Designing The Massive Vs. The Masses - Part 1 of a Cautionary Tale on Breaking Into the Games Industry

The following rambling wad of text is the story of the development process for my first game, The Massive Vs. The Masses: Gamorzilla the Giant Monster Vs. The Army. While not technically the first game I ever designed (by a long shot), attempted making a profit off, or even sold through this company, it is the first game I ever designed which I took seriously as something to put out on the market.

The story of The Massive Vs. The Masses begins way back in something like early 2002. I was getting more than a little burnt out on the many many card games popular at the time where everyone was on equal footing, drawing from the same deck, with the winner being whoever kept quiet long enough to horde the most win-attempt prevention/aiding cards until the end. So I decided to make a 2 player asymmetric game, still using cards. This lead to the first version of MvM, which involved nothing but cards played onto a grid.

The basic idea was the same as the game I ended up with, but the actual mechanics were fairly different, and not particularly fun. Gamorzilla was represented by a single card, placed in the middle of the table. The Army had a deck of unit cards, which were drawn and placed adjacent to any card on the table, meanwhile each turn Gamorzilla would move to a new position and remove cards in various patterns depending on the attack card played. Again, not very interesting, and difficult to balance.

The next step of course was to drop this whole cards only notion and throw in a board and some pieces. Shortly thereafter, I had a prototype version of the game, with decidedly smaller decks than the final version of the game, and rather spartan production values.

The basics laid out, the next step was to start working on balance. I decided on the real basics of deck composition early on. 30 cards each, 5 of them weak points, one a reshuffler, and the rest spread out over particular patterns of utility, both for what one's opponent likely has to work with, and with that set's own weak points in mind.

I'd like to point out right now that a good number of the numbers I pulled off the top of my head were decidedly bad calls from an economic viewpoint. Most card manufacturers are geared towards the production of standard playing cards, which come in decks of 54. If you can manage to make the number of cards used by a game some multiple of that, it saves a few headaches. My extra 6 cards here cause issues with pricing plans, and complimentary tuck boxes. The counts of the army's units are even worse. When placing orders, it was 9,000 of these, 15,000 of these, 30,000 of these... Again, these were all arbitrary counts until I balancing the whole game around them, and they all just happened to come to totals which fell just short of price drops. One of the best examples is the 3D pieces for the fighter jets. Each copy of the game gets 6, but it was actually cheaper to order 10 per copy of the game, leaving me with a huge pile of spares. That's not even getting into the staggering costs incurred from designing around oddly shaped custom-cut boards with precisely cut 60 degree edges.

Getting back to the design process, the first few test games were played with an awful lot of identical cards. There were maybe 10 unique cards in each deck, counting weak points. I played a few test games like that, noted what seemed too common, thought about what sort of card would have turned things around instead of having that 5th Deploy Ground Troops, swapped in new cards, and played it some more.

Originally, I'd planned on continuing this process until there were no cards with two copies in the deck, even if it just came down to minor variations of major utility cards (hence why the final version of the game has the mechanically similar Punt and Hurl cards), but early testers pointed out that if it was properly balanced as is, the extra confusion of not-quite-the-same cards wasn't worth the mild addition to variety.

Once the game reached more or less its current form came the next step. Playtesting this sucker to death. Switching from one end of the table to the other, I played roughly a hundred or so games against myself, to ensure both sides had equal odds of winning. One or two particularly dedicated playtesters did the same, and game upon game of proper two player games showed how various strategies worked against each other, and proved that skill is a factor to victory, but a novice would still beat an experienced player often enough not to be discouraged.

This wasn't the end of the road however. While nicely balanced if you're fully familiar with the rules, said rules were written in a less than optimal way. A few cards had around 60 words describing what they did, others were vaguely worded, one or two managed both at once. There was much rewording to be done. This process was made easier for me as one of my testers was working on a Java version of the game. While it isn't a path the average game designer usually has available to them, having to teach a computer all the rules to a game is an excellent means of spotting and eliminating any ambiguities the rules might contain. Granted, it isn't fool-proof, as you still need to take the resulting wads of code and convert them back to plain english, but it's still quite helpful.

Finally, the time came to take this game out and share it with the public, making sure all this clarification had properly worked out. Taking it to local conventions and game stores, and showing it off. After one disastrous attempt at showing off my original prototype, with pencil-illustrated paper boards 15 centimeters across, tiny paper squares for pieces, and for cards, paper-cut-producing extra small cards written out in, of course, pencil. Even for a quick demo of a home brewed game, there's a certain minimum standard of quality for these things.

Here are some basic requirements before you can show something off, as established through this process. If any component is smaller than your thumbnail, it's too small. Nothing should be paper thin if it isn't a disposable piece of paper. Everything should be done in ink, and reasonably large text. If there's cards, round the corners off. If there's a board, make it nice and sturdy. My prototype boards are poster board glued to a styrofoam core, and they work quite nicely. Once I could properly introduce the game to people, the appeal of it proved to be compelling enough that it seemed to be time to try and have it professionally published.

The Horrors Continue in... Publishing The Massive Vs. The Masses - Part 2 of a Cautionary Tale on Breaking Into the Games Industry
- Jake Alley

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