Designing a systems game was a little bit tougher than I had anticipated. Designing simple games focused on teaching educational goals was one thing, but having to not only model a system, but also balance it brought a lot of lessons. Our game Sugar Showdown (originally called Sugar Rush) went through a lot of iterations, and through each one, I learned a new lesson. Initially, our game was purely transitive. The original goal was to have your team (the food company versus a health organization) acquire the most people on their side. Each round, you could “buy people”, get money to “buy people”, get actions to hopefully “buy people”. Aside from problematic concept of buying people, there weren’t many incentives to achieve the goal (people would hoarde money, for instance, out of instinct) and the real-world mapping wasn’t very evident. We had a decision to make: did we want to drastically change our game to feel more cohesive and map to the real-world, or go the easy route and make minor changes out of convenience, recognizing our game was flawed?
Through taking the more difficult route, I personally learned a lot. Some lessons:
Pick a mechanic and just go with it
Initially, I thought that with systems games, you had to have the perfect mechanic right off the bat and plan things out. Mentally, I was hesitant and wary of having so many different moving parts. It’s ironic because for other endeavors, I usually make really rough drafts, get ideas on the page, and then iterate off of those. But for some reason, I didn’t make the connection that that mentality still applies to system games. Through adding, going out there and trying things out, applying things similar to the Rule of 2, I learned that the key thing is not perfection, but rather information and subsequent iteration. For example, adding random actions and then building off of those based on playtest feedback yielded more knowledge than calculating the math behind the balance.
Balance Doesn’t Equate to Fun
We ended up adding another “converter” into our game economy— support and money. When we added this mechanic and subsequent tradeoffs, our game went from feeling like a task to an actual game. I learned— or rather, internalized here—that games can be balanced and unfun. Even if we had perfected the balance of our old game, I don’t think it would have been as fun. Our first iteration of the new game— which focused on acquiring stakeholders (lunch lady, parent teacher association) was perhaps a bit more unbalanced than the last iteration of the first version of the game , but still felt more fun.
Be bold
Additionally, being bold with design decisions, be they aesthetic or mechanically. Being specific with our aesthetics— going from [unnamed food organization] and unnamed health organization to a named local school and a named local food co. made things more salient and from the getgo made things more inviting. Learned a lot!
