Pecking Order

Pecking Order is such a unique experience that people began inviting their friends to test it, 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. 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.

Pecking Order is a social deduction game, so we are developing it in a highly collaborative way. I had some core ideas nailed down, but was struggling to realize those ideas in a prototype. I brought in a group of friends who are a mix of experienced designers/testers, and game fans who have zero design experience.

We have spent 3+ years developing our first board game Beast Master. Part of the reason it has taken so long is that we fumbled around in the dark for the first couple years designing without any constraints or any particular goal in mind. A cool, divergent idea would come up and we had no grounds to say, “no, that’s too far fetched,” or, “that’s simply not what we’re aiming for here.” We ended up accidentally re-designing it into a completely different game more than once. We eventually landed on a game that both of us are proud of, but we spent lots of unnecessary time banging our heads against the wall.

Since then, we’ve started explicitly writing up two things that shape the development of our games: Spine and Constraints. These crucially important concepts provide a huge amount of clarity and focus for us, and give shape projects before we even start prototyping them.