Evolutionary Design
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Step 5: Create new rules

The final step is to create rules that fix the problem areas. This is where a game designer brings their own artistic flair to the craft of design. You must know the system intimately so that you can understand the general effect of small rule changes. There are no magic bullets since the solutions needed are typically unique to the specific gaming system. There are design patterns that are useful, but that is a subject far beyond the scope of this article.

The best I can give you are some rules of thumb that usually apply:

Take risks
If you are playing and testing on short iterations, there is only so much damage you can do before you figure out that you screwed up. If you see a need and you have a creative solution, try it out.

Be willing to remove existing rules
To paraphrase a writing rule, balancing is the act of cutting away everything that is non-essential. If a rule is not helping, kill it, regardless of how much effort you’ve put into making it work.

Focus on incremental changes to existing rules
Often a game sub-system needs to be tweaked, not rebuilt from scratch.

Be wary of changes that add unnecessary complexity
A simple fix is often just as good as a massively complex system. Pac man uses a power up system consisting of a single dot. The designer could have implemented an RPG style experience system instead, but would it have done the job at hand any better?

Changes should reflect identified issues
If you toss a system into the game with no expectations of what role it will play in the various reward systems, you will pay the price. You end up with a set of unrelated game rules that need to go through extensive balancing before they actually work.

The Life Cycle of an Evolutionary Design
Once you’ve created your initial rules, played the game, observed, identified issues and created some more rules, you are ready to repeat the process all over again. After enough repetitions a solid enjoyable game will emerge.

I’ve noticed several stages in the evolution.

Stage 1: Prototyping
At first there are very few rules, so each change has a huge effect on the game. Giants and Castles originally was a game about digging up treasure in the Amazon. After play testing a couple rounds, minor rule changes caused an entirely new set of game mechanics to emerge. I got a few comments from players, but mostly this stage is driven by careful designer analysis.

Stage 2: Balancing
Next, the game settles into a ‘conceptually interesting but practically boring’ stage. The rules seem to be in place, but the game is just not all that enjoyable to play. This is where the meat of balancing occurs. Players have copious opinions because they can sense the general idea of the game, but they are typically frustrated by the details. I took time to listen to my players. They saw things that I would never have commented on because I was too caught up preserving and nurturing the intricate web I had created. Slowly, the game became more enjoyable.

Stage 3: Equilibrium
Finally, the comments become sporadic, and players spend less time complaining and more time having the time of their lives. Your game has reached equilibrium. The web of rules support and reinforce one another, so that adding or tweaking a rule has little effect on the system as a whole. In Giants and Castles I added another card to the spell deck during the final iterations. In previous iterations, such an action had radically changed the flow of the game. This time, the game play was nearly indistinguishable. An economic term for equilibrium is ‘the point of diminishing returns on design.’ Congratulations, you have a mature game.

Expanding the Evolution Metaphor
Imagine a hill. The high points on the hill are areas of great player enjoyment. The low points make players miserable. The evolutionary process is often called a hill-climbing algorithm. Your initial game idea is a point on the side of the hill. Each iteration of the design process, you stop and “Ask which direction should I move to increase player enjoyment?” Slowly, but surely your game will climb the hill. The equilibrium point of evolutionary design corresponds to the peak of the player enjoyment.

Evolutionary dead ends
What happens if there are multiple hills? Unfortunately, a given game design can only climb one hill. If the closer hill was also the shorter hill, then someone who is climbing the other hill will end up with a more enjoyable game. The result is called a ‘local maxima’, and it points out a cruel hard fact of game design. Some starting ideas will lead to a game with a low enjoyment level, no matter what the skill of the designer or the development team.

Why there are clones
Now imagine an entire landscape of potential game designs with huge mountainous peaks that corresponds to massively enjoyable games, and thousands of smaller peaks that correspond to less enjoyable designs.

A few talented, visionary game designers hit upon a seed that climbs those mountainous peaks. They stand at the top with their incredibly enjoyable games and the world sees a success story. These are games like Wolfenstein 3D, Dune 2 and Ultima Online.

And here’s the rub. Original ideas take a lot of effort and money to balance and there’s a good chance they only end up climbing one of the smaller hills. Designers are interested in making the most enjoyable game given their limited resources. Many designers want to survive to make another game. If they can start at a point near a known success, there’s a good chance they can build a game that climbs an equally tall mountain.

The result is a huge number of companies clustered around a similar design foundation. And here be clones. Not because designers are stupid, or because marketing people are greedy. Clones happen because smart people make optimal decisions that result in the most enjoyable game they can imagine given their resources and need to avoid risk.

Building an original game
It takes a diligent and lucky team to discover a new mountain to climb. Thankfully for designers who enjoy original games, the process is extraordinarily simple. First pick an enjoyable fundamental activity. You could wake up tomorrow with a new way of moving a character on the screen, and think “I could imagine a simple game using that concept.” Now begin iterating on the design. Play the game. Observe how people react. Come up with new rules that make your idea more enjoyable. Over time an enjoyable, original game will emerge. If you don’t succeed, try again.

Giants and Castles is my fourth board game design. It is reasonably original since I know of no other game that uses its core mechanic of stacking. In the landscape of game designs, it climbed a medium sized hill and I’m not sure if it is possible to take it higher. The other three designs were flops that made it through one or two iterations before I realized I was ‘polishing a turd’. Still, I only lost a week worth of effort exploring three new ideas. Such a process is remarkably more cost effective compared to spending millions on a shiny new game only to find the underlying premise is flawed.

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