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matt tolman
Canada
Calgary
Alberta
Look for my first published game, Undermining! Coming soon from Z-man games.
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NB: People who want to get to business should skip to the end of the italicized section.
Foreword, by Ryley Tolman
Not many people are science-based individuals like myself, so they do not realize the complex reality that has come about to create this game. Life began in the primordial stew literally hundreds and hundreds of years ago. Zeus, having been betrayed by the great Khal Drogo, turned this stew into an army of angry dinosaurs to attack Drogo's Khalasar. Drogo, naturally being equipped with super-rainbow-all-knowing-vision, knew of Zeus's plans from his lair in Delaware. Knowing that a herd of angry dinosaurs would make short work of him, Drogo bestowed gifts upon the army of angry dinosaurs in hopes of gaining their favor. To the T-rex he gave teeny tiny arms. To the Triceratops he gave a walnut-sized brain, to the brontosaurus he gave irritable bowel syndrome, and to the raptor he gave most of the word velocity, creating the Velociraptor. These wondrous gifts, however, failed to appease the dinosaurs.
The great dinosaur insurrection caused Drogo to become exceedingly angry. In retaliation he created his own army of animated corn to do battle with Zeus' army. After equipping their armies with weapons of all shapes and sizes, made from technology that has since been lost to mankind, they loaded their armies onto asteroids and sent them hurtling toward each other at the speed of ∞+1.
Each comet was as big as ten thousand universes, and with matter so black, it was dark grey. All of the matter in existence was contained in these two comets and the armies thereupon. Drogo and Zeus both followed their comets with their rocket jetpack sandals on – which is what gives comets their flaming tales – in order to witness the great conflict. However, the one thing that they thought would never happen, the one thing that could make all of their plans come undone, was physics.
The two comets hit with such force that physics happened, sending physics in every direction in the form of nice little worlds, some with people on them. After the light died down, the only thing that was left of the battlefield was a glowing ball of the two armies that had fused, containing all the rage of the two great gods, as well as all the anger of their armies. Realizing that this pent-up anger could destroy the universe and everything in it, the gods decided to fuse the armies into crystals, bury them in the center of an asteroid, and place that asteroid at the center of the universe, where the energy it gave off could sustain the universe indefinitely.
One day, we will find that asteroid, of that I have no doubt. I also have no doubt that when we do, we will create little mining vehicles and call them "UMVees". I know that we will likely take these UMVees and mine the crystallized dinosaur army crystals, and that we will trade them in to fulfill contracts and win victory points. I feel that the winner will be the person who has the most points.
So, basically, the game just wrote itself. Matt just took all of the facts that he had learned from the wikipedia, and used his science background to construct the story of the universe, and just put it down in boardgame format.
Ryley Tolman
Canada
Lethbridge
Alberta
Part 1
...um, thanks Ryley, I think...
Where to start? As Undermining is my first game, the beginning would be a good place I suppose.
Back in 2007, I was running a successful construction company. That year I made more money than I have ever made, times two. I reinvested most of that money in my company, leasing vehicles, buying tools, and hiring people. 2008 was looking to be even better – or not. At the exact instant I expanded my company the economy went flat, and I found myself with nothing to do. I'll save you the long and depressing version of my company's downfall; it sufficeth me to say I learned a hard lesson about overextending yourself.
Around the same time, I met a man, Alan Biggs, who invited me over to his house to help him "playtest" a board game he was making. Playtest? Never heard of it. So I went over to his place, played the prototype with him, and found myself enjoying the process of thinking critically about game design. Then Alan said, "You're good at this; you should design games."
Uh oh.
With nothing to do construction-wise, I decided then and there that I was now a professional board game designer. I knew nothing about board game design or the people currently designing games. I had only recently started playing Euros and had about 20 in my collection.
When I told Alan about my new career choice, he told me how difficult it was to make a living designing board games, and how there are only a handful of people in the world lucky enough to do so. Meh! How hard can it be?
"Very hard" does not begin to describe it.
Alan informed me that he had contacted several other board game designers from Alberta (I live in Calgary, Alberta) to a mini design conference during the last weekend in August and invited me to go. Sweet. I had just six weeks to get a game ready to show at the conference. Good thing I had nothing to do...
Not knowing anything about game design, I designed a complete game start to finish, did up graphics in Photoshop, and printed it out. That wasn't so bad, I thought. Then I tried it.
Looking back, I should have been quite pleased; it played to completion after all – the first real milestone for a game design – and had a little bit of an economy going. It was called King's Favor and was about a struggling kingdom on an island that had run out of resources. As the King's offspring, you were each given a satellite island to settle and sent goods and supplies back to the main island in an effort to impress your father and be crowned the next King.
Now, I'm thinking about finishing that design, but at the time I thought it was a failure. So I scrapped it and started working on Wanted!, a western-themed game about running a gang. In it, you went around on a hex map and robbed ranches, stage coach lines, trains and banks. This game worked quite a bit better, but was playable only two days prior to the conference.
Ready or not, it was time for the conference. What an interesting experience. People in attendance included myself, Alan Biggs, Rob Bartel, Gavan Brown, Orin Bishop, Brent Lloyd, Dylan Kirk, Tom Sarsens, Wilf Backaus, and Jonathan Gartshore-Baxter. Coming from a construction background, I definitely felt out of place at the conference. I was the only person present that did labor for a living. Pretty much everyone else worked in an office of some sort.
We took turns showing each other our designs and critiquing them. I had the last table time of the weekend, Sunday afternoon. It went pretty well, and the compliments I received helped give me confidence to pursue designing games further. More importantly, however, we had a meeting afterwards.
This meeting was the first meeting of what is now called the "Game Artisans of Canada" (GAC). Everyone present was blown away by the weekend. We were all buzzing from the collaborative environment. Most of us had been designing in a box until then. We desperately wanted to be exposed to that environment as much as possible, so we decided to formalize our relationship and start meeting on a semi-regular basis.
Without the Game Artisans of Canada, I would not be a game designer. One thing that almost every game designer goes through is design depression. Starting on a new design is sooo exciting. Your mind is firing on all cylinders, you are having genius idea after genius idea. "This game is WAY better that Puerto Rico!" you often think – but it's not. It's not only broken, but the mechanisms barely work, the rules are incomplete, and *shudder* it's neither strategic nor fun.
That is a hard pill to swallow, and I probably would still be choking on it if it weren't for GAC. The best part of our association has always been the support we give each other. It keeps us going during the hard times.
My particular pill came in the form of the combat system in Wanted! I simply couldn't get what I wanted out of it without making the game three hours long (and it is not a game that has legs for three hours).
I lost hope for a while. I had put in over 300 hours of work and still did not have a game. I quit designing as it was too much like work! I lost myself in video games for a while, but kept in contact with the other guys in GAC, offering help when I could on their designs. While watching others have similar trials, I was slowly starting to realize that beating your head against a brick wall was part of the design process.
And that was when inspiration struck...
Part 2
One of the video games I played during my design hiatus was MotherLoad. It was a free flash game, and I couldn't believe how much fun it was. It reminded me of Dig Dug, which I have always loved, but had modern video game elements in it, such as upgrades!
Thinking about MotherLoad and Dig Dug, I came to a conclusion: Digging is fun. Why don't I make a game about digging? So I did.
I decided to make it look similar to MotherLoad and Dig Dug, using a cutaway view of the Earth. You were in a futuristic mining vehicle much like the Shredder's transport from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The game would feature tile laying/exploration, digging, and upgrades.
Now I needed a prototype. I'd never made one so involved before; I needed tiles, and a lot of them, so I butchered my copy of Ra. Ouch. I printed stickers and placed them on the backs of the Ra tiles. I printed player boards picturing the player's mining vehicles and made some upgrades. The moment of truth was here!
The first time I tried Undermining was in a back room at some tiny game store in Calgary, a small shop in a small mall (sadly no longer with us). I grabbed pawns out of my copy of Princes of Florence and laid a row of the resource tiles I had made below them. Right from the get-go, Undermining has always been an action point allowance game. I gave each player three actions and we started drilling, driving and upgrading. Each time someone took a resource tile, we grabbed another at random, and placed it next to the empty space. It worked. Yay!
Okay, a lot of things didn't work. The game didn't even have an end condition or point system, but we were actually enjoying the play. This was really the heart of the problem in my previous designs. They all more or less worked, but the play wasn't fun. Now I had a solid foundation: fun.
I played that prototype as it was, for a few weeks, trying to decide how best to finish the game. I've always felt that game design needs to percolate, I never rush things. I like to get a good feel for how something is before I change it. This makes me a slow game designer – effective, but slow.
The heart of the game has you mining resources so that you can build upgrades for your vehicle. I had originally wanted it to be an exploration game, but it was becoming obvious that the exporation just wasn't working. You can't ask someone to invest a couple of turns heading into the surface of the earth and expect them to be happy about finding nothing but resources they don't want. I now understood that I needed to do a redesign.
This redesign was a huge leap forward for the game. I decided to take exploration out of the game, in favor of allowing the players to see the whole layout of the board at the start of the game. The new version had a modular board, with 4x4 grid tiles with the resources printed on them. Now, instead of collecting the tiles when you drilled them, you would cover up the resource you drilled with a tunnel tile, then take an appropriate resource from the general supply and place it into a cargo hold in your vehicle. It was a little fiddly but it got the job done. I also added a contract system: a deck of cards with resources and a money value printed on them. You could now spend resources to fill contracts for money, which would serve as a victory condition in the game. Most money wins.
At this point, I also added in some theme (other than simply mining). You were now digging at an ancient alien crash site. I put a UFO graphic at the bottom of the board, which was comprised of four tiles, with each tile being worth a certain number of dollars. This would serve as a trigger for the end of the game. Once all the UFO tiles had been recovered, the game was over.
I also added in "Alien Tech" spaces that provided players with one-off powerups they could use to gain a temporary boost when needed. These powers were largely designed to harm other players, the intention being to offset the runaway leader problem that was starting to rear its ugly head in the previous version.
By now it had become obvious that this was a race game. The sooner you got upgrades on your mining vehicle, the sooner you could get more upgrades. The Alien techs where helping with the runaway leader problem, but they did not solve it. I thought of beefing up their power, but I don't like "take that" mechanisms, and I felt it was just a band-aid over a more fundamental problem. A fix was needed.
That fix was decoupling the value of a contract from the resources used in the contract. Contracts still came out randomly, but the amount of money you received came from rigid, descending piles of money. This meant if you filled an early contract, you might lose something in terms of infrastructure compared to those who upgraded, but you would gain a points/money advantage. It worked, and it even made sense thematically, as when you arrive, the market demand for goods is high, but drops as you and others fulfill contracts.
I now no longer needed the Alien Tech "take that" cards to control the runaway leader problem, but players did enjoy the powerful feeling they got from using them, so they were modified to be simply good for the player using them and not harmful to other players.
Undermining then entered the "honing" stage. During this time I played the game more than 250 times, mostly two-player with my wife. Six months later, I had polished almost everything until it was shiny, but some problems in the game still bugged me:
• The end condition went wonky sometimes. As it was triggered when the last of the UFO tiles was taken (which were all in the same place, at the bottom of the board), the player with the most cargo space generally could dictate to the other players when the game would end.
• It was fiddly. As the resources were printed on the board, you have to place a "tunnel" tile over them when you drilled them, then take a corresponding resource from the general supply.
• It was long, usually around two hours with four players.
• It was anti-climatic. At first you are close to the resources, so it takes little time to gather them, but as the game progresses, everything becomes slower and slower, even when you factor in the upgrades.
I decided that a good publisher for Undermining would be Z-Man Games. I sent an email describing the game play to Zev Shlasinger, along with this picture:
Apparently the picture worked, as I got a reply right away saying that he would take a look at it, and he also said, "Nice touch with the picture!"
I sent him the game and waited for his response...
Even though he played it right away, it seemed like forever, and he phoned me while he was playing it to ask a few rules questions. That was the worst. I knew they had played it but didn't know what they thought. I got an email the next day stating that the game was indeed fun ("Yes!"), but that the game seemed to outlast the fun ("Nuts!"). Zev said that if I could get the game length down to about an hour he would take another look, and he made a couple suggestions on how to speed up the game by increasing movement and drilling speed.
Something in my brain clicked. I knew the game was too long all along, yet I submitted it anyway. Suddenly I realized that the game would not be finished until the four problems I outlined earlier had been addressed. But not only that, I also suddenly knew exactly what I needed to do to address every single one of them.
Over the next 24 hours, I redid the game from the ground up. I took the resources off the board and made them tiles that were placed on the board at the start of the game. Originally I was concerned with setup time, but I cut the total number of tiles in half and had all the players simultaneously place them on the board. To my surprise, it took less than a minute to do. This had the unfortunate side effect of making it possible for the rock (blocking terrain that added tactical flavour to the board) to make it impossible to reach certain areas of the board. This was simple to fix now that they were tiles, too: I allowed players to drill them but it took two drill actions to remove a rock. These changes made the game a lot more fun and much less fiddly.
I took out the UFO at the base of the board and tied the endgame to the contracts. The game is basically based on a bubble economy, so why not have the game end once demand for the products is gone?
Originally building an upgrade took 2-4 resources and fulfilling a contract took 3-6. I cut that to 1-2 resources each, but maintained the variability by having some resources be more rare than others. In retrospect, I have no idea what I was thinking before; the design worked just as good or better with the new numbers, and this cut the game length in half. I think that design choice was a result of my videogame background. In video games, many things like this are actually designed to waste your time on purpose!
I'd played with several methods to keep the game pace from slowing as you got farther and farther from the surface (and the refinery, where you needed to take all your stuff), but none of them worked the way I wanted. The version I sent Z-Man Games used a rule that allowed you to skip your turn to teleport back to the surface, but this meant you still had to trudge your way down to the bottom time and time again. Skipping your turn is never fun, even when voluntary. The answer was portals. I placed a giant portal on the surface that could take you to any other portal below the surface. At the start of the game, however, these underground portals were buried, which meant you had to uncover them during the game. This not only solved all the pacing issues with the game, but also introduced a ton of tactical play in and around the discovery and control of the portals.
It was the biggest rewrite the game had ever undergone, and the moment of truth was here. Was it everything I thought it would be? Absolutely! I couldn't believe just how much better it was! Everything felt right, which made the shortcomings of the previous version seem so very, very, wrong. In general, when designing games I find that solutions to small problems make those problems seem a lot worse than they did at the time. This has become one of my primary design paradigms: My games aren't done until nothing about the game bothers me.
After this point the development was mostly fine-tuning the numbers and content. The game now played so fast that I decided to add another player, bringing the player count up to five, while still playing in 45-60 minutes. I sent the new version back to Z-Man and awaited his decision...
I got the best one sentence email I've ever gotten shortly thereafter:
Quote: Hey Matt, Everyone liked the game, so I think I'd like to do it.
And the rest is history. I started Undermining almost four years ago, and it's finally coming out. I was completely blown away by how long even a lighter game like this took to create and develop, but it was a process I thoroughly enjoyed and have since repeated many times.
Well, if you made it through that, I thank you for your time and interest. I have not read many of these design diaries, so if you have any pointers for future diaries, please Geekmail me with your sage advice. Hopefully this is the first of many!
Matt Tolman
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matt tolman
Canada
Calgary
Alberta
Look for my first published game, Undermining! Coming soon from Z-man games.
and his Game Design aspirations and progress by subscribing to his newsletter. He puts a new one out every 2-4 months. To subscribe, send him a Geekmail with your email address.
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Look for my first published game, Undermining! Coming soon from Z-man games.
My first ever video game, how awesome is that.
I had DigDug for my NES so it looks like a buy offhand.
How "recently" are we talking here?
