Having a pre-existing audience is one of the biggest predictors of success for a Kickstarter campaign. While that’s great if you already have thousands of followers, it can be very intimidating when you’re just starting out. How are you supposed to get people to follow you when you haven’t released anything yet?

This was the exact situation we were in when we decided to crowdfund Captain’s Gambit. When we started out on our journey five years ago, we knew basically nothing about marketing or community management. But through a lot of research (and a lot of trial and error), we’ve managed to cultivate a fun, kind, and growing community.

So how did we do it? Well, today we’re going to share some of the steps we took to build an audience from scratch. Follow this guide and you’ll be well on your way to a sizeable following in no time!

As I’ve talked about in the past, balancing games is really hard. And while that’s true for all games, card games in particular are very tricky to balance. Often cards games will feature dozens if not hundreds of unique cards, all of which could have unintended game-breaking interactions with one another. As a designer, you need a way to keep specific cards separated while still providing players with the freedom to make whatever decks they want to play. Thankfully, there’s a simple design trick that does just that: factions!

We’ve talked extensively on this blog about why you should design games, why they are so awesome for self-expression, and how you can create your first game. But once you’ve taken the first step, it can be hard to know where to go to learn more. Today, I’m going to share some of the resources I personally use to expand my knowledge of game design. Though there are countless amazing creators out there, here are ten of my personal favourites.

There’s a lot to love about Hades. From its diverse cast of memorable characters to its endlessly replayable gameplay, Hades is easily one of the best and most ambitious Roguelikes ever released. I’ve personally sunk over 120hrs into the game and have played more than 100 runs and I still have so much left to do. Despite all the time I’ve spent on the game, it still feels just as captivating as it did when I first picked it up in early access. You might be thinking that this is because of the game’s overwhelming amount of content, and sure, that’s a pretty big factor. But Supergiant actually uses one little design trick to help encourage you keep the game fresh.

See, we often think saying someone “looks suspicious” is the same as saying that they are lying. It’s not. If we knew for certain someone was lying, we wouldn’t call them “suspicious”. Rather, being suspicious means we think they might be lying and that they might be telling the truth. It means we’re uncertain.

Creating games can be really fun, extremely satisfying, and a great outlet for self-expression. But if you’ve never tried making a game before, it can feel really intimidating to give it a shot. As someone new to the field, where are you even supposed to start?

Luckily, I’ve got an easy game design exercise that is perfect for everyone. It’s the exercise I started out with when I got into game design, and anyone can do it regardless of age or skill level. Check it out below, and then I’ll go through why it’s such a great gateway into game design.

If you’ve ever played a Zelda game before, you know that not every item feels like a meaningful addition to your toolkit. Rather, some items just spend most of the game collecting dust in your inventory. For every amazing item like the Hookshot, there’s another disappointing item like the Deku Nuts. What sets these items apart? What makes an item useless, and what makes an item worth using?

The Lock-In Effect is very common in games with multiple objectives. Achieving a win condition typically requires devoting a lot of time or resources, so logically it should be difficult to have enough left over to successfully pivot to another goal. But what if you want players to adapt their strategy and change objectives throughout the game? How can you avoid the Lock-In Effect?

So if many modern Roguelikes do not possess all these traits, does that mean that none of them are Roguelikes? I would argue no. Rather, I believe the problem is with the definition itself. The Berlin Interpretation was created over a decade ago, and since then the genre has changed and evolved. As a result, the definition is out of date and out of touch with modern Roguelikes and is written far too exclusionary. Many of its factors are either too arbitrary, too vague, or too specific. Additionally, the Non-Modal factor doesn’t even encompass ADOM, Angband, and Crawl, all games which it claims belong in the Roguelike canon. When taken together, this shows that the Berlin Interpretation doesn’t define what makes a Roguelike a “Roguelike,” but rather what makes the game Rogue “Rogue.” Because of this, we have no choice but to reject the Berlin Interpretation and instead find an alternative definition.

Whenever you combine two games some of the original design elements aren’t going to work well together. As a result, some of these elements end up cut or scaled back. Cadence of Hyrule’s movement system is a pretty clear example of this. In classic Zelda games you can move fairly freely around the world, but in Crypt of the Necrodancer movement is locked to a grid and must be done in time with the music. Since these two movement systems are incompatible with each other, Cadence of Hyrule chose to ditch Zelda’s movement system in favour of Necrodancer’s.

But now that the core gameplay of Cadence of Hyrule has been created and tested (and we know that it’s excellent), I think that Brace Yourself Games should consider revisiting some of these design decisions.

Making something as fun and robust as The Dalaran Heist just wouldn’t have been possible right when Hearthstone was launched. Blizzard needed to first test out their boss battles in the early adventures, take a big chance with Dungeon Run, and then finally experiment and refine the formula with Monster Hunt and Rumble Run. Not every step in this progression was perfect, but that’s kind of the point. It’s okay to make the occasional misstep as long as you keep running forward.

Learning how to play a board game is hard. It’s not because board games are inherently more difficult or complicated than other types of games (they aren’t), but because of how their rules are enforced. In a video game, the game itself enforces its own rules. If you attack an enemy, the game knows exactly how much damage you are supposed to do to that enemy and will make sure that damage calculation is done correctly. It doesn’t matter if the player doesn’t know how those calculations are done, they’ll be done correctly anyways. But with a board game, it’s up to the players to enforce the rules. If you don’t know how damage is calculated, the game isn’t going to do it for you. Or worse, if you think you know it is calculated but are wrong, the game isn’t going to step in and fix your mistake. Because of this, players need to know all the rules of a board game before they can start playing. Otherwise they are likely to either get stuck or break the game. But what is the best way to teach someone how to play a board game? As part of my Game Research course this semester I ran a small preliminary study testing out different learning methods for teaching board games, and I’ve got some cool initial findings to share with you.

If you don’t play Hollow Knight, the only information you need to know is that it’s a moderately difficult game with occasional rest spots that feature benches. Your character can sit on these benches to heal and save the game. And they’re designed so well that it’s made me enjoy sitting down in real life.

Century: Golem Edition is basically the exact same game as Century: Spice Road. Some players like the theme of Spice Road because of the wooden bowls and/or the familiarity of the theme. I much prefer Golem Edition, however. The ‘story’ of Golem Edition - discovering crystals, trading them up for better crystals, crafting golems - feels way cooler than farming and trading wooden cubes (spices) for what Spice Road vaguely labels as “score cards” (pictures of cities).

First I’ll describe three good parts of Golem Edition’s theme. Then, we’ll talk about human experience!

If you’ve played Undertale before (and I’m assuming that you have), you’ll know that one of its defining features is player choice. It’s a game that allows you to kill literally everyone you meet (genocide run), befriend everyone you meet (pacifist run), or do something in the middle. Each of these playstyles results in significant meaningful changes to the gameplay and story. So naturally, when you start playing Deltarune, you would expect to be able to make the same range of choices.

But here’s the thing about Deltarune. Your choices don’t matter.

Recently for my Games and Society course, I wrote a paper about how to define Roguelikes as a genre. Turns out that topic is a bit complicated, so I decided to break it down into several smaller blog posts. Today, I wanted to share something broad I learned while researching that paper about how video game genres come to be.

Back in March I backed a project called Guardian’s Gambit. Originally I backed it because it had a similar name to Captain’s Gambit, but I also backed it because it looked interesting and I liked the minimalist art style. Guardian’s Gambit is a 2-player card combat game with some light strategy elements created by Knights of Norwood. Players take turns using the cards in their hand to attack the cards in their opponent’s hand, while using special abilities to protect their cards and bypass their opponent’s defenses. It’s a fun, quick, easy game that’s great if you have some time to kill while traveling or taking a short break. But I don’t really want to focus on the game itself today. What I want to highlight about Guardian’s Gambit is this:

I can't write this post without talking about spoilers, so this is your warning now. Bastion is gonna be on the Switch in like three days though, so you should definitely get it if you can!

With the "thin deck" strategy, you should focus on a few key cards with specific effects and remove as many middling cards as possible. By doing so your average hand will have a much higher chance of including the exact cards you want with none of the anti-synergistic fluff in between.

You've heard this kind of advice before if you've ever tried your hand at creative writing, or even academic writing. But I guess I never intuitively Got It as much until my descent into deckbuilders gave me a better sense of recognizing how different parts can interlock [or not] at a given moment.

I have coined a word to describe a particular type of dialogue delivery that's pretty much exclusive to videogames: "live enjambment"!
Live enjambment is a literary device that is, predictably, a variation on regular literary enjambment. This specifically concerns the affordance that only 'timed' media like lyric videos and videogames can take advantage of.

An increasing number of roguelikes are implementing the cyclical nature of its own genre into the lore of their games, and it's really cool.

The scarcity of time only works because other variables stem from it. For example, because players don't make much money per day, the average player can't pay for both food and heat consistently. Players always feel the strain of forcing their family to endure one type of sadness or another. The lore of making your family suffer + the mechanics of losing the game if you go broke turn cash into a premium resource. Therefore, the scarcity of money motivates players to work as quickly as they can and optimize their reading skills. Your money troubles also motivates you to take bribes, which is useful for introducing quandaries. Linking variables like this gives a kind of distance from the time variable. Technically, what you mostly need is money, not specifically time. Instead, you kind of force yourself to optimize time on your own as the 'solution' to money problems. I think when the player puts importance on time on their own, it really helps them get invested in the game.

I noticed something neat today with the loot in Borderlands: they all have a bright green label when unopened, and then turn grey and dark after being opened.

The anxiety of min-maxing your character (that's usually so prevalent in roguelikes) is softened by Dead Cells' alternative method of play.

You don't need this blog to tell you that Overwatch has thoughtful character design. But maybe you can learn new approaches to ability design with me. :)

I first realized I was lacking some kind of design sense when I realized I held two thoughts in my mind simultaneously: A) Reinhardt's abilities make no mechanical sense together, and B) Reinhardt feels fun and cohesive anyway. It was an obvious sign that my design skills were amateurish in comparison to the folk at Blizzard, and so began my quest to figure out why things worked.

The ability to remove poor draws from your deck is incredibly powerful. There's so many things we can learn from the power of deck thinning.

Subset Games' technique for bringing narrative into a tactics game is so simple, it's easy to underestimate how well it works. Basically, what they do for ITB is have the pilots say X dialogue in response to Y state occuring. Most of the dialogue just hangs in the air for a few seconds before disappearing, and you don't have to read it to understand the game. So it's completely out of the way of players who don't care (which is important for a game like this).