On making District 5.
Origins
On a rainy afternoon in Michigan, my girlfriend and I sat at the dining room table of my apartment looking for something to do. She lamented that we didn’t have any board games and suggested we buy one the next time we were out.
“Buy a game? I’m a game dev,” I thought. “I’ll build us a board game.” I didn’t quite get it finished that evening, but the next few months spent designing District 5 were some of the most fun and instructive months of my life.
Early Lessons
There really is no substitute for building the game. Things that can be glossed over in thought become real hurdles when you have to make them exist. Things that seemed like great ideas in my head were obviously terrible the second a playtest started. The first playtest’s board had three districts with three spaces for cards in each, totaling nine spaces. It’s a ten-turn game and each player typically plays 1 to 3 cards per turn. The game changed to five districts with five spaces in each before the end of the first game. Another thing I had failed to think about was how players could distinguish their cards from their opponents’ once both players had cards on the board. Digital cards handle that easily; physical cards carry no such information. That card marking system becomes obvious the second you start the first game but it’s hard to think about beforehand (I had a similar experience when starting paper-playtests for my next game, it turns out you can’t have both horizontal and vertical connections on a hex-tile grid) . The nice thing about making a board game is that making paper-playtests isn’t optional. At some point you have to make the game in real life and move the pieces around with your hands. It is a habit I’ve carried into every project since.
Design Philosophy
Board games come with demands that digital games minimize, like forcing the player to draw cards, resolve card effects, and track resource spending. With that in mind, and because my target audience was people who played games socially and not competitively, I made a concerted effort to keep the design of District 5 as simple as possible. A ramping energy system that starts at zero and counts up to ten is too difficult to keep track of, so at the start of a turn you have three energy. Cards attacking each other and taking damage is too complicated, so cards have an energy cost and a power number. Another thing about board games is that they ask you to learn them much more quickly than video games. A board game generally doesn’t give you a well-paced tutorial that gates more complicated mechanics behind mastery of more basic ones; it gives you a friend who only partially understands the rules themselves and five minutes to learn as fast as possible before people get bored of explaining the rules and start the game. A board game aimed at this audience can afford almost no complexity.
There are some interesting design chain effects that come from the desire to keep things simple. A card game with a consistent three energy per turn has far fewer tools to balance cards with than other games. With a ramping energy system, more powerful cards aren’t just more expensive; their cost precludes them from being played early in the game. With a consistent energy system, nearly any card can be played on nearly any turn. This limits the design space for cards that have massive effects but can only be played late in the game. Cards not fighting each other through health pools limits how they can interact with each other, making interaction much more “all or nothing” than it otherwise could have been. The most difficult design challenge that came from the desire for simplicity was that cards needed to be built around the idea that players wouldn’t build their own decks. Each player receives 25 random cards from an 80 card pool. Card synergies had to remain surface level to reduce the risk of a player drawing a hand full of cards that were essentially unplayable. I get asked a lot about when I am going to make a digital version of the game. I’m not. Every decision in this game was made within the constraints of being physical. If I were to design a digital card game I would make every decision differently.
Later Lessons
Many of the hardest challenges presented themselves after the larger design questions had been settled. It was difficult to get enough data to know whether cards were over or under-performing. My own affinities for certain cards or mechanics didn’t help. I tried to get everyone I knew to play the game, especially without me, to see which ideas they liked and which cards they thought needed changes. One of the major problems in balance is that some cards would need so much clarifying text to be fair that they would become nightmares for new players. I tried to limit the amount of text on a card to less than four lines; several ideas that seemed great just couldn’t fit in that space. Another challenge was cards that were balanced but just weren’t very fun. Some things, regardless of how cool or fair they are, just shouldn’t exist. This was one area where other players’ feedback was particularly helpful; multiple players having a strong negative reaction to a card was a good sign that I needed to look at the card’s effect again.
These late-stage design problems made me thankful that I had been organized early on. I had created a changelog of every card with notes about what had changed and why. I can still go back today and see when every card was added and every buff, nerf, and rework that a card received. It’s much easier to balance a card when you can see every iteration you’ve already tried and why those versions didn’t work. I could see, for example, that I had buffed multiple cards with the Return keyword over the course of multiple patches. That was a good indicator that the keyword needed to be looked at rather than individual cards. I also kept notes about how players felt about the game as they played. I would note which rules they struggled with, which mechanics they frequently forgot, and the times when they would get frustrated at the cards in their hand. I asked players after every game what their favorite card was. The responses were often surprising, which reminded me that I can’t make a game on my intuition alone; cards that players were excited about were almost always cards I didn’t expect.
Making the Game
District 5 meshed well with how I think about games. Card games and turn-based games are satisfying to design because their discrete parts are so easy to visualize. It’s difficult to imagine what increasing the attack speed of a weapon by 15% will feel like; it’s very easy to imagine changing the energy cost of a card by one. One of the joys of being a solo developer was having to learn every part of the production process. I began learning to draw, I created marketing materials, I designed the UI of the cards and the board. These were often things that didn’t come naturally to me. For example, I am terrible at naming things. For a long time the game was called Park Alley, which I always felt a bit embarrassed by. One day I was playing the game with a friend and he asked what the game was called. I told him and he said,
“That’s terrible. Why not just call it District 5 or something?”
More than anything else, I learned that I loved making games. Going through the puzzle-solving process, waking up in the night to scribble an idea in a notebook, teaching myself to draw, I loved all of it.
Closing
There’s something humbling about watching two people play a game that I’ve made. No feeling is as sweet as a player finishing a match and asking if they can have a copy of the game to keep. After a question like that, how could I do anything but make games?
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