Walter and I have been “designing games” in our mind palace for years. We thought up a puzzle-based competitive iOS game, a Jackbox-esque multi-screen heist game, and an epic superhero role-based strategy board game. We talked on Skype and imagined exciting, novel games that had beginnings, middles, and ends. They were sort of like un-playable, puffed up thought experiments. And because they weren’t real yet, they sounded elegant, fair, and perfectly balanced.

We had misplaced confidence in the quality of our ideas, because no player had yet given us that blank stare that says, “this rule makes no sense and there’s a typo on the card… and by the way this isn’t fun.” They needed rigorous editing and brutal feedback and fresh eyes. They needed to be tested.

*Walter’s floor after our first day. We used lots of components from other games for things like currency and people.*

Moving from the mind palace to the real

In January 2018, we decided to change our approach and get serious. And by “get serious,” I mean, “Buy index cards and sharpies.” Our strongest, simplest idea was a game where players bid different amounts of resources to commission space ships and send them on a dangerous journey (the mechanisms for competitively bidding on multiple risky entities mimics venture capital investing, which was my day job). Without any sense of how the game worked, we started cutting little ships and pushing them around Walter’s carpet back and forth between an origin planet and a destination planet. Extremely basic stuff.

At first, we just wanted to stress-test the basic engineering of the game. These crummy index cards exposed some obvious initial questions with much deeper questions behind them:

Obvious questions: how far can ships move from a given location? are there spaces between them?
- Looming questions: where are we, what are these locations, why are we motivated to move between them?
Obvious questions: how do players move about the board? do they have turns with limited movement?
- Looming questions: who is the player, what are they doing here, what does a turn feel like, and why?

Immediately, the tactile experience of pushing index cards around sharpened the game. By the end of the day, we had basic, fair rules about movement, and it felt good. The game was resolutely un-fun, but we had our first few rules. Then we played it with Walter’s unbelievably patient wife Toria, who exposed a bunch of other blind spots. We made more progress on that Saturday than we had made in the last three years. Since then, we have had a major design sessions or play tests almost every week. We repeated this process for months, the best features of the game percolated to the top, and the half-baked filler ideas started to look weak and bland.

Once we had a game that more or less hung together, we began looking for something much more mysterious: fun.

30 Seconds of Fun

These play tests were in pursuit of some great, repeatable experiences within the constraints of the prototype. By tinkering with the components of the game, interesting little movement mechanics or a satisfying progression cycle or a set of dynamic problems would emerge. We wanted to find the best features, and focus the entire game around them. We needed some activity or decision at the center of the game that you could do 1000 times before getting bored.

We refer to this hook as the “30 seconds of fun.” That’s how Jaime Griesemer described the design process of the player experience in Halo.

“In Halo 1, there was maybe 30 seconds of fun that happened over and over and over again, so if you can get 30 seconds of fun, you can pretty much stretch that out to be an entire game… but if you don’t nail that 30 seconds, you’re not gonna have a great game.”

We didn’t yet know what our 30 seconds are, but we know the fastest way to find it is by playing the game. A lot.

*v0.1 consisted of a 25 space board, hexagons with crazy encounters, specialized ships, a currency (fuel for ship movement), and a villain who prowled around the map autonomously between turns.*

Finishing v1

Many ideas worked elegantly in the mind palace, but created friction and confusion for players in practice. Physically moving cardboard and plastic on a table and watching the reactions of friends and family forced all of our design decisions to be practical, understandable, and integral with the other components in the game. We mercilessly chopped everything that didn’t work, and the game evolved quickly into something pretty different. We tested this way for months, sharpening the good, purging the bad, and always keeping the game intact and ready to play each week. In July, we landed on v0.1 of the game

We played v1 throughout June and July. Since then, we developed and shelved a v2, refining our design process along the way. And now we are testing v3 at board game shops! Our design process is still based on rapid iterations and ongoing tests, but includes a system for tracking and categorizing all the components and rules. That’s a blog post for another day.