Why we are focusing on web games
When we started designing games in 2018, I set a goal to create 5 functional prototypes in different genres before deciding which prototype to finish and release. I’m interested in all sorts of games, and it was important to explore different genres and mediums to figure out where we could really thrive.
Over the next few years, we made:
Elephant in the Room: a quick abstract strategy game that works as a physical board game or a digital game
Beast Master: a board game with some unique mechanisms
Contingency Plan: a fast paced strategic card battle
Pecking Order: a social game played via Discord and the browser
A bunch of other prototypes that are too rotten to show to the public
We built Pecking Order during Covid lockdown because we wanted a game to play via chat in Discord where we were already hanging out. We wanted to play a deep game remotely and asynchronously, because our schedules didn’t always line up. The whole experience of designing and playing this game felt fresh and unique. We wanted to build a social game because social games are amazing, and fit the chat medium really well. This was not a physical game adapted to be played digitally — it was a game tailor made for the experience of chatting with your friends online throughout the day.
There’s a question that people often ask in startups, “What is the thing that you can do better than anyone else?” Michael Porter codified some brilliant ideas about business strategy that are applicable to the design process. Many of his ideas boil down to his thesis “Strategy is about being different.” Products that are easily comparable to competitors end up only differentiating on price, and have a very hard time standing out. Businesses that have products that are truly distinct tend to stand out and grow.
Pecking Order is such a unique experience that people began inviting their friends to test it. Then their friends invited more friends, and our test server grew organically in ways we never expected. We realized that ultimately the game would need to evolve into a website so people could play it outside our Discord server. Fortunately, many of us already work in software, and we have the skills to build it. We gradually realized that we were in a unique position to build something that felt genuinely new.
It turns out that being different is not just good strategy — it’s also more interesting to work on. The problems we’re working on feel novel and unique:
When we run into game design problems, the analogs are less obvious, and so we must think creatively. When I work on Contingency Plan, it’s easy to run into a problem and ask, “How do the 10,000 other card games solve this problem?” But there are far fewer games to compare Pecking Order to, and so creative, lateral thinking is required.
Asynchronous gameplay comes with some weird, unexpected complexity that I outlined in this other blog post. Designing around those problems has actually made the game better.
The mediums of a web app and 24/7 chat open up new, interesting opportunities for gameplay and design. There are all sorts of cool things we can do that aren’t possible in board games.
We are over halfway done with development of the Pecking Order web version. Several members of the team are learning to write code. And now we are cooking up ideas for more web-based social games. There’s some gold in these hills, and we’re determined to find more of it.