How to name your game!

When you design a game you face many challenged from the very beginning to the very end. You struggle to find out a good and interesting mechanic that offers something new to the players, you work hard to prepare a fitting theme and figure out the look and feel for your game. You spend countless hours testing your game, circling ideas and iterations to smooth it and perfect its core. There is so much to do and so much to take into consideration, it’s amazing that a single person can handle it! However in such a multitude of tasks, where all are equally important, some things tend to slip away if we don’t steel ourselves with rigour and good planning.

And one of such important thing is the game name.

Yes, as trifle as it seems, game name is hugely important and even long-lived, respected publishers tend to slip on time to time here. And we, beginners on the field of game design, can always fall into a trap with game naming. In fact, we here at Rombo Games know this from our own mistakes, since our kickstarter project – Publish or Perish – did not work out so well, and the name of the game was one of its problems! We learnt late into the campaign that the game seemed too aggressive and competitive for a cooperative game for families and kids, that it was too exclusive in its meaning, restricted mostly to the members of the Academia to see and enjoy the reference. Simply put, we tripped on the basic thing like the game name! Now we ensure proper, deeper research before settling down with a game name.

So what you can do to ensure that your game name works just fine? Well, we are not going to claim that we are big time experts on this, but we learnt and observed the trends... And we believe we can share a few handy tips. Here we go:

Quadropolis title is a great example of an unique yet straightforward title!

-        >>>  Unique and not generic. This one is both the key and the biggest struggle in finding a suitable game name. Tom Vasel said once that the titles of the greatest games yet to come are not taken yet, and that is obviously correct. When you pick up a game you have to ensure that no one else claimed it… And that goes beyond browsing Board Game Geek search. Mostly because you would like to be sure that your game name is not used in a video game or any other popular product! Why? Well, to promote your game you want it to be on top of the search engines listing, and if it happens that a similar or same name is used in a different, more popular product, you’re royally screwed.

Blood Rage. Simple, clean, easy to remember and spell out. Great title.

-       >>>  Simple and easy. Okay. Here we are getting slightly mixed up… So, we need a name that is unique and yet it have to be easy and simple? Well, it is important due to the simple fact of human nature and accessibility to information. Word of mouth is a big marketing thing in the boardgame community, and if you made your game name hard to spell or type down quickly, you’re making it hard for your potential customers to find you, and I hope I don’t have to explain why that is a very bad thing. Avoid stuff like replacing ‘I’ with ‘y’ because it looks cooler. Avoid unreadable fonts and big, robust names. Avoid made-up words as much as you can, and if you do need them, make them nice and simple, and easy on the tongue.

Food Chain Magnate - the title is as clear as it can be. You know what the game is about already.

-       >>> Theme fitting. This one should be obvious! Your name should give people idea what the game is about even if all they will know about it is the title alone. When you hear ‘Robinson Crusoe’ you will get the idea of the theme – lonely island, survival and so on. When you read ‘Power Grid’ it might not tell you that it is an auction game, but you will get the notion it have something to do with the electricity and infrastructure of providing it. Keep that in mind when naming your games – the biggest package of ideas you can put into it that fit your game, the better.

Patchwork simply works - it's short, to the point and fit the theme with a tight knit!

-         >>> Short and with no subtitle. Simple enough, really. If you are a boardgamer, and we believe we all are here, you know how we tend to shorten the names when talking about them. I know of no person who says “Let’s play Settlers of Catan!” but I will hear “Let’s play Settlers.” Because everyone will know which game it is. Same with Ticket to Ride, to give another example. People don’t play Magic: The Gathering, but simply Magic. They don’t play Neuroshima Hex, but Hex or Neuro. There is little reason to make big names, since players will shorten them without hesitation. Same with subtitles. You know the games, like Descent: Journeys in the Dark or Ancient Aliens: Creators of Civilizations. Not only it’s huge but literally no one in entire world will ever spell the entire title, ever. Not to mention it make it looks like these are expansions, and not core games. Which is not such a good idea.

And here you have it. Hopefully with these few hints you’ll get a better idea what bad habits to avoid when figuring out a name for your projects and make it pop out from the throng! And if you think we skipped something or perhaps do not agree with the hints above, be sure to write a comments ;)

Game testing is hard!

Testing games is a chore. It is, truly, and a tiresome one too. Oh sure, we usually pull through with a smile plastered on our faces because no matter the feedback we get , we know it is for the betterment of the game in general. But let’s face it – testing games is an ordeal, hard, tedious and often frustrating, for many reasons really…

Firstly, because it really require us to walk out of our comfort zone. It is still valuable to test our game concept with family and friends! We still will manage to squeeze some info out of such games on our own… Measure the game duration, see if the mechanics stutter, observe the frustration and joy moments through the gameplay and so on, but verbal feedback from people close to us will generally be lacking in the sweetness of harsh and unyielding honesty. I mean, not all the time, but it is quite expected that family and friends would not like to hurt us and mangle our feelings, and so will usually try their best to find something good even in a colossal flop of a game, or at least soften the punches!

Which is not something we can afford when testing a game.

I know it’s not easy. I mean, whenever I come up with an idea of a game the initial phase of it is just pure excitement! I feel like the idea is nouvelle and fresh, I believe I managed to take the pieces and arrange them in a pleasant experience… It is not always pretty to face reality and see how something that sounded neat on paper and worked smoothly in our imagination crashes in flames. But it’s important to learn to cope brilliantly with it and truly open up for brutal and direct criticism.

It still itch me the wrong way, when during testing someone just throw the cards and proclaim “This sucks.” There are more dignified and elegant way to offer good criticism, but even in such cases I swallow the pride and nod in agreement, trying to fish out what exactly does not work if it is not evident to me.

That’s what I meant by ‘walking out of your comfort zone’. You need to test your product on people, who do not owe you anything, who do not feel the need to somehow placate your creative burst, who do not see sense in sugar coating things for your own benefit. You need to test your game, most preferably, on total strangers. Why? Well, your goal is to find people who will be most objective. People who obviously want to have fun playing a game, but won’t go an extra mile to find it, because they expect game itself to provide it in spades. Only these people will be honest enough to crush your mechanics and concepts with proper ruthlessness and trust me on that, it’s very good if they do so!

Because only good feedback can make your project progress. Never lock yourself up in the cage of your own idea, never get upset and huff and puff and nay-sayers, never look for empty praise and shut off any negative comments, because if you will do all that, your game will most likely be bad in every way, and its existence will just serve to tickle your ego, which is hardly the point in making games, is it?

Now, let’s not get crazy about it though. Game testing is not a session in BDSM and you don’t really go there to smile in glee as players bash your game in some imaginative way. Gathering feedback truly is an art, and you really need to know with sharp focus what you’re looking for.

Simple example given our own games. MonsterBuffet is a simple, quick game about reflex. It’s a party game, a light and quick filler and nothing more. Now if I bring this game to fans of monstrous wargames or admirers of brain-burning eurogames, I can quite rightfully expect the game to get bashed hard. Does it mean the game is bad? Yes, it is – for this specific target groups, since the game is not made for them, as much as Through the Ages was not made for Sunday casual player who want a round of Carcassonne or Catan. And no, it is not – for folks who just want to enjoy a swift and easy game to accompany their drinking session or to have rapid fun without a need to read a thick booklet of rules, it just might be the best game they played lately, right?

You see what I mean by having a good idea what you want to test? It will require different approach to pretty much every aspect of the game to be tested. Different people and test routine to tighten the mechanic, different group to see how fun it is, different to ensure the look and feel of it clicks with your target audience…

Truly, testing is a chore. A fun chore none the less!

Mish-Mash Work in Progress #2

Check the webpage!

It's been a while since I stopped, took a long breath and look at the path behind me... It's time to share some progress of Mishmash Galaxy! :D

The last time I shared this progress with you, the game was well defined but raw i the graphical part! Also we tested the game much and more since that post 3 months ago! This post will be mainly content, so there we go! :D

The first concept art for the game by Greg Bobrowski!

Layout for the Technology cards!

Layout for the Resource cards!

Testing Mishmash Galaxy!

How to Play Mishmash Galaxy on Tabletopia!

The game will be hitting Kickstarter later this year. On the meantime you can play the game online following the link above or print and play your own prototype copy with the link below! :D
RULES OF THE GAME + PRINT AND PLAY 

Don't forget to tell us what you think! ^^

Effeciency vs. Presentation - how to make early prototypes!

I think it is nothing new to claim that Time is the most valuable of all resources you can muster in, well, everything. Work especially so, hobby as well. Money? Sure, needed for lots of things, but ultimately time trump it without effort. Why I am writing about it? Because of one little issue I saw more than a few times in my local game testing groups and game designer events. Enough, in fact, to inspire me to write this down for your benefit! The question or rather a power struggle of today is Presentation over Affordability – how refined your prototype should be.

This is actually quite a big topic on a true balancing act. How to prepare our game idea to be shown to people, how it should look to convey the very core concepts without effort or overcomplicating it. And how to do it with as minimal effort as possible!

Wait, what? Minimal effort? I’d say yes to that, because spending big amount of time on a first few prototypes of your idea is ultimately the biggest waste of all – a waste of time. See, pulling all-nighters to develop some graphically rich prototype components have it merits, and I will list them soon, but in the end and in nearly 99 out of 100 situations (if not even more!) all your work will be scrapped, for plenty of reasons. The most basic would be scrapping the game idea, but even any major change in the mechanics or components would make you slave over a new version of the game for further testing, and all the time you put into developing a nice looking prototype would just evaporate like gossamer on a heated, summer day.

An example of very simple card design for Mishmash: Galaxy first test prototype.

On the other hand preparing a prototype on a scraps of torn paper, with things dotted down with pencils and unreadable scribbles, with any crumpled bits of cardboard acting as necessary tokens and such is not quite a good idea either. Oh it might be just a thing you need for yourself or your immediate idea bouncer to simply check if it holds any merit, but when you’re ready to bring your game to the audience that will be testing it, you really should put some effort into it… However not to make it flashy, but to make it playable. There are few little things you should take into consideration here:

- Clarity of purpose. This one is, as I found out during testing, the key. When you prepare your cards, your tokens, your boards, they don’t have to be flashy and good looking. They don’t have to make people gasp in astonishment and delight. In fact, that’s not the thing you need to test – you want to know if the game works and flows properly, and to ensure that you can do so without a hitch, you have to make your components as intuitive and easy to read as possible. No one should guess what the icons represents, no one should squint to read the text. Don’t be afraid to spell out even the most obvious things on them, because what is obvious for you, it might not be so for anyone else. After all you have the idea of the game in your head. No one else know it.

- Ease of manufacture. Now it’s time to treat yourself. Think of every single prototype as of utterly and absolutely disposable thing. Treat them, like if you could give them away without a thought, fully knowing that you could cut out a new one in moments. Of course this is not as easy as it sounds, depending on the scale of your game, but that’s basically why you should keep it in mind during the process. Ensure that all files are easy to print and cut out, utilise space well on the paper, figure out what you can cut off from the game and what can be changed into any simpler solution that can still work exactly as you need it. When you manage to make components, that you can manufacture without feeling like battling a tedious chore, you’re in a good spot!

- Have a manual. Okay, this one is disputable and on forums dedicated to game design, you will see a lot of people talking for or against it, both sides having their arguments. I myself believe that manual is one of these few things that should always be there, mostly because it require little effort to produce and provide even with every iteration of the project. Don’t get me wrong, making a good manual is a terribly hard job, but the key here is to ensure two things. First, testing the rulebook from start – I can’t stress how vital it is to forge a manual, that players can use and seamlessly play the game without you needed there to explain it! And second, because it add a proper rigidness to the testing process. When a situation arise during gameplay that require smoothing out, consult the manual and check if it is there or not. See what you missed and be sure to add it next time or fix the game to root the issue out.

A highly polished endline prototype for Publish or Perish, ready to be sent for reviewers and shown to publishers.

Does it mean that prototypes always have to be this simple, geometric things with basic shapes and Times New Roman taken straight from Microsoft Word? Well, of course not, but it should still serve a clear purpose, and the quality of it should depends heavily on what we are going to do with it… If I am preparing a game to present to a publisher, of course I’ll put some extra effort into it to polish it up, make it gleam. But If I just need it to check the idea and play out the mechanics, slaving over cool looking cards is just some sort of tickling my sense of self-satisfaction.

Hope this little article will help you out with narrowing your focus when working on early prototypes. And perhaps you can tell me if I skipped something? Or maybe you disagree with this ideas and would like to dot down why a higher quality prototype is superior? If so, be sure to share!

Why You Should Care About Your Colorblind Players

One of the easiest and biggest mistakes you can make in game design is to forget about Color Blind people. Color blindness affects mainly to the male population, 8% of the men in world have some sort of color blindness! In total 1 every 20 potential gamers are going to have problems if you are not careful. Now that's a lot! If that's not enough reason for you, keep this in mind:

Almost every group of gamers could have at least 1 color blind people at some point... keep them in mind. They will appreciate it! :D

Now that you are reading this... let me tell you how to easily avoid color blindness problems it your game!


But before we continue, it's important to understand what really colorblindness is... The most common variety is the mix of red and green colors. This is easy to imagine and catch, however, other colors that contain red or green are also confused. For example purple could be also difficult to "read" since it contains red. And this gets more and more complicated since there are many different colors that can be mixed... virtually there is no limit to which colors could be affected. There is even a variant called Monochromacy that prevent you to see any color (everything would be gray scale).


 - Should I stop to use colors coding in my games then? D:
 - Of course no! :D


It has been our players that have thought us the important of keeping color blindness in check. They also told us the very best advice to solve every color blindness problem ever in an surprisingly easy way!

Pair every color in your game with an icon. This icon doesn't have to be complicated or fancy, it just need to follow a simple rule, always place it on top of this color and always make it pure white. The contrast and the shape will make it impossible to miss!

Here I will show you and example of color blindness test we have been performing for our game Mishmash Galaxy. A good proof that it's difficult to imagine how a color blind person would your your game.

Tokens in Mishmash Galaxy

As you can see, for a person with Protanopia, red and purple would be exactly the same. Thanks to the white icon they are easily recognizable. You can do your own tests in the Colorblind simulator :)

How You Should Test Your Kid's Game

Making games for kids is the biggest challenge in game designing.

There it is. Controversial statement? Perhaps, and it is very much open for discussion, but so far every experience I had in making board games only provide more and more proof to this statement. Oh, sure, you can spent way more time working on a titanic and super-heavy strategy game, spending countless hours on testing, cutting the corner cases, balancing the mechanics and so on, but ultimately it is still easier, simply because when you’re making a game for gamers, you’re doing a game for yourself.

As a gamer you know what you demand from a game and you have expectation of players behaviours. You will instinctively know which mechanics will be cumbersome, where players will struggle and which points in the game will click together. Of course it do not mean that making ‘gamers games’ is an easy thing – new games are released every gosh darn day and only few of them climbs to the top of gamers desires.

But when you make a game for kids, all your expectations fly out of the window. You simply cannot know what will work for them and what will not, even if you try your best to predict the outcome, kids will always surprise you!

Like yesterday, where we had a testing of our newest game in the class of 2^nd graders. The game ultimately was not aimed for the youngest audience, but lately we discovered that the theme and the light mechanics might just suit them well enough, and decided to cut it down to fit them. Still, two mechanics were rather… complicated, even with adults sometimes being unable to catch on them quickly, and we rightfully feared that the test will only prove to us, that the core of the game would need a complete overhaul, because kids will be utterly unable to dig into it.

Gosh, we were quite mistaken.

Testing provided valuable information to us. First, that the kids did not found the game hard or the mechanics complicated… No, in fact they caught on them pretty effortlessly and had no issues with grasping the concepts we deemed to be hard and complicated. It was a mild shocker to find out, but not as big as the fact, that the point when the kids struggled was one we never imagined would be a problem, because for adult gamers it is so intuitive, we did not thought it might be a problem to anyone.

Kids had problem with managing cards. See, the game require players to grab cards from the pile on the table and then play them down on the table, forming a row of five cards in order. That’s it, really nothing more to it, and not a single adult ever stumbled on this part of the game, since it’s so completely basic! And yet, it was the biggest issue with our youngest testers. They had no idea what to do with the cards, no matter how we tried to explain it, they constantly missed the spot to play them, they did not know what is the meaning of playing them in order and why they have to form a row of five cards.

It was extremely educational for us to see, that when kids had no problems managing complicated mechanics, as long as they were intuitive, they still stumbled on the most simple part of the game, just because it was hard for them to make a connection WHY they have to do such things with their cards.

There is a lesson there…

Making games for kids is not hard because of the unending balancing act of simplicity and fun factor the game provides, but because ensuring the game is easy to understand and play for them is an entirely new set of experience a game designer need to gather.

Mostly because testing with kids is such a hard thing! Oh, it was a delightful session, full of laughs and fun, but when adults usually will give you their honest feedback, kids simply won’t. If you ask them “Did you like the game?” they will just quickly say “Yes!” and be done with it. Kids have no expectations of the game other than that it provides fun and distraction – they won’t tell you which part of the game was boring or bad, they won’t inform you that they felt some lack of balance or that the luck factor was too strong. In fact the best thing you can squeeze out of such tests when it comes to verbal feedback is just to learn if they enjoyed the look and feel of the game and which part of the game play was most entertaining, and that’s it!

And that is why when testing with kids you have to be extremely cautious not of their words, but their reactions. You have to observe them like a hawk, because what they won’t tell you even just to lack of vocabulary, they will still display with their emotions, since kids just don’t have that iron control of them like adults tend to develop in time. You will see their obvious joy when the game is fun, you will observe the growing boredom if something is not tickling them fancy, you will see the anger and impatience flashing like thunder over their faces when they feel somehow cheated by the game mechanics or other players.

And there is no other way! To make a good game for kids you have to test it with them and ensure that everything works the way they want it to work… In fact, we’ve done a little extra test to see how are game is seen by them. Simply put, after a few enthusiastic rounds we put Dobble on the table and played a few quick games with them. Seemingly the reactions were similar – happy squeals of joys, cries of dismay at the defeat… And yet, after we finished we asked them which of the two games they would like to play again.

Every single kid pointed to Dobble.

Seems that there is still a long way ahead of our game to cross.