Indie Designer's Journal #12 Creating Player Investment with Choices!
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- Опубліковано 8 лют 2025
- In this episode I discuss creating a game that will keep players coming back by giving the player choices during play.
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Choices --> Investment --> Tension
I liked hearing that. Really great information. Thanks. 👍
Thank you! It doesn't take that many choices to make a player feel that investment, but we can lose sight of it when designing sometimes.
I am so glad I found your channel! For about a month I am working on my first game and this video was very insightful! I will definitely rethink some parts of my game because of it!
Great game design advice
That's a interesting point of view! Keep goind!
Thanks!
Really great points. My favorite game Marvel Champions is nothing but choices. How you build your deck to playing cards and using the rest of your hand as resources, to balancing damaging the villain to win the game or to remove threat from the villains scheme to prevent a loss. That's why its my favorite game cause I feel like my choices matter and are what decides if I win or lose.
Agreed. The trick is that if you create that sense of choice and investment, you have to make sure there is not too much luck. Nobody likes working hard playing a game only to die because of a super random die roll or something.
Good video.
The term I have heard used is "Player Agency".
I think that this is what turns an activity (which can be fun) into a game.
Take snakes and ladders (or chutes and ladders depending where you are fron).
In this, the players have no agency. They don't make any choices. They roll the dice and llmoce their piece that number of squares. If you land on a snake or ladder then you are jumped to that new place.
And, for kids, this is a fun activity. But it isn't a game. It could be tunlrned into a game with a simple change: Give the players a choice.
An easy one would be a push your luck dice mechanic.
Choice is what turns an activity into a game. And choice is what gives players agency.
Well said. Snakes and Ladders and the like are good classic examples, but I still see modern designs coming out that offer little or no choice. It really doesn't take much to create that "player agency". Even adding a simple press-your-luck mechanic could make such a game much better. Maybe roll a dice to move. Look at the result and decide if you want to re-roll. If your second roll is equal to or less than your original roll, you don't move. If it is more, than you get to move that amount. It really doesn't take much. Another example of this is in Carcassonne. Instead of draw a tile and play that tile, I always play with a tile in hand and then draw another tile and choose from the two to place. Makes the game much better. Thanks for the great comment.
Back with another rant ;)
For me (as a player), choice is enough to create the _appearance_ of agency/investment and keep me going for a while, but there's one more factor that needs to be present if I'm going to continue "blaming myself" (taking responsibility) and coming back to the game long term: *Skill* or *Intelligence.* It's one thing if I can look back on a lost game and think "I see now that what I should have done at that moment was X instead of Y." But if this is always just the benefits of hindsight, that's going to fall flat eventually. I don't mean to pick on Iron Helm, which I like, but if we focus in only on the choice between Rooms it's maybe an example: if I flip 1 room, choose the other, and wind up Ambushed by a Gelatinous Cube then I can definitely look back and say "I shouldn't have done that" -- but since it's a mostly blind choice, I wasn't in much of a position to do better, and there's very little I could do differently next time to improve. If the whole game works like that (and I'm not saying Iron Helm does) then I'm eventually going to walk away -- If a game gives me only blind choice, then it is telling me that I am responsible for things I cannot seriously control or influence. This is sort of the inverse of "With great power comes great responsibility" -- I will eventually refuse responsibility where I effectively have no power.
Developing Skill-based or Intelligence-based ("strategic" or "puzzley") gameplay is definitely even harder than giving players a choice. And the lines are blurry here. I think some folks find it skill-based/intelligent to learn what's in a deck, and essentially count cards and constantly weigh probabilities -- a player like that might say "Well you may not have been able to predict that the 2nd room would be an Ambush, but you should have known that the Gelatinous Cube was still in the deck, and since you'd already depleted most of the weaker enemies you should have known it was a bigger risk." And I get that, but for me this is a mix of Memorization + Math that's not terribly interesting or thematic or unique to any specific game. That's the real tough nut to crack -- pairing Choice with Skill in a way that's unique and memorable.
Fantastic points! I think you are really on to something here. Offering the player the choice, even if it is a blind choice, can make a bad/tolerable game good/decent, but adding a level of player skill into the mix, can elevate a game to great. That makes sense to me. I often had folks ask me to add more card to the dungeon deck of iron Helm. They were simply looking for variety. But I never added a single card, even with all the expansions I came out with. I felt like having that set 16 card dungeon deck forced players to learn the deck. Learn to count cards and learn the odds. I could add tons of stuff around that deck, but as long as I left that deck alone, I kept the game pure and allowed players to grow in the game. I did the same with Tin Helm. I allowed players to learn what was on the back side of each card. Not only would they have to learn the 12 card deck, but they would have to remember what was on the back to actually get better at the game.
I don't say all this to say that my games are great, but more that I am learning about what you are talking about. It really is a tough nut to crack. In my game Desolate I added more cards to the exploration deck with expansions, and I think that took away from the game. It is quite hard to master in a card-driven exploration game of any type. Thanks for the great comment!
@@jasonglover6615 And thanks for the thoughtful reply. I haven't played Desolate yet, it's on my list of things to PNP, but when I do I'll be interested to see how it feels.
What you're saying about the design of Iron Helm and Tin Helm makes sense: by restricting the size of one deck you encourage/force players to get a feel for the odds and develop familiarity with it, which does provide a sense of progress/skill-building. There's plenty of variety to be added around that core deck, and that's a way to encourage replays. Throw in some randomness and some run-ending Gelatinous Cubes and it's a good mix.
I also feel like the rate/frequency at which people tend to play games makes this whole problem more difficult, too, but I can't quite put my finger on that. Most games are going to have rules that are complicated enough that you probably can't just pick the game up after 6 months and jump right in. So there's an incentive to play a game regularly. But then, that's going to make it more likely that players "see" most of what's in the game. If you try to correct for that by adding variety (expanding decks) you might buy more replays for a while, but does that actually make the gameplay more skill-based and more compelling in the long run?
Some really great stuff here Jason that made me think about new ways we could tweak games we have published to better engage players by giving the choice of the devil they know, vs the unknown. Specifically I’m thinking of the six random monsters we pull every night for our tower defense game. If we gave one player the opportunity to see those monsters ahead of time, and then they decide to allow them to come on the board, or they say this set is terrible and they place on the board a new random set of six monsters. And like you said, if they loose, they have no one to blame but themselves🎉
That is a great example of how this thinking can sharpen a game, taking a decent game and make it a memorable game. I love your idea. A simple twist like that might take an extra 3 minutes, but if the player wins, they look back at the choice, if they lose, they blame that poor choice.
I feel like Maquis does this really well: I as the player decide where I place my workers and if they get arrested, it's on me (should have secured the route, should have been more cautious, should have done this instead of that).
On your games: I love Desolate because it does everything well
1) Push your luck: when you are resolving rooms and in combat
2) Tension: running out of oxigen or ammo and hoping the next card gives you resources
3) It's hard and I blame me 90% of the time (for the other 10%, the cards and dice screwed me too fast)
4) When I tried to create a tribute game to desolate (with 3 location cards per turn instead of 2, enemies included in the same deck, weapons improvements from D6 to D8/D10) I found that it lacked tension... Which was resolved beautifully in Desolate: if the player has seen 0-1 engineering rooms, they will explore to find one more power cell; if they have 2 oxigen left they need to find 1 more...
-- I tried to make a game different enough but still good, it is very hard!
Thank you for your games and your content, Jason!
Great points (regarding player agency and tension). I do not enjoy a game that is overly luck dependent. I feel like I had no real influence on the game and am a victim of the cards/dice. I want there to be a skill factor in the game, so that if I play well, and as I learn about the game, my chance of winning increases.
Spirit Island is great for player choice and responsibility, even though there is plenty of flip-a- card and see what you get (invader cards, getting power cards, fat cards, event cards)
Fun talk. Thank you for the insight. 😊 Not to be a vanilla gamer, but I think Gloomhaven and Ascension both offer a good deal of player choice. 👌
Do you think there is a line not to be crossed of excessive decision making in game design? 🤔 Maybe making the gameplay too cumbersome or inflicting decision paralysis. 😨 If so, is there a game in your mind that walks or crosses that line? 🤔
Thanks! I definitely think it is a balancing act. Too many decision doesn't just lead to analysis paralysis, but can really slow the game down. I think you can get a great return by offering the player just a few choices to make. If they are meaningful and impactful, then the player gets invested. I think there are far more games that don't offer enough choices than games that offer too many. That is a good question. I cannot really think of one off the top of my head. Maybe Robinson Crusoe? It is a great design, but maybe too over-designed and that weather die is a killer. For a game that has a lot of choices, it is actually hindered by luck. I would love to see a simpler version of that game that takes all the stuff that is fun and ditches the rest.
Great video! :D Kind of an unrelated question : how many cubes + dice to you feel you could fit inside a tin box if you have if you have essentially the same amount of cards as Tin Helm? :)
Hmmm. Both Gate and Tin Helm sort of max out the tin. Gate more so. I have an 18 card tin deck, 32 card mini deck, 4 12mm dice, and 10 smaller crystals in Gate and that is about the max. The key is only using 18 of the tin deck cards and using mini for the rest.
@@jasonglover6615 interesting! Thanks for the info! 😁
Great discussion on all your videos! So happy I found your channel and discovered your games. I’ve been carefully making my way through all the unboxing and tutorial videos to help me decide what I want to buy first 😅 Any crowd sales coming up??
Thank you for the kind words. The next game I am working on is UnderQuest, which will be a solo dark fantasy game. If you enjoy solo games, I suggest Tin Helm or Gate as a good entry point. Both are cheap as well.
Final Girl is the most overrated solo game. It's almost forbidden to criticise it (only two negative reviews locatable online) and everyone gushes over it. Every action requires rolling and consulting a chart (including moving), and the game is random-hard (using the excuse that it should feel hopeless like a horror movie). Each turn is fiddly, what with all the rolling, consulting, card arrangement, effects you have to remember and movement of panicking meeples (again with rolling) and the enemy doesn't really go for you until it's eaten the other meeples. Worst part is how you know you're going to lose over 20 mins before you do. Unlike Unbroken, Gate, Desolate etc.
I was looking forward to it because of theme, but gameplay wasn't what I wanted in a solo game. It's too bloated. But there aren't many quick and easy solo horror games, although I've found The Draugr, Castle of Sanguine Blight, The Brambles, Gate and Gates. Only played Gate. There are a lot of fantasy and sci-fi solo games, but I'd like a classic horror/Halloween game (e.g. a game like Desolate but horror). I like Desolate more than Iron Helm and Tin Helm because of how quick each turn is. That and Gate are my favourites.
Have you tried Kaiju Siege ?
I have not played Final Girl, but thanks for the warning. I personally do not mind rolling a dice and consulting a chart is some cases. It does allow for some more narrative-driven experiences. I am a fan of how D100 Dungeon works in that regard. But if the game is nothing but that and there are no choices leading into those rolls, then the game becomes and activity to me.
Thanks for the support! I actually am considering designing a tin game that uses most of the mechanics from Desolate, but have a darker horror theme. We will see. My next game will be UnderQuest, which will be a medieval-horror game like Gate, but with mechanics more in line with Iron Helm, but with more narrative. It will be a larger game (larger for me anyways...lol), so might not be your cup of tea.
I have not played Kaiju or a few of the others you mentioned. I will check them out. Thanks for the great comment.
You're not alone.
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@@wishmeheaven Ah some sanity. I stopped taking some main review channels seriously when they keep trying to say it's a good/worthwhile experience. I sold the all-in pledge for 70AUD and never looked back. I tried all the other feature films, but the bad points were even more pronounced.
@@jasonglover6615 I don't mind a bigger game. E.g. A Touch of Evil (playing solo) has more theme, atmosphere, story and balance than Final Girl, but it feels lighter because the turns are quick. Also not much longer, since FG drags. But still looking for the mini version, in the sense that Adventure Tin is the mini solo Talisman.
I have Unbroken, Desolate, Kaiju Siege, Gate and Under Falling Skies all set up nicely on one average-sized table, because 1) they're good 2) good themes 3) they're quick to setup/reset 4) turns are quick so I can walk into a room, play a turn and continue walking through. To a lesser extent Under Falling Skies, but it's so thin spacewise. Having maximum theme, mechanics and variety for minimum space, setup and fiddliness is the draw.
Kaiju Siege is worth looking at. Feels unique, and quick turns. I have Game Crafter version and all expansions (including King Kong and Godzilla one). Looking forward to Gates. These games feel like old timeless classics, even though they're all only a few years old. Still appreciate Iron Helm; might set it up next to Gates if I decide to set up new table in other room..
Thanks for creating them.