Push cx » turn-based strategy

Game Influences (6/6): Kongai

Peter Harkins — Mon, 18 May 2009 12:37:15 +0000

This is part of a series of blog posts on the design process of my web game:

Kongai is a very different from all the previous games. It’s an online two-player collectible card game. You build a deck of three to five characters (with, optionally, one item each) and defeat your opponents’ characters.

Each turn you have two choices to make and the results are resolved simultaneously rather than in the more common “I go, then you go” fashion. Range is first: you can leave your character where they are or spend energy trying to get to the near or far range. If you leave your character, the range is whatever your opponent sets. If you both try to set it to something different it doesn’t change. Some abilities work only at near or far, some both. The energy you spend to change range is the same energy used to activate abilities, so there are immediately some tough decisions to make about where and whether to spend your resources and guessing what your opponent will choose.

Second, you each choose an action. You can use one of your characters’ four abilities (mostly attacks, though a quarter or so heal or give status ailments), switch your character out for another (dodging any attack), intercept your opponents’ switch (preventing it and dealing significant damage), or rest your character to recover extra energy for the next turn.

It’s one of those simple-but-deep games because of the simultaneous turns. You don’t flail away at your opponent, you have to outthink them. Kongai’s designer, David Sirlin, has written a bit about the process of designing Kongai and how it’s all about the skill he calls yomi, the ability to predict your opponent’s moves and keep yours unpredictable.

This, in a nutshell, is why I gripe about multiplayer games being primarily about deckbuilding like Tactics Ogre. You only get one try to guess your opponent’s plan. If you guessed wrong, you play a (possibly quite long) battle that you can probably only lose. Only then do you get a chance to change your build to have new tactics to try again. Tactics Ogre isn’t much fun because there’s little back-and-forth between the players, battles are just about lining up and smashing as hard as you can (or, worse, about “leveling up” the power of your characters).

Deckbuilding isn’t intrinsically wrong, it’s fun in Kongai and in Magic: The Gathering even more of the game is deckbuilding and it still works well. Many strategy games like Civilization and StarCraft intertwine the building and using phases. You scout your opponent and deceive their scouts to decide your build and sabotage theirs.

Sirlin’s written an awesome book called Playing to Win: Becoming the Champion about how players should approach competitive games to succeed at tournament-level play (it’s also available free online). His pushes players to understand games as they are designed rather than as they may stylistically appear to play. Basketball can be won by playing the court and constantly harassing other players, not by executing a practiced attack or defending the zone (the Traveller example is even more powerful). I also recommend reading Sirlin’s entire blog, it’s similar in content to his book but from the perspective of the game designer trying to plan and balance a complex game that elite players will do their best to break over thousands of hours of dedicated play.

I was thinking about my game’s design and how to prevent it from becoming a slugfest when I thought of Kongai and read Sirlin. The best strategy in any farming game like Ikariam is to find the weakest player and raid them repeatedly. The best strategy in WeeWar is to steal an opponents’ nearest base and the positive feedback loop generated by bases being a zero-sum resource means you’re almost guaranteed a win. Tactics Ogre is a slugfest because there are no meaningful options, the best move on any turn is to move to the weakest opponent and hit them as hard as possible. The constant refrain here is that you never care what your opponent is doing; nothing they do actually influences your moves because you don’t have significant decisions to make.

Counter-Strike is a highly successful tournament game because players are constantly shifting tactics in the real-time battle. X-Com is the only single-player game on this list, but it would have a good shot at translating to multiplayer because it deals with managing limited resources and knowledge in response to your opponents’ actions.

These are the games that had the biggest influence on my design, though there are certainly others like Syndicate, Eve Online, and muds that have had an effect. I seem to have a habit of working on my design, seeing flaws, adopting from other games to refactor my design, and repeating. I’ve been really happy with my current plans for an unprecedented several months, so I’m moving into playtesting to start getting real-world feedback on how well gameplay works. I’ve got one more game design blog post scheduled on technology trees and otherwise will be returning to my regular babbling about whatever shiny thing captures my attention — which is to reiterate that you should feel free to comment, email, or IM because that’s where I tend to pick up topics from.

Game Influences (5/6): X-Com

Peter Harkins — Fri, 15 May 2009 12:17:17 +0000

This is part of a series of blog posts on the design process of my web game:

So I thought I’d solved everything and was moving along on my design. Players control 1 or 2 secret agents on an isometric map. Turns simply alternate rather than being based on how much you did last turn. Almost all weapons are ranged and powerful enough to kill in one or two shots. Hm. So why would you ever risk getting into someone’s line of fire, should I add fog of war so the player only knows what their agents can see? I guess I could add stances so characters could hide behind terrain, and maybe 3D to make positioning important…

Doubts crept in. Could a game this complex be playable? Wouldn’t the user interface be overwhelming? I took my notes and went to chat with a game designer.

Me:: So, I’m making an isometric turn-based tactical combat game. And I’m not sure it’ll work because most characters in most turn-based strategy games can take many hits but that doesn’t match my urban combat setting.
Ammon:: That sounds a little familiar.
Me:: I don’t know any games like it. So I’m thinking I should really reduce the distance characters can move and do these other things so they don’t just run straight at each other, but that’s getting complex.
Ammon:: This sounds like X-Com.
Me:: Never heard of it
Ammon:: X-Com is single-player, you have a squad of 8-14 units. Units gain XP but 1-2 shots kill so any unit that survives a few missions is awesome.
Me:: Any enemies were the same size and shape as your units? Did they outnumber you?
Ammon:: Yep.
Me:: And most weapons are ranged? That works?
Ammon:: Yep.
Me:: Huh. I guess I’ll check it out sometime. So I’m trying to decide what a turn looks like. Move and attack vs. move or attack, mostly.
Ammon:: X-Com has action points you spend for moving, turning, changing stance. Different fire modes (snapshot, aimed shot, burst fire) take different amounts.
Me:: What’s the gameplay effect of turning? Are attacks against side/rear better? Is there fog of war?
Ammon:: Yep, fog of war is the primary effect. A shot from behind could be a kill and you’d never even know where it came from.
Me:: Hm. One thing I’m pondering is a ‘guard’ action. So an agent could do nothing on their turn but look out a door and nail someone who crosses by the doorway in one turn.
Ammon:: Yeah, X-Com has that.
Me:: Oh. Do any of these model audio? Like you could hear someone sneaking up on you? [Which means some kind of replay of enemy turns before you take yours.]
Ammon:: Yep, you can hear running footsteps, gunfire. Rockets are effective but attract a lot of attention.
Me:: And all that works? It’s not overwhelming?
Ammon:: The only problem was scaling the power curve. A major element was new technologies, which meant building a base, capturing alien equipment during battle, and spending money to research it. Which would attract the aliens’ attention, they’d come attack your base.
Me:: Huh. That was a big part of my game, building bunks to be able to have more characters but also making yourself a more tempting target for other players.
Ammon:: Yeah, base layout mattered a lot. When you defend against attacks, it’s on whatever floorplan you created. So if your barracks are too far from the entrance, aliens could trash your equipment and kill your scientists before you got there.
Me:: OK, stop talking about X-Com. I can already tell I need to play it because it includes every element I thought was original and spiffy and maybe even too complex.

The X-Com series of games was released in the 1990s. You can find the first couple games (#2, Terror From The Deep, is probably the overall best) on abandonware sites and run them under dosbox or easily pick up the port to modern PCs on Steam.

There’s not a lot of description that early conversation left out. When I played X-Com a few days later, I was awed that someone 15 years ago had created almost exactly the game I was inventing.

I pondered where to go from here. I had the confirmation that I could make as complex a game as I’d considered. But if the game has Been Done, can I learn from it instead of (inadvertently) cloning it?

I’ve always liked game designs with simple mechanics and few numbers. I don’t really like to count into double digits, let alone have 382 hitpoints and decide whether to buy an item that gives me a 6% boost. X-Com requires that players be meticulous about equipping units, sending enough ammo that they won’t run out but won’t overburden and slow them down. It seemed like too much deckbuilding, moving the interesting decisions out of the main gameplay and into the preparation. Battles were fairly repetitive once you learned the basic strategy of how to move under cover, search buildings, provide support fire, and balance your team.

I was still working on my design but wasn’t very sure of it until I thought about another game named Kongai.