Design Notebook: Dress-Up Dolls
When I write classes, I usually do it in Notepad on my desktop. When I write games, it's typically in notebooks that I buy from the drugstore across the street (they have the best ones -- lined on one side, grids on the other, hard covers -- beautiful!).
Here's the first thing I scribbled down about Dress-Up Dolls.
The game began life as a Discord conversation. Louis was discussing thoughts for his then-upcoming game, AFFRAYER, and I chimed in with some out-of-pocket nonsense to try and make people laugh, as is my wont. But there was some merit in what I said, and it got my gears turning.
So I started designing. The first drafts of the game specifically cited inspirational material -- Gurren Lagann, Code Geass, MSG: The Witch From Mercury -- but once the ball got rolling, these proved to be wholly unnecessary.
Here's my notes from the first playtest.
I got some rules written up and organized into a document and I drafted some players to try it out. I learned a lot on this first pass. The most important thing was: It was fun! Everybody was enjoying building and showing off their mechs, and the simplified node maps I had used for the sake of ease-of-production, which I worried would be dull or confusing, worked great!
I also learned just how many of the important mechanical questions of the game I had left unstated. Since they were in my head, and I was running the game, it worked out, but I would need to get those on paper so other people could run it. This would continue to happen with each playtest: I kept discovering more things I had been taking for granted.
(Other small refinements: I had been calling the player-characters "pilots," which was causing confusion in contrast to the grunt pilots, so I changed it to "aces." I discovered that the cyclical weapon advantage table I had used to imagine the thing in the first place was totally unclear to players, who were misunderstanding it in a consistent way, so I changed how it was displayed.)
The first playtest was also the time I brought a second designer onto the project -- Blattella, who readers of my blog will know, spectated the first game and had a lot of valuable thoughts. This kept my enthusiasm for the project going for what turned out to be five more playtest revisions, and certainly helped give the game its voice and style.
Pretty soon, the amount of changes per revision dropped dramatically.
The main thing about Dress-Up Dolls that I was proud of was what I call the information game. This is the period of the game where you're analyzing the resources your opponent has used so far, and trying to extrapolate what they're capable of and what this means about their weakness. In the early testing, this information game worked but it was over too quickly, owing to several factors, the largest of which was that every mech had a fixed loadout. So we spent a few days brainstorming a build system.
We sketched out some costs that seemed appropriate and a budget that would be easy to keep track of and tested it some more. At this point we knew we had something great. The numbers would need to be tweaked, but the game was working. Every mech a player designed had the whole table excited. It was tough to make decisions, but you were always informed, and you could lean on style to help you decide. The information game had been extended to exactly where I wanted it to be: You can't "solve" it too early, but it doesn't take too long if you're playing smart. It's also possible to more or less ignore it, if you're really feeling experimental, but since it's a team game, you're still helping your friends figure it out.
We pushed the costs of the gear that led to the most interesting and fun moments, and cut the ones that sucked. We futzed around with the layout to facilitate better understanding of the rules. I kept playing with the visual style (which had pretty early on cribbed a lot from Vital Shell, which Blattella and I had both been playing recently).
If I'm paying for image embeds, by god I'm gonna use 'em.
I am copying the maps I used during our test games, because they worked (except the one that didn't, which I'm changing!). I intend to run one more playtest before launch, as we added a feature that neither of us can believe wasn't there from the start, and I'd feel too crazy sending it out with such a major addition without testing. But at the same time, I don't want to test it too much, both because my time is limited and because I think it's fun for a buildcraft game like this to have a little bit of chaos left in its bones. Can you break the game? I'm really not sure! But we've done what we can to ensure it's not easy to do.
So yeah! If you're reading this and you don't already know me from Discord and you want in on the final playtest, find my email on this blog and hit me up! The game launches mid-August! You bet your ass I'm going to post about it when it does!