine! This was purely and simply a proof of concept. I wanted to see if there was even a game here; spending hours and hours on phrasing for a game that I was immediately going to throw out would have been a terrible idea.

For your first draft, keep it rough. You can polish stuff up once you know that you’ve made something fun.

“You show up as blank during a rendezvous, except against the Magic Mirror.”

So much to unpack here.

Either later this year or early next year, the first sequel to Dracula’s Feast is going to be coming to Kickstarter. It’s called “Night of the Mummy”, and it introduces a new concept into the game: ‘hiding’.

I say “new concept” - in fact, as you can see, it comes from the very first draft of Dracula’s Feast. It’s gone through a lot of changes since then, but (as is the case with many sequels/expansions) it was a fun idea that we removed to make the base game as streamlined as possible.

Showing up as blank is the same as hiding, and it’s a pretty simple mechanic. Normally, when two players dance with each other, they just swap cards, look at them, and swap back.

When you’re playing with characters who hide, everyone else shuts their eyes, and both of the dancing players hold up their cards for the other player to see.

BUT if you’re a character who hides, you don’t show your card. You instead show the back of your card.

It results in dancing being more risky for some characters, a higher reward for other characters, and in general leads to a bunch more dancing.

We took it out because the game already has enough going on; as anyone who’s played Dracula’s Feast will tell you, it’s a great game even without the “hiding” mechanic, and removing it cuts down the complexity.

Night of the Mummy is going to work as a standalone game which is also able to be mixed with Dracula’s Feast (One Night Ultimate Werewolf style) and I’m super excited to get it out to everyone.

To add to the confusion, the Magic Mirror referenced in original-Alucard’s ability isn’t the Magic Mirror who you’ll be getting as a promo. Instead, the original-Magic Mirror was a special card who could see into the heart of hiding dancers, and force them to reveal their card.

(This role is now “The Archeologist”, and she’s the Van Helsing of Night of the Mummy - optional, but radically changes the way the hiding characters play!)

"Answer “yes” if guessed as Dracula. You can also win the game by being named as Dracula."

Ah, here’s the Alucard we know and love! The obvious thing to notice here is that “accuse” used to be called “name” (which for a proof of concept, is perfectly fine terminology).

The next version was just a slight tweak in terminology:

Alucard, Version 2

“You can also win the game by being named as Dracula. You must answer “yes” if guessed as Dracula or offered a rendezvous. During a rendezvous you show up as blank.”

No, original-Magic Mirror wasn’t removed from the game. I just made the (obvious) realization that rather than listing the exception on every other card, it should be listed on Magic Mirror.

The only other change here was that (just like Trickster) I combined the “yes” of guesses and rendezvous, and changed the terminology to offered a rendezvous.

All small changes, but important ones. 

Alucard, Version 3

“You can also win the game by being named as Dracula (either individually or during a demask attempt). You must answer “yes” if guessed as Dracula or offered a rendezvous. During a rendezvous you show up as blank.”

So this one has a few key elements: firstly, for an embarrassingly long time (literally years) I thought the term for “removing a mask” was "demask".

No. It’s unmask. Demask is not a word. Demask has never been a word. Why did I think that was a word?

Secondly, “either individually or during a demask attempt” is clunky and confusing. I’d like to claim that it got better, but the truth is, we just got better at hiding how clunky it was.

More on that later.

Alucard, Version 4

“You can also win the game by being accused as Dracula or by being given his name token during a demask attempt. You must answer “yes” if guessed as Dracula or offered a rendezvous. During a rendezvous you show up as blank.”

That’s right; for a while there, every Dracula’s Feast card was novel-length. This version of Alucard: 42 words. The final, printed card: 19.

Also of note: for a while, the accusation cards were “name tokens”. You can see them here:

Alucard, Version 5

Progress! This one is only 35 words.

By the way, I realize that it isn’t strictly necessary to show you every single iteration of the cards. But I think the key to designing good games is to iterate, iterate, iterate, and so I wanted to show you exactly what that process can look like.

I see a lot of designers pitching games that they’ve been working on for all of three days. And hey, if you can make a brilliant game in three days and get it picked up, more power to you. But as a publisher, I’m extremely wary of this - as I’ve said before, until you’ve tried twenty different versions of something, how can you be sure that you’ve made it the most fun it can be?

More than that though: if the designer has properly tested their games, it saves me a lot of time in development. If I think that the game would be far better with twice as many sheep, I can either construct a new copy with more sheep and playtest it, or I can just ask the designer.

“We tried it with more sheep, and we found that there was too much wool and it wasn’t fun any more” can save me a week of playtesting.

“I don’t know; those were just the first numbers we came up with” puts the work on me. I'm already going to be spending months playtesting and developing your game; I'd like to know that you did the same before it got to me.

This is obviously just my personal philosophy; other designers, developers, and publishers will completely disagree. But I’d much rather sign a game that’s been tested from all sides than something which is just a nifty idea.

The big changes in version 5: we have dances! Also, it seems that this was the point that I realized the “hide while dancing” characters were their own expansion, and took them out of the base game.

And of course, this was the first version I actually have the image for. The playtest image I used to represent this “try-hard Dracula” still makes me laugh.

Over the next 18 months, Alucard stayed the same. When I put the game online as a free print-and-play, this is what he looked like:

I continue to love the art on this Alucard. Elsa Lynn (the artist for the print-and-play version of the game) actually submitted this as the art for Dracula; she wanted to do a cute chibi sort of style, but I just couldn’t this little fella as anything but Alucard.

Mechanically he’s identical. His wording is almost identical as well, except the name tokens had become cards, and I had finally learned the word "unmask".

I want to point out the two dots at the bottom: for a long, long time (right up to the version we sent out to reviewers) we gave each character a “complexity rating”.

This was to represent how hard they were to play as, how hard they were to play against...how much they affected the mental overhead involved in any individual game, basically.

The idea was that players could put in all the 1-star complexity characters, and then gradually upgrade until they were playing with the three-star characters.

We eventually ditched this. Partially because the characters slowly became less complex across the board, but mostly (like so, so many ideas) it just didn’t add enough to the game for the two sentences in the rules it would take to explain it, and the space it would take up on the card.

Every idea you put into your game needs to justify its presence.

(Most don’t.)

“Dracula’s Feast”, down the bottom, was also replaced in the final game by a watermark of a bat, to make sorting out expansions easier. This is something we didn’t do for Scuttle! - lesson learned!

After that, as I mentioned last time, I didn’t work much on the base set. Instead, I started the process of endlessly iterating Monster’s Ball and Night of the Mummy.

When I next returned to Dracula’s Feast, Tania had been hired to art all the art, and whenever we were faced with a graphical decision, we’d look to Edward Gorey for answers.

During this process, I became obsessed with avoiding commas. I thought it gave the cards more of a clean, storybook feel - I had spent a lot of time looking at Gorey books, and I wanted the cards to look more like a tale than an instruction.

For example, instead of “At the start of your turn, buy a sheep” I wanted to phrase it as “Buy a sheep at the start of your turn.”

This had the unexpected effect of simplifying the characters. Whenever we couldn’t get a sentence to parse in my strange “effect then cause” order, we’d continue to rework the character until we had a version that could.

Aside from minor graphic design changes, this was the version that went out to reviewers.

The little line with the fangs and the dots was our latest attempt to show set/complexity. The other characters had gotten so simple that Alucard was now actually a 3-complexity character.

The other big change here: “Win by being given Dracula’s accusation card.”

In Update #27, I spoke about the huge change that Tom Lang brought to the game - removing the individual “accusation” action. I mentioned that the key factor in this decision was that it was never a useful move; this was certainly true, but it wasn't the only reason for the change. Removing an action greatly helped us simplify the terminology.

In the version of the game that went out to reviewers, there were four base actions. Here's the action reference card that went out with the reviewer copies:

Now, this system was certainly fun (I wouldn’t have launched the Kickstarter if I didn’t love the game) but it was far more confusing than the final version. (Also, it required an entire component - dance tokens - which served no other purpose.)

Some points of confusion we encountered included:

• When someone asks “are you X”, you answer secretly. When they accuse you of being X, you answer out loud. 
• Being wrong when questioning has no penalty. Being wrong when you accuse knocks you out of the game. 
• Certain characters can lie in response to questions, but all characters must always be honest in response to accusations. 
• Some characters care about accusing players individually, some care about the Grand Reveal. (Alucard cares about both.)

Now, we worked hard to reduce that confusion, and until Tom Lang suggested we completely remove “accuse”, I thought we’d done all we could.

In fact, what we were doing was hiding the confusion under the rug. It wasn't as obvious any more, but it would frequently rear its confusing head.

You’ll notice that in the above list, both Accuse and Grand Reveal involve putting an accusation card in front of a character. This was part of our attempt to help separate Accuse from Question, but it also meant that we could combine the two possible ways that Alucard won (Accuse and Grand Reveal) by tying it to the physical components.

This sort of worked? Like I said, it was just another way of sweeping the problems under the rug. The real solution, as you’ll recall, was to remove the “Accuse” action entirely.

(We then renamed “Grand Reveal”, calling it “Accuse”. This was the correct move for the game, but dang was it confusing for us who had spent several years playing the older version.)

After the change, every single card was reworked in some way, and Alucard was no exception. Here’s the version that we released as a print-and-play during the campaign:

The first mechanical change in Alucard for several years was the same as the Trickster’s: removing Alucard’s forced dance.

When individual accusations were a path to victory for several characters, Alucard could nab his free win much more often. Once that element of the game was removed, he was considerably weaker, and so taking away his forced dance brought him back up to strength.

Alucard is a great example of how much more elegant the whole game became once we took away the individual accusations. No longer did we have to bring components into it, or clumsily explain that he wins not only when he’s accused, but also when someone accuses him as part of the “demasking”/Grand Reveal.

Now his entire card text consists of an instruction and a victory condition. 14 words is all it takes to ensure that the character is balanced, fun, and a totally different experience to playing as any other character.

What more could be improved?

Well…

Remember my weird obsession with phrasing everything as a comma-less sentence? After a few rounds of blind playtesting*, it became obvious that it was confusing as heck.

*I firmly believe that blind playtesting is a key factor separating good games from great games. There is no prototype that can't be improved through blind playtesting.

Eventually, with a great sigh, I accepted that we needed to use standard "cause, effect" phrasing for clarity.

Here’s the final, final version of Alucard - the version that you’ll be getting in the mail in just a few months.

At 19 words long, it might seem clunkier, but playtest after playtest confirmed that it’s far clearer to everyone (especially new players) exactly what the card does, and in a game where you can’t ask for clarification on your ability, that’s the most important factor.

Also, you'll see the watermark I was talking about. Characters from the base game have a bat, characters from the Cthulhu and Friends expansion have a Cthulhu head, and the promo cards have the Jellybean Games logo.

And that is the journey of Alucard!

Whew! That turned into quite the essay. If you did read through the whole thing, do let me know! I'm so insanely happy with the end result; Alucard is one of my favourite characters in the game (on basically every level) and it's nice to show off all the work that went into getting him there.

As I said, it’s going to be one of the final designer diaries in the series - I have some vague ideas rattling around, so you'll see some (considerably shorter) entries coming up before we wrap up the whole series.

Of course, if there’s anything you would like me to expand upon, just leave a comment! I’m always happy to answer questions about design, publishing, how to be this good-looking. Anything you want to know!

Until next time,
-Peter C. Hayward
Secretly a wanna-be Dracula himself.

P.S. In each of these updates, I like to link to a currently-running Kickstarter I think you might enjoy. This time it’s The Grimm Forest - with just over 24 hours to go, this project has just hit $335,000. Amazing!

It’s a gorgeous game by a designer I really admire, and I recommend you check it out before it’s too late! 

 

Bigger boxes and no news (which, as we all know, is good news!)
about 7 years ago – Sat, Apr 01, 2017 at 12:50:57 AM

Hey! 

Not much to update on since last week - we’ve had some minor back-and-forthing with the printer. We just worked out that the components (Tarot cards wooooo) aren’t going to fit in the box that we had planned, so...the box is going to be slightly larger than we expected! 

Hooray! 

Aside from that, there is no news on the Dracula’s Feast front. As soon as we have anything to report, you'll be the first to know about it!

In other Jellybean Games news, The Lady and the Tiger campaign has less than a week to go, however, so if you haven’t checked that out, this is the perfect time to do so! 

 

We’ve just added two new game modes, making it a 1-6 player game. Cool stuff! 

This week's Designer Diary was going to be the history of the Alucard card, but (like Trickster did last week) it took me far longer than I expected, so I’ll have it for you next week. 

Until then, thank you so much for your patience and support.
-Peter C. Hayward
Just as excited as you are for printer proofs!

Address changes, and the journey of the Trickster's phrasing.
about 7 years ago – Fri, Mar 24, 2017 at 01:23:05 AM

Hey!

The printer is assembling eproofs, the Cthulhu and Friends rulebook has been spellchecked and sent off, and everything is DONE!

How exciting!

I've been getting a number of messages with address updates: just to be clear, you can update your address at any point by logging into the Backerkit and changing it there! We'll be finalizing addresses once the game has finished printing, but I'll make sure to give you plenty of warning. :)

There's no news on the Dracula's Feast printing front (although by this time next week, we might have physical proofs!) so I’m going to jump straight into this week’s Designer Diary.

Today I want to talk about something that might sound boring, but is actually super interesting...to the right kind of person:

Wordings on cards.

Last week, I spoke a lot about expectations. As I said then, this is something incredibly important at every level of your game - when people open your game, you want to meet or exceed their expectations, not confound them. Everything you do signals a message about your game, and people get annoyed when the game doesn't match the signals you're sending out.

As you’ll remember from previous Designer Diaries, Dracula’s Feast has gone through a LOT of iterations. This is important: if you’re not iterating, you can’t be sure that you’re making the best game possible. You might stumble upon an incredibly fun and engaging mechanic straight away - but unless you tweak and meddle and try something new, you have no way of knowing that you’re not a few minute’s work away from an even more fun game.

Perhaps the thing that’s changed the most in Dracula's Feast is the specific wording of various abilities - both on individual cards, and the terminology used as a whole.

The two characters whose abilities have changed the least since the game’s inception are the Trickster (although her name has changed a few times) and Alucard, the vampire who just really really wants to be Dracula. In today’s diary we’re just going to look at the history of the Trickster’s wordings, and next week we’ll do the same for Alucard.

This was the second game I ever worked on, and so my file management system hadn’t yet reached its current, mediocre standard. As such, a lot of these early drafts I don’t have images for...BUT I did obsessively keep the text of every iteration.

Here’s the very first version of the Trickster:

Shapeshifter: You must answer “yes” to all guesses and rendezvous requests.

Let’s break it down!

“Rendezvous” was the original name for dancing, and queries were originally called “guesses”. Also, the original Trickster was called the “Shapeshifter”.

As you can see, while the ability is almost identical, almost every part of the wording has changed!

In Dracula’s Feast, the most common way of getting information is a query - asking someone “Are you Dracula?”, for example, and secretly getting a Yes or No in response.

Another common way of getting information is dancing - asking someone “Do you want to dance?” and publicly getting a Yes or No in response. If they say Yes, you look at each other’s cards.

The Trickster’s ability is that whether you ask her “Are you Dracula?”, “Are you Alucard?”, “Are you Van Helsing” - she’ll always hand back a Yes card.

Making sure there’s a clear difference between the “Yes” you get when querying and the “Yes” you get when requesting a dance is SUPER IMPORTANT. They’re the two most common questions that you’re asked in the game, and so people need to understand which characters care about which question.

This wording tooooootally fails to do that. Totally. Fails.

That’s okay! Your first draft isn’t expected to be perfect - at that stage, you’re testing what we call the “proof of concept”; whether your game is, at its heart, fun.

According to my notes, versions 2 and 3 of the character were identical. At version 4, he (at this point, almost all the characters were “he”) became:

Prince of Lies: You must answer “yes” to all guesses and rendezvous requests.

This one is just a name change - version 1 had a different character called “The Prince of Lies” (who was fun, but turned out to be mathematically broken). People were constantly confused as to why the character who lied about their identity wasn’t the Prince of Lies, and so I switched the names.

(In November last year, I was playtesting a different character called the Prince of Lies, and ran into the same confusion - people kept getting him confused with the Trickster. Turns out I sometimes need to learn the same lesson twice! That character will almost certainly be back some day, with a very different name.)

Version 5:
Prince of Lies: You must answer “yes” to all guesses and dance requests.

Progress! We finally lost the stupid “rendezvous” nomenclature and switched it up for “dance”, which is so much more intuitive.

This ties into what we were talking about last week - for a game this fast, everything needs to be easy to understand. I mean, that’s important for every game, but more so when the whole experience only runs for about 10 minutes.

“Rendezvous” is a fun term (say it! Ron-day-voo) but it doesn’t communicate enough fast enough. If I say “You can rendezvous with other players in this game”, you’re left with just as many questions as when you started - when I say “You can dance with other players,” you might not guess the exact mechanic, but it at least gives you a starting point, something you can latch onto.

“Dance” is also way more fun, and so incredibly appropriate for the setting. You’re at a BALL. It would be ridiculous if dancing WASN’T a mechanic in the game!

Expectations! Theme, title, runtime, and terminology. They’ve all got to line up.

Over the next few versions of the game, the “Prince of Lies” character didn’t change much. Entire mechanics were stripped out, many characters were hugely rewritten, but over about 6-12 months, the Trickster remained as she was.

I don’t recall who suggested “Trickster” as a name - it doesn’t really feel like something I would have come up with, so my money’s on Tom Lang. At this point, I had a group of friends regularly coming over to playtest the game (for many months, this was the only game I was working on) and so it could have been anyone from that table, or it could have been a group effort.

I do know that when the ollllld print-and-play version of the game went online (2014), the card looked like this:

WHAT. That doesn’t even make sense! I have absolutely no idea how this went online like this, and even less of a clue how I never even noticed it before now.

It SHOULD read “You must accept all dance requests and say yes to all guesses, even incorrect ones.”

When I knew that this was going to be public, I went through and clarified as much card text as I could - in the process, apparently butchering the Trickster’s wording. 

Separating “accepts dances” and “answers ‘Yes’ to guesses” on the card is a big step towards separating them in players’ minds.

After the print-and-play went live (August 2014) I didn’t make many changes to the base game for about 18 months (I was focused instead on the next two games in the series - Monster’s Ball and Night of the Mummy).

After the success of Scuttle! (which launched in March 2016; one year and one day ago), I decided to make Dracula’s Feast my next game. I officially hired Tom Lang to help with development, hired Tania to do the art, and changes began in earnest.

Here’s the version of Trickster that we played with for most of 2016:

I spoke about this in Update #27, the “developer” designer diary (say that 5 times fast), but one of the best things about Tom is that he never. Stops. Picking.

The first issue he had was with the term guess. After all, you’re not really “guessing” - you’re asking. Why not, he argued, just call it what it is - a question.

Then we waaaay reduced the text. “You must accept all dances” simply became “Accept all dances” - look at all that saved space! 

Fewer words, provided clarity isn’t lost, is always better. Arguably in all writing, but particularly when trying to fit words onto cards.

Other characters came and went, various changes were made, but Trickster largely stayed the same. That’s the version of the Trickster we had online when the campaign launched, and that’s the version that went out to reviewers.

And then...it happened. I spoke about this in Update #27 (that design diary covered a lot!) but to briefly summarize: Tom came up with a way to remove one of the actions/player elimination from the game, streamlining (and greatly improving it), and as a result every character had to be reevaluated.

As you’ve seen, the Trickster hadn’t yet mechanically changed from her first, first incarnation. But once we removed the extra “accuse” action, her power level dramatically changed. Being able to hide (and avoid being knocked out of the game) is suddenly much less important - now her only power was slowing other people down with her lies.

“Accepts all dances” is something that we had often used to weaken characters who were too powerful, and so - after many playtests to confirm the power level - Trickster underwent her one and only mechanical change. This is the version of the Trickster currently available for print and play:

Ah, but we have a new term!

One thing we discovered was that people - often in their first game, but more often (for some reason) in their second or third - were answering questions out loud.

“Are you Dracula?”, someone would ask, and a player would look at their card and (without even thinking twice) triumphantly say “Nope!”

That knowledge is meant to be secret. In fact, it breaks the game if that knowledge is public.

So when I was teaching the game, I started emphasizing “Hey, don’t answer out loud! People often do, so watch out for it!” - this helped a lot, but (and I hope you still want the game after hearing this) I don’t actually come with the game. I don't fit in the box, for one.

The other issue we were having was with the new terminology - “Question”. A card that says “Always answer ‘yes’ to questions” actually causes more issues than it solves. After all, “Do you want to dance?” is technically a question. Once people wrapped their head around it, it was fine, but I wanted people to understand it immediately.

The new Trickster didn’t have to accept all dance requests, and so she doesn’t answer “Yes” to all questions, only to “questions”. 

You see the problem.

And so two changes were made at the same time. Firstly, “question” was again renamed - this time, to query. Technically “Do you want to dance?” is a query, but by bolding it and treating it like a game term, the ambiguity disappeared. In more than a dozen blind playtests since we made that change, I’ve never seen a player confused by the term.

Secondly, the Yes/No cards (which we’d been imaginatively referring to as simply “Yes/No cards”) were renamed “Whisper cards”.

This was really nice for a few reasons: firstly, it’s super thematic! Anytime you have the opportunity to add theme to your game (without reducing the fun factor), take it. You’re at a party, secretly whispering to people. Just as adding "dance" gave it more of a party feel, "Whisper cards" gives it more of a masquerade feel.

As well as that, it gives them a name. This is a little thing, but it’s so nice to have a name to refer to cards by - both internally (suddenly we don’t have an art folder called “Yes/No Cards”) but also for players. In The Lady and the Tiger (now live on Kickstarter!) there are two kinds of cards - Door cards, which have a door on the back, and the...other cards. Y’know, the other cards. The non-Door ones.

For a long time we were just calling them “cards” (terrible), but then Tom Lang pushed for a name, and we came up with “clue cards”. So much better!

Once they had a name, the art for the back (which was just a sort of generic question mark) became obvious: I don’t know if I've ever posted it, but this is the art on the back of the Whisper cards:

But best of all, it solved the problem of people answering out loud. Anytime someone needed to answer a question by sliding a card, we literally just called it “whispering”. While we were making this decision, someone raised the point “But what if people decide to be clever, and literally whisper their answer instead of passing a card?”

Great! That’s mechanically identical. If players want to respond to every query with a real-life whisper, that is fine by me.

It also really helped separate “answering a query” from “responding to a dance request” - one is done out loud; the other is a whisper.

As you can tell, I’m very happy with the “whisper” terminology. :D 

At this point, you’d think we had reached the end of our journey. The card text is three words long, and “whisper” has removed the query/dance confusion. We’re done, right?

Well, no.

I really like our first game, Scuttle! - I think it’s fun, it's gorgeous, I love how strongly kids react to it, and I got an email from the World Champion of Cuttle (the game that it’s based on) calling it a “masterpiece”.

My one Scuttle! regret is that we didn’t blind playtest it. I’m now a bit of a blind playtest evangelist; designers, once your game is working, give the rules to people who haven’t played before and see how they do!

Dracula’s Feast was blind playtested a bunch, and The Lady and the Tiger even moreso. It’s become a mandatory part of my design process; you learn so much from watching people read the rules. Not just “how to make the rules clearer”, either - I’ve made substantial design changes after watching blind playtests of my game.

After a number of blind playtests, we settled on this: the final version of the Trickster, and the one sent off to the printer:

Dracula’s Feast has very little text. There’s the reference card, and then there’s the sentence or two on the bottom of each card. If you don’t count the “YES” and “NO” on the Whisper cards, that’s it.

When people started getting confused by the brevity of the cards, Tania (quite wisely) suggested that we could probably afford to add a few words back in.

“You must” was part of a standardization sweep; some abilities are optional, some abilities are mandatory, and now each card specifies whether it’s a “must” or a “may”.

The bolding of queries was another small tweak to make it clearer that it was a game term. I also think it makes the cards slightly easier to read, especially for characters with a lot of text.

As you can see, something as simple as “how to word the cards” can go through a whole bunch of tweaks. In the 3+ years since her conception, the Trickster has only gone through one mechanical change, but her wording has been changed again and again.

I’m extraordinarily happy with the version we ended up with! It’s precise without being wordy, the language is thematic, and - most importantly - it never came up as an issue during blind playtesting.

Hoorah!

The only other change is that we got permission to use the font for Edward Gorey’s handwriting. This isn’t really a “wording” thing, but it’s pretty cool! The game is now as Gorey as we could make it. (Literally every time we had a design or visual issue, we’d pull up some Edward Gorey references for inspiration*.)

*maybe the topic of a future Designer Diary?

And that's it! From "You must answer “yes” to all guesses and rendezvous requests." to "You must whisper Yes to all queries" might not look like much of a journey, but look at how different versions we went through to get there.

Like I said: if you're not making changes, you'll never be sure.

I’ll be back next week with another card wording designer diary - this time, following Alucard (who also went through very few mechanical changes) from first iteration to final print. In the meantime, I hope you’ve learned something about the surprising complexity of conveying simple ideas.

As always, thank you for your support.
-Peter C. Hayward
Delighted that The Lady and the Tiger has no card text.

P.S. In each of these updates, I like to highlight a currently-running Kickstarter project that I think you might be interested in. This week, it’s The Grimm Forest, by Druid City Games.

It’s a gorgeous, simple game. The designer is one of the dudes behind March of the Ants, perhaps my all-time favourite Kickstarter game I’ve ever received - the game’s been up for 3 days, and it’s already exceeded $100k. Check it out!

Everything is off to the printers!
about 7 years ago – Fri, Mar 17, 2017 at 06:15:58 PM

Hey!

With the exception of the Cthulhu and Friends rulebook, which is undergoing a final round of spellchecking and proofing, I am excited to announce that everything has now been sent to the printer, and we are back on schedule!

Some people were concerned by the delays. That's totally fair! I was concerned by the delays as well. In fact, I went through the seven stages of concern - annoyance, frustration, more annoyance, staying up all night for several days working on stuff, spell-checking, negotiation, and finally relief.

I just spoke to the printer, and we have an updated timeline!

The printer estimated about a week to assemble all the final proofs, and then they're going to hit the big red "print" button at the factory (I assume that's how it works) and print everything over the next month.

(I tend to add a few days to each step, just to account for any tiny delays.)

When I created the original timeline in October, I added a few months in case things went awry. My not-so-secret hope was that we wouldn't just deliver on-time: we'd deliver early. It looks like that's no longer possible, which is a pity. 

The delays were partially caused by the fundamental game changes we unexpectedly made (which I promise you, have made the game SO much better) and partially because of some annoying miscommunications between the Jellybean team and a freelancer.

It's all been resolved now, but I just wanted to let everyone know that I'm aware of the fears (Kickstarter projects hitting sudden delays is not fun for anyone) and that all is well! The game, for all intents and purposes, is 100% complete.

Now we just have to print and ship this sucker*.

*vampire pun

To celebrate, here's the beginning of the designer diary I was working on last week! I ended up splitting it into several parts, because - as with most of game design - there's basically unlimited stuff you can end up talking about. Second part is coming next week!

Designer Diary!

This is more of a combination designer/publisher diary, but the lessons I've learned as a publisher have seriously influenced how I design games.

Also, if you're designing games with the intent of having them published, this sort of thing is extremely important.

So, let's talk about expectations.

Dracula’s Feast is an extremely quick game. The more you play it, the more strategy you pick up on, but as a game it's actually quite fast: the longest I’ve ever ever seen a game last was about 25-30 minutes, and that was with 8 players who have never played before.

With a game this quick, it’s important that people understand each concept immediately. Not only so that the game doesn’t get bogged down by rules-checking and clarifications, but also because when you see the time on a game, you have certain expectations.

If I told you "Hey, I have a game about the rise and fall of the Roman Empire", how long would you expect it to take?

This applies to box size, as well. There are exceptions - there always are - but as a rule, you want every aspect of your game to send the same signal. Game time, box-size, price point, title, theme - all of these are ways of saying “Hey, gamers! If you try this game, you can expect a certain type of experience.”

When you pay $100 for a game, you don’t expect a 5-minute dexterity game. When you pick up a game about echidnas trying on hats, you don’t expect to be spending the next 4 hours negotiating with your friends.

Like I said, this is me with my publisher hat on, but if you want publishers to be interested in your game, you have to start thinking about this kind of stuff at the design level.

Dracula’s Feast is a 10-minute social deduction game, that I’ve worked hard to make available at a $15 price point. (As Kickstarter backers, you got a big ol’ discount!) Everything from the box to the rules are - as much as possible - reflective of that.

It also has way more depth of play than a lot of $15 games, but that’s not a bug - that’s a selling point! It’s fun the first time you play, AND the more you play it, the more strategy you’ll discover.

These expectations are most important with the clearly visible parts of your game (as I said - title, theme, box-size, etc etc) but they permeate every stage of the design process.

I played a great game at Metatopia (a game design con) last year. I cannot for the life of me remember what it was called, but everyone played as Japanese nobles, vying for influence. It went for about 30 minutes, it played 2-4 players, the art was gorgeous, and it involved a lot of bluffing and trying to read your opponents.

Already, it did most everything right. Playing nobles vying for influence comes with certain expectations: you want to be sneaky and manipulative, a little bit backstabby, but you can't just send an army to kill your opponents.

Mechanically it was a lot like Love Letter - each turn, you'd draw a card and then play a card, but your hand of cards never went above 2 or 3. It was fast, smart, fun - like I said, it did a lot of stuff right.

But there was one card in the deck that bugged me, and I couldn't immediately work out why. The card was something along the lines of "Everyone turns their hand to face you; you have 6 seconds to look at them before they turn back."

The next day, while I was discussing the game with Chris Zinsli (of Cardboard Edison), trying to work out why I was so annoyed by the presence of a real-time element, he pinpointed exactly the issue.

It wasn't (just) that it was discordant, it wasn't (just) that the game otherwise had no real-time or memory elements: it was that adding a real-time "minigame" into a neat little strategy game felt wrong.

I had certain expectations of the game, and by adding an element that didn't fit those expectations, I was put off.

When you ask me to play a serious strategy game, I'm going to be annoyed if there's a sudden dexterity element in the middle of it. I'm going to be put off if there's a real-time mechanic, or a sudden die roll to determine the winner.

As a designer, you want to use your theme and title to set expectations, and then ensure that the rest of your game meets those expectations.

I have a co-design with Christopher Badell (I know a lot of gaming Christophers). For close to 2 years, it was called Hex Mex, and it was a game about wizards working in a Mexican restaurant. Delightful, right?

Except the game we ended up designing was a fairly intricate Euro, with cubes turning into other cubes, an abstract movement system, and lots of thought before each risky turn.

It was a great game, but it was never the game people expected from the name Hex Mex. We sat down a few months ago and totally rethemed it - it's now about mining comets, and the whole game is so much less discordant.

There's a reason that so many games are about "trading in the Mediterranean" - it's because when you sit down to play that game, you know exactly what you're getting into. If you can take that game and reskin it to be "zombies fighting in space", you've done something wrong.

Look at your game. Work out what kind of game it is. Then, look at your theme, look at your title. Do they match the game? If not, you've got a problem.

Whether or not you're a theme-first designer, a mechanics-first designer, or an experience-first designer, it's important that these things mesh, else you're going to turn off players, and you're going to turn off publishers.

That's all for this week! I'll be back next week with some more thoughts on expectations - specifically a lot of terminology choices we made when assembling Dracula's Feast.

Also: this weekend, I'm at UnPub 7 in Baltimore! If you're here also, come find me - I'm (almost certainly) going to be the only blue-bearded Australian, and I love meeting backers.

Thank you so much for your support,
-Peter C. Hayward
Always aiming for a N.E.W.T. score of E.E.

P.S. In each of these updates I like to link to a currently-running Kickstarter that I think you might enjoy! This week, it's Dinosaur Island - if you've ever wanted to create a dinosaur theme park, this is the game for you. After all, what could go wrong?

Check it out!

The Lady and the Tiger is live, and the last of the files are done!
about 7 years ago – Mon, Mar 13, 2017 at 12:54:49 AM

Hey!

As I was walking home from the post office today, I heard my name being called. I turned around to find someone across the street whom I’d never seen before, enthusiastically waving.

I waved back, cocked my head, and in response, he shouted “I’m a Dracula’s Feast fan!”

The grin that crossed my face was bright enough to blind several passing pedestrians and cause a small forest fire. I’ve been recognized at game cons etc, but never before “in the wild” - super cool! Thank you, mysterious backer! You absolutely made my day.

This update is a little late (the above anecdote actually happened on Thursday!) because I dove far too enthusiastically into this week’s designer diary...aaaaand it’s still not done. I’m going to post the designer diary NEXT week, probably from UnPub!

But first: some news! The last of the files have come in, and so once we’ve finished proofing them, I’m going to send them to the printer and update the timeline. That’s right: updated timeline time! Everyone’s favorite time!

Also, this!

 

The latest project from Jellybean Games, The Lady and the Tiger, is now live on Kickstarter! 

It’s a gorgeous, simple, 2-player bluffing game. It takes 15 minutes to play, and every game is different.

Check out the Kickstarter page for a how-to-play-video, more incredible art, and a free print-and-play!

Some people are wary about backing another Kickstarter before the previous one has been fulfilled, and that’s totally valid! All I can do is promise that you will get every game you pledge for; Jellybean Games is something I’m pouring my heart and soul into, and making sure that every backer feels taken care of is extremely important to me.

If there's anything you need from me or the Jellybean Games team, don't hesitate to let us know!

That’s all for this week! BUT if you’re coming to UnPub, come and say hi! Unpub is a convention in Baltimore, and it’s the single best place to try unpublished games. Registering as a playtester is free - if you’re going (or you see a blue-bearded Australian wandering around Baltimore), come play some games with me.

(Or, just shout “PETER” and then wave enthusiastically. We already know I enjoy that immensely!)

Thank you so much for your support,
-Peter C. Hayward
Excited for Baltimore, nervous about driving through the ice!