It’s been a while since I last made a blog post, but I have a good reason for my extended absence: over the past 8 months, I have been finishing up my master’s degree in game science and design at Northeastern University! The final two semesters have been a bit of a bear: one class had me designing a new game level every single week in addition to analyzing and creating game design patterns (probably a topic for a future blog post) and I completed two separate research projects in that time. I also was part of a 3-person team that created a 3rd person shooter using Unreal Engine 5, a program that we all were new to (again, probably a blog post all on its own).
But now I’m back baby! I’m newly graduated and temporarily unemployed, so I have plenty of time to think and write about gaming!
And hopefully you're more excited about it than Estelle is.
The first thought I want to write about is a thought I had shortly before I attended GDC as a CA this year (oh yeah, I also spent a week in San Francisco in March (also probably an entire blog post in and of itself)). I consider myself a little bit of a late bloomer when it comes to digital game design: most of my classmates in the aforementioned master’s program were in their mid-20s, and many of them had been playing with programs like Unity since they were in their teens. I, on the other hand, had never even heard of Unity until I was 30. This created a bit of insecurity for me: am I too far behind some of my younger game designers to ever hope to catch up?
But then I thought more about it and I realized, I started game designing in my youth as well. Sure, I wasn’t grinding out games from scratch on Unity, but I was able to use the tools available to me to make games for myself, my friends, and my family to play. In fact, I reckon that most people who are reading this blog have done so too.
So please, join me on a nostalgic walk down memory lane as I reminisce over the ways I discovered the game designer that always existed inside of me. My hope is that in reading this, you’ll remember the tools you played with over the years and realize that there’s a game designer in you too.
Memory Lane Stop 1: Using your imagination
I think the first game I ever designed was a game show. I was probably about 8 or 9 years old when I came up with The Spinning Game, a trivia game show with a very simple premise: answer the question correctly or pay the penalty of having to spin in a circle until I tell you to stop. The show was never picked up by a studio (in the age of Netflix, I bet I could have at least gotten a meeting) and it only ever had one contestant: my little sister who would have been 4 or 5 at the time. The trivia questions usually reflected what I was learning in school and would have consisted of basic arithmetic, US history, or sports trivia that my sister couldn’t possibly know the answer to. I served as the show’s host and came up with the questions in my head. If my sister gave the correct answer, I’d award her points. If she gave in the incorrect answer, I’d make her spin until I told her to stop. If I had a lot of good questions I wanted to try that night, I’d often make her stop quickly. If not, I’d often let her go until it looked like she might fall down. This game was a bit of a fad in our house and we likely only played it for a few months, but it was a frequent after-dinner activity for my sister and me for that span of time.
I’d imagine that many kids, if not most of them, invent games such as this to be played with friends or family, and many are probably much more creative than this. But still, creating a game that rewards correct decisions and punishes incorrect decisions shows a basic understanding of game design and a desire to create something that will be fun for other people. I think that kids crave validation, and nothing is more validating than being told you made something fun when you’re 8 years old.
Not to end on a down note, but my game did have a pretty significant design flaw. A while after my sister and I stopped playing The Spinning Game, she confessed to me that she would often give incorrect answers because she just wanted to spin. I’d created a game where the punishment was more desirable than the reward. But I can’t be too hard on myself for that issue, I was only 8 after all.
Memory Lane Stop 2: In-Game Editors
Making a video game is incredibly complicated and requires a huge variety of skills, abilities, and know-how. Making a video game as a kid is almost impossible without the help of a program that supplies most of the material for you to do so.
Thankfully, there are tons of games that exist that do just that. Games like Mario Maker, Minecraft, Halo Infinite, and Far Cry 5 all have design modes that allow players to make their own maps and game modes and share them with friends and players all over the world.
However, my first experience with a scenario editor came years before online gaming became mainstream, and it started with one of the most influential games in my life: Age of Empires II.
I spent a lot of time designing maps to look just right using this editor. This was my first level design experience!
For those unfamiliar with Age of Empires II, it is a real-time strategy game where players are tasked with commanding a civilization based on the cultures of the early-late middle ages of Europe, Asia, and the Middle East and building up their economies and militaries until you could achieve victory in one of several different ways (but usually killing all of the other players). The main game mode saw players take control of a civilization in the Dark Age with no more than a few villagers to gather resources and a scout cavalry to explore, but there were also scenario modes that put players in unique situations that were tied to a backstory such as Joan of Arc or Genghis Khan. One scenario may have you start with an already established city and task you with defending it from enemies for a certain period of time while another may give you an army on one side of the map and require you to fight your way to the other side of the map.
The game came with a scenario editor that you could use to make scenarios of your own, and over the years people have made some very cool scenarios ranging from recreations of famous battles to tweaks on the regular game mode (my favorite was a play on Robin Hood where you’d start with a longbowman and a monk which I would use to kill/convert enemy villagers) to completely overhauled game modes like a tower defense mode.
I was probably about 10 or 11 when I started playing around with the scenario editor, so I wasn’t exactly interested in creating a challenge for myself, and I didn’t have the knowledge to recreate a famous battle. What I did have, though, was a desire to build cities and a lot of friends that I wanted to put in the game. As a result, I created my own story and made a series of scenarios to take me along that journey. Sadly, I can’t remember the specifics, but here’s what I do remember: I always made myself the Turks because I liked their unique unit, the janissary, and I always made myself blue, the default starting color for the player. I would almost always include at least 2 of my allies and I’d give them names like General Vinny or Admiral Andrew, named after some of my best friends at the time. Those two names I actually do remember giving to my allies: I think General Vinny was the Mongols in yellow and Admiral Andrew was the Britons in red. I would build my allies very nice cities with plenty of houses, military training buildings, castles for defense, and almost always a series of walls, sometimes using the walls to divide the cities into different districts. I would also divide up our armies into different specialties: as the Turks, I was happy to provide the camels and the gunpowder units to the war effort, Vinny would be in charge of cavalry archers, and Andrew would be our naval support. I’d often cheat a little and give my side units they shouldn't technically have access to, like powerful paladins or perhaps even unique units from other civilizations. Our enemies were always far less equipped for battle than our side and were given names of sports teams or players that I didn’t like (probably the Rangers and Flyers). The enemy civilizations were usually the Goths and the Saracens: the Goths because they couldn’t build walls which would only serve as a deterrent to the absolute destruction I craved, and the Saracens because I thought they were a weak civilization.
I probably made 4 or 5 different scenarios to cover the tales of Jonny and his allies as they stomped the evil forces of the Rangers and Flyers out of existence. Most of the story was only conveyed through my own headcanon and perhaps a bit through the types of maps I made: a map that was mostly water would indicate that we drove our foes into the seas and pursued them by boat, for example. Unfortunately, nobody but me ever played these scenarios, and I think that’s a crucial part of being a game designer: having other people play your games.
I did, however, have friends play a game that I didn’t exactly make, but I did curate my own collection of mods to make the game even more wild and crazy than the vanilla version. The game was Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, a game I played so much of that I decided the only thing left for me to do was mod the ever-loving crap out of it. I’m not exactly sure where I found the assets, probably a random message board I located with Google, but before long I’d replaced the in-game car models with ones that looked more like their real-life equivalents, souped-up their stats so they drove faster and handled smoother, and I even changed the game’s fighter jet to an X-Wing from Star Wars. Changing the models and stats of the vehicles was only the start, soon I learned how to do things like arm pedestrians or give the cops better weapons so that once you started rampaging you’d have to contend with even stronger opponents.
I hope whoever made this thing was employed by EA to make assets for Battlefront
Playing San Andreas at my house was a little bit of a thing for a few of my friends: I think they mostly got a kick out of seeing the vehicle replacements or flying the X-Wing, but we would spend a couple of hours trying out the different vehicles and going on rampages around the cities of San Andreas. This definitely scratched that game design itch for me: making something for someone else to play and feeling validated that I gave them a fun experience.
Memory Lane Stop 3: Physical (Board/Paper) Games
Making a board game is easy, right? All you need is a piece of poster board, some markers, maybe some construction paper and glue, and a set of dice that you probably stole from an old copy of Monopoly.
I’m sure most physical game designers would quibble with that statement, and to be sure, making a good physical game is a much more complicated task than just getting some art supplies together and going to town on a piece of paper, but at the end of the day, with some minimal art skills and a little bit of creativity, it’s not hard to come up with a physical game that can keep you entertained for an hour or so.
I can think of three examples in my life where I made a physical game to keep myself and a friend or 17 (more on that later) entertained for a while. The first example I can think of is one that happened on the back of many a kid’s menu at nice restaurants. I grew up in Northern New Jersey, which means my family went out for a lot of Italian food. There are three things I remember about these outings. First, I was a picky eater when I was young, so I probably had a lot of noodles with red sauce, not exactly taking advantage of the area's delicious Italian food. Second: it always felt like we had to wait forever to get our food. Third: To keep myself entertained, I would flip over the kid’s menu and draw mazes on the back for my dad or my sister to solve, only the mazes would be filled with monsters or traps that you needed to get other objects to overcome. For instance, you would need to travel to one area of the maze to get the chainsaw in order to cut down the tree that blocked you from getting to the exit. I especially liked coming up with all different kinds of monsters that required esoteric ways to defeat them, like creating a monster that was afraid of bright lights (a fact you couldn’t possibly know if you were not the person that designed it), so you needed to get the flashlight to scare it away. I’m not sure how much fun these little mazes were to solve for my players, but they were certainly fun for me to make.
The monsters in my maze informed the next physical game I remember making along with a friend in middle school art class. We would take a massive blank piece of paper and take turns drawing monsters or tools or characters of some sort in an effort to beat one another in a theoretical battle. For example, my friend might start by drawing an ice cream cone with arms and legs and a menacing face, so I would draw Super Spoon, a spoon with a hero’s jawline and a cape that could scoop the ice cream. In response, my friend would draw a rain cloud that would rain all over the spoon and cause it to rust, so I would draw an umbrella with legs to keep Super Spoon dry. This would go on and on until we’d wasted an entire class period (I say wasted, but honestly we were probably practicing art more than most of the kids in the class) on our little game. I don’t remember playing this game with anyone else (shoutout to Gideon Chiaet), but it was a great way to spend an hour at school.
My final personal example of this is actually what I consider to be the beginning of my game design career, and I want to start by giving a shoutout to my friend Nick Beek for being the driving force behind actually making this game a reality.
I don’t remember how Nick and I decided that we wanted to make a board game, it was likely Nick’s idea as he was an avid fan of Monopoly and Settlers of Catan, and at this point in my life, I was woefully ignorant of the joys of board games. I imagine that he probably had an idea for a board game, and he decided to bounce some ideas off of me. One thing you may not know about me is that I love brainstorming and I can get pretty invested in just about any idea that is brought to me, so if Nick brought me a board game idea, it seems logical to me that I’d be so enthusiastic about providing ideas and feedback that he looped me into being a part of the project. I think Nick’s original idea was something like a game that mixed Trivial Pursuit with a drinking game, and I encouraged him to add performative elements such as those found in games like Cranium and Quelf and a unique way of adding drinking to the game.
What we wound up with was a mix of Candyland, Quelf, Cranium, Trivial Pursuit, and a ridiculous drinking game. The game was called Glass Peak which was not only a play on the surnames of the creators but also a reference to the game’s central theme: to win the game you must climb to the peak of a volcano (Mt. Glass, presumably) and drink a glass of the alcohol at the top of it. That glass, the Volcano Cup, would be filled by the players along the way and contain one type of liquor (whiskey, rum, vodka, tequila, etc.), one liqueur (triple sec, Kahlua, Jaeger, etc.), and one non-alcoholic mixer (coke, orange juice, tonic water, etc.). The Volcano Cup would be filled and emptied many times throughout the game by various players, which means that what the drinker put in their mouths could be potentially very pleasant or extremely foul depending on the whims of the other players. Perhaps the other players would work together to create a margarita by combining tequila, triple sec, and sour mix. Or maybe they’d work together to create an abomination by mixing together whiskey, peppermint schnapps, and cranberry juice.
The game’s board was a repeating series of colors: blue, yellow, green, red, and purple. Players would roll a die and move their game piece (which we encouraged to be a bottle cap from your favorite beer) and move the corresponding number of spaces, drawing a card the same color as the space they landed on. Blue cards included drinking rules such as all boys take a drink or all lefties take a drink or everyone take a drink (drinks would be taken from your own personal side drink, not the Volcano Cup). Yellow cards induced a mini-game like Never Have I Ever or Telephone. Green cards required the player to partake in a personal performance, like a dance-off or giving a best man speech for another player’s wedding. Finally, red cards were punishment cards that would require players to do borderline humiliating or unpleasant actions for a duration of time. A favorite punishment card was the troll card, which required the drawing player to sit under the table and mock everything being said by the other players. Finally, the purple spaces were the Volcano Cup spots, and landing on a purple space meant you needed to add the next ingredient to the Volcano Cup unless it was already full, in which case you would have to drink it.
This is actually what the board looks like. The original board was made with paper and markers on poster board.
I think I played this game twice, though I know Nick has played it on several other occasions. The first time we played it, we played it with about 18 people, which was both a total mess and an absolute delight. As you can imagine given the aforementioned rules, the game succeeded in getting people smashed and created some funny memories. The player that drew the troll card did such an excellent job of being a troll that they refused to leave the position even after their allotted time was over (much to the delight of the other players). We learned that after indulging in a few drinks, most people can’t remember the words to “I’m a Little Teapot,” or at least cannot recite the poem and do the accompanying dance at the same time. We also learned important game design lessons, such as the fact that someone is always going to do something you didn’t anticipate in playtesting, or that your design definitely has flaws in it even though you’re pretty sure you’ve thought of everything.
I’m 99% sure that in today’s political climate, this game would be a little dicey to play. I don’t think there’s anything in it that would get someone canceled, but there are definitely a lot of cards that require people to do something uncomfortable even when alcohol isn’t involved. But in 2012/2013, this game was an absolute blast for a smattering of kids in their early 20s to play. If The Spinning Game and modded Grand Theft Auto scratched at the itch I had to make fun experiences for my friends, Glass Peak was a full-blown realization of how important it was to make experiences that bring people joy.
It took me a long time to chase the feeling of wanting to bring fun to people, but I’m glad I finally did by pursuing a master’s degree in game design. I hope that I can spend my working years doing just that. If you or anyone you know is looking to hire someone who wants to make games on a fundamental level, hit me up.
Now I want to hear from you: when did you become a game designer? What games did you invent as a kid, or what types of levels/scenarios/creations have you made with in-game creation modes?
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