Shall We Play A Game?

My family did a thing in early 2021. We were just struggling to get over the holiday doldrums in between house hunting and an ongoing pandemic, and so we took a page from that one Arthur episode and invented a holiday to insert between New Years and Easter (Valentines Day is dumb and doesn't count, fight me). What we came up with is Winterfest, a name I'm well aware is used by everyone everywhere for anything they do during the winter.

Our Winterfest is a celebration of creativity that happens over the last weekend of every January. Saturday night we made pizza in whatever shape we wanted (everyone landed on cats, somehow) and watched an animated movie together, and then Sunday we put on The Joy of Painting with Bob Ross in the background and spent the entire day working on making things. We all had fun, and my kids keep asking when we're doing it again, so I'll vouch for this holiday as being worth your time. Everyone participated in their own way, but my personal goal was to create something in a day that I could put up on Itch.io as a fully playable pen-and-paper game.

I was successful, for the most part, and that thing is called Density. You can go download it right now for free, or donate a buck or two if you'd like.

Designing the logo was also one of those things that needed to be done in a day. That's my excuse here.

The Itch.io page says essentially what Density is, so I won't repeat it here. Just know that version 1.2 you can find there is not what I created in one day. There are several revisions in there that improve the playability and readability immensely, and there's another revision I'm currently working on. What I will say is that Density is my first real crack at actually creating a "game system", and so there was way less writing in there than game design. Which turned out to be pretty interesting to work with, because writing is what I'm actually good at. Game design... well, this was my first real shot at it.

See, when I was a kid, I thought it might be fun to make games. Not like computer games, I was never that interested in coding. But just something people could interact with in telling their own version of a story, whether that was a largely abstract and extremely random story like with most board games or a heavily guided story like a tabletop RPG. That's what I wanted to make. My first attempt at this was in the form of a battle card game informed by Magic the Gathering and Yugio (because Pokemon is more about the trading than the playing, don't pretend otherwise). This did not go well because I had barely any actual exposure to either of those card games, and so I had no idea how their mechanics really worked.

The second game I tried to design was a board game intended to capture the essence of Calvinball, from Bill Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes. The better read among you may recognize that as a game with exactly one rule; you can never play the same way twice. I actually still have that game, but I've got no idea if it actually works. I made a board based on Calvin's house, player pieces based on several characters, and a wash of various balls, wickets, etc as referenced in the comic, but I've never played the thing because I really just have no idea where to start.

So another swing and a miss (though I haven't given up on it yet). But Density I have actually played, and in fact I'm in process on what is essentially a setting for the Density system called Ebonmire that I'm thus far quite proud of. They say that failure is an important part of making anything, because your failures will teach you more than your successes. So, now working on my 4th game creation project and with two of them abject failures (we could say three, version 1 of Density was a little rushed if you can believe that), what have I learned from those failures that's helping me succeed now?

The first is that to create a game you have to have played some games, or at least studied them with intent. That card game I mentioned, were I to make the attempt now, would need some sort of limit on the playing of cards per turn. Something like the lands in Magic or the mana in Hearthstone. It would also need a steep balancing pass on the abilities for some of the cards. There were more than a few in there that were basically instant-win cards in the vein of the house rules free parking space in Monopoly.

The second thing I learned is that rules can restrict playful creativity, but they're necessary to building a world in which to play. Saying "you can never play the same way twice" in something like Calvinball places a lot of responsibility on the players, and they might appreciate a few other specifics like "use dice to move" or "here's what all these game pieces are." The rules define the playspace before they tell you how to play. And while with something like Density, a game system, you have a lot of freedom to create your own world in which the game occurs, the rules still need to tell you what sort of world that is at a fundamental level. In Density games the world is one of conflict, and then the rest of the rules tell you how that conflict happens.

The third thing (and last thing, for you frequenters) is that sometimes the most important thing is just to get something down on paper so that you can test it. You can polish and refine a concept for years and still not know whether you have a playable game unless you, ya know... play it. Sitting down and saying "by the end of today I'm going to have a game people can play" and then proving it to yourself by throwing it onto the internet and dragging some friends around a table to play it may not actually sound like fun to you. It sure didn't to me. But there's something incredibly rewarding in seeing people actually laughing and having fun because of a thing you made, even if the reason they're laughing is because you accidentally peppered the thing with unintended innuendo.

No, Density 1.2 doesn't have any unintended innuendo in it.

So there you go. I'm apparently playing at being a game designer now (pun absolutely intended), because I looked at the intersection of technical writing and fiction writing and went "hey, that's where game rules are!" And also because I enjoy playing games. If you want to go check out Density I would appreciate it, along with any feedback you have to offer. And I'll be sure to put something in this space when Ebonmire releases, because I genuinely think this game has something unique to offer that you won't get elsewhere in the TTRPG space.

And if you're looking for something to take away from this post that isn't me shilling my stuff, how about this; Winterfest 2022 is in less than five months. Why don't you plan on celebrating by making something with us?