Weekly Design ~ Machine Operators
Sept 7, 2010 20:36:40 GMT -6
Post by Judge Sam on Sept 7, 2010 20:36:40 GMT -6
Well I don't know if it's going to be weekly haha, but I really do like explaining my game design decisions and talking about what went into making the game. So many months of tough decisions, twist planning, and event creation went into this game before it began. I like illuminating that part of it which you really don't see and I can't talk about during the game. Plus since Spies is over there's no reason to hold any secrets at all back so I can just say whatever I want!
Oh wow I'm flipping through my notebook and there's so much to talk about! But here's the overarching story. After Spies 6 ended in July 2009, I took 3-4 months off to develop both Spies 7 and Spies 8 simultaneously. Spies 8 actually came to me first. I worked on it for the first month and then set it aside to make Spies 7. The reason why Spies 8 was Spies 8 and not Spies 7 was that the voting twist was too similar to Spies 6's set of voting twists. Back to back seasons of voting twists would be kinda lame, so it had to wait one game.
To develop both games, I created a bunch of material to use in both. I listed every role I could possibly imagine. Wrote a ton of Imprisonment stories for both. Came up with Activities I used in both games.
I'm looking at the role list and a lot of the ones in both games are on here haha. Oh this is one I have really wanted to talk about for a year haha but couldn't. I hope David / spies7cuddles is reading this because it's about him!
So before Spies 6, I ran something called the Choose Your Own Role contest! Before the game, players made up a Spies role that thought was cool. I picked one winner and they got the role of their choice.
David submitted a set of roles called machine operator roles. They were really good. I'd recommend reading them. I liked them all. They were my first choice as winners.
Here's the basic summary of machine operator roles. You perform a task, and you get a reward. Only if you succeed in the task do you get the rewards, which can be quite powerful. David's tasks you had to complete were Exile a Spy, guess the Imprisonment target beforehand, and go 2 Exiles without getting a vote.
But the more I thought about it, the more I realized the machine operator roles were too good to be winners haha. (I have this feeling about things David creates a lot!) There was too much juicy stuff to have it just be one role. I wanted it to be a whole set of roles. This was going to be good!
At this point I also realized that machine operator roles were a generalization of roles I had already used in the past. In Spies 6 there was a role called Astrologer. If they guessed the alignment of the Exiled person before it was revealed, they got a doctor save. So like:
Guess Alignment -> Doctor Save.
Eugenicist, a role where they had to Exile inactives to get investigations, also fit into this category.
So I was very excited about all the possibilities for these machine operator roles. So many tasks and so many rewards to give out! The problem was, I was quite overwhelmed. I listed out like 12 tasks, and 12 rewards. That's 144 combinations. I couldn't pick out the one role there that seemed interesting, cool, and fun to me. It was all so disjointed. It was giving me a headache. So I put it off haha.
Meanwhile I was developing other roles I really liked for Spies 7. They were taking up slots and I wanted machine operators to be 2-3 roles. So it was set off for Spies 8.
By the way, I had wanted to do the Choose Your Own Role contest again for Spies 8 because it was so successful. Really cool ideas. I intended on it but I got Spies 8 applications started a little late, which left less time before the game started. Additionally, I was pushing the free $$$ theme as an attention grabber, and didn't want to complicate it with the choose your own role thing as well. Also Taskmaster was on the list for Spies 8 roles but it didn't work as well as I hoped with other roles and was bumped off.
So it's time for Spies 8 game design so it's back to the machine operator roles. Those are tough to design. At first I thought it might be one role, with several different tasks and rewards for each task. But that would have been amazingly complicated, not only to balance each task, but to balance them against each other. (They might ignore tasks that are too hard or don't give a good enough reward.)
I also wanted the task they had to be complete to be interesting, influential, and sort of difficult. It also had to be "repeatably interesting," which is tough to come up with. If it was a super boring task after the 4th time they did it that wouldn't really be fun. It had to be interesting each time it was done through the whole game.
I also had to avoid situations where it was easy to "fix" the task in order to get the reward. If they could just tell someone else to do something simple to get their reward, that would suck.
Alright, so the machine operator roles in Spies 8 became the Angel, Devil, and the Lobbyist. They don't really have a complex story leading to their creation. It kind of came to me in a flash of inspiration. I was just looking at the different powers and the duality of it was really interesting. I liked that one did Immunity from Imprisonment and the other Immunity from Exile. Both were quite simple yet very deep and rich in terms of what could happen.
Finally, I had been looking for mason roles which 2 people could do forever. I wanted to bring back masons, but I didn't want just simple masons because that would be a little too easy haha. For the last 4 games, ever since the Cat and Mouse Game of Spies 5, I had been looking for a 2-parter mason role. It eluded me for years and here it finally was! So I was excited for masons again. I tried to pick two people who would be friends so I was glad Gertrude and Chance were.
Okay that's part 1, part 2 coming up soon hopefully!
