04.11.10

My Design Process (or: the Super Mario Prime case study)

Posted in Game Design at 4:53 pm by Christian

Recently, I made a mini-RPG for Aidan (my 6-year-old son). I figure I’ll write down the process, not as a “this is how you have to do it,” but as a “this is how I do it” kind of thing.  After all, there’s lots of different approaches to designing games. And since I talked at GameStorm about how I start from a freeform place and add to that, this might help to show what I meant by that.

Aidan is a big Mario fan–Super Mario, Mario Kart, and so on.  He also got interested in my Anima Prime manuscript, which, with a low-quality printout of the cover that caught his attention, is lying around in a notebook on our desks these days.  He asked what it was, I told him it was a game, and he wanted to play.  So we decided to make a related Mario game instead.

He was mostly interested in fighting Bowser and other opponents as Mario, so that’s what the game would be about.  As I said, I start from a freeform place, so we could have just talked about it.  But I wanted to add a die mechanic to add some unpredictability and, later, opportunities for gaming choices.  It was based on Anima Prime: you roll a number of dice, and every die showing a 3 or above counts as a success.  Mario always rolls 4 dice, we decided together, while opponents roll dice depending on how powerful they are.  Whoever reaches 10 successes first wins the fight.  Mario always starts.

Obviously, the odds are stacked in Mario’s favor (in what we would call Super Mario Prime).  But that’s good; it’s a kids’ game, and they should win far more often than not.  Also, there’s no negating successes; I hate “games” like Hi-Ho-Cheerioh in which you can lose your whole progress, which can make them take forever.

Speaking of: at this point, we didn’t have a game, we had an activity (according to my definitions).  After all, there was no element of choice.  Each side rolled dice in turn without an opportunity for decisions that could impact the outcome.

So I added to that a coin mechanic: Mario’s player has 3 coins.  He can trade one in to reroll dice that didn’t earn successes.  Given that now we have viable choices to make, the design moved into the “game” category in my head.  I later added other characters who could use their coins in different ways, whether to gain additional guaranteed successes (even above 4 with one roll), make the enemy reroll their successes, or something else.  This gives mechanical diversity among characters (like Luigi and Princess Peach) that makes playing the game more fun in the long run, because Aidan could now discover different strategies within the same basic framework.

I also added a rule that he would only gain new coins when he lost a fight.  Aidan immediately said: “Oh, so losing is actually fun because you get your coins back!”  Exactly.  Again, given that this is a kids game, it’s all about avoiding frustrations and making all aspects of it fun (whereas in a grownup game, making an option less fun can raise the intensity and promote investment in the choices within the game).

Still, it wasn’t a roleplaying game because the fiction didn’t matter.  Well, to Aidan it did; he insisted that we draw Mario and the opponent for each battle, then cross out pieces we attacked and hit each round, and he had fun with it.  But to me, the difference between the greater category of games and the smaller one of RPGs (or story games or whatever) is that the fiction has the ability to, at least sometimes, impact the mechanics.  I didn’t get to the point of officially creating the rule that would turn this into an RPG, but there are several options:

• Allowing a very cool maneuver description to earn extra successes or outright defeat the opponent
• Letting him “dodge” successes from the opposition if he can tell me how Mario would not be too susceptible to a specific attack
• Handing out a bonus coin at the beginning of a battle if fictionally, Mario had an advantage over the opponent

There are more, of course, but you see the common thread here: they all require judgment on part of the player of the opposition.  That’s why I don’t think you can have a completely adversarial game that’s also an RPG according to my definition; competition and fair judgment, while working sometimes, will often lead to frustration.  Not always, but often enough that I don’t think it’s fun, for me, to try and balance those things while I’m playing.  I want all my play motivations to align, not oppose each other.

So there you go.  A very basic game that Aidan greatly enjoyed, and which produced many battle drawings full of scribbled-out opponents.

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