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It seems easy enough. For me, it's a bit like the way that I write. I know the ending, but I still have to write the story to explain how I got there and Genegrafter wasn't any different. I chose the end goal to be the accumulation of seven Trophy cards. It seemed like an easy and quantifiable goal – until we started the first round of playtesting.
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We also found that getting seven Trophies seemed to take too long, so we dropped the requirement to five – but even with the lower number there were issues. What happened if you never got to five? Did you reshuffle the deck? What if some of the cards you needed for Trophies were discarded and you couldn't get them back? With more than two players, the Trophy distribution could end up such that it was impossible for any one player to obtain enough Trophies.
There was also a bluffing mechanism that allowed you to put cards in your Trophy pile that accelerated the game a bit and was fun in some ways and completely broken in others. For one, bluffing was too automatic. Why not just throw down three cards at the beginning? We tried to limit bluffing to once a turn, but it degraded to nothing but blind luck. I outlined some of the other problems with the bluffing mechanism in my Genegrafter blog on BGG, but the biggest was that it was thematically inconsistent.
This focus on theme also showed another incongruence: What was a Trophy anyway? We weren't hunters, we weren't competing in the X games, what place did a traditional trophy have in our game. The answer was simple: It didn't. These have been replaced with Genetic Markers that you collect from fallen foes as you evolve towards becoming the ultimate champion.
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At this point I looked to one of my favorite games of all time for inspiration: Decipher's Star Wars CCG. As I looked through the sets I was reminded of cards like "Access Denied" and "Through The Force Things You Will See" that were insert cards – that is, you would shuffle them into the deck and when they surfaced they triggered some effect. We tried applying this to Genegrafter using a special card that ended the game when it was drawn. The original thought was that it was a supernova or some other disastrous event that only the player who had accumulated the most genetic markers could survive. Of course this didn't work very well when the game started and the first card drawn was the disaster event card.
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I think this is a perfect example of how iterative playtesting and adapting previously learned game mechanisms to a current implementation work toward making a better game. Game design is as much about luck as about trial and error and pattern recognition. Even with something as seemingly simple as a win condition of seven cards, we can see that a good game is the product of constant tweaking and the willingness to throw out ideas in favor of those that fit better.
And now, back to the beginning...
Genegrafter is about much more than just game play mechanisms and rules. It's a rich and developed story just waiting to be told, and Genegrafter has become a vehicle to let the players do just that.
As the story swirled in my head, the idea of a game began to take shape, but not the card and dice game – rather the video game. That's right, Genegrafter actually started out as a video game with RPG elements and dynamic storytelling. It followed our protagonist, Lance Orton, as he stumbled into a world of super-powered characters and secret alliances. The major characters were sketched and powers were made, but the story was still just a skeleton. While I developed better and cleaner game mechanisms, I found it hard to visualize the code without a little help. Enter the mighty index card!
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Going through hundreds of index cards and using them to create real-world programming stacks led to the realization that it was almost as much fun playing with these prototypes as the video game itself. This was the point at which the idea of creating a card game finally manifested itself.
I've been playing games of all kinds games for as long as I can remember. Video games have been a staple ever since my first NES – okay, actually since Frogger on a cassette tape for the Apple II, but I didn't want to date myself – and until about 1992 I was into roleplaying games like D&D and Shadowrun. But in the pre-Internet it was tough to find local players who also wanted to play these and had the time to do so. Then along came Magic: The Gathering, the poor man's substitute for roleplaying – and if you weren't poor, shelling out all of your weekly paycheck for the latest expansion hoping to get a "Jester's Cap" would make sure that you were soon. Richard Garfield had invented cardboard crack.
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Magic started me on a long road with collectible card games (mostly from Decipher), with most of my time spent deck-building for that elusive killer deck that couldn't be beat. I was lucky enough to do some beta-testing for Decipher when it still had the Star Wars license and was disappointed when Wars didn't make it past the first expansion. These games really shaped how I viewed card games and deck-building. I was also influenced by what I hated in them as I created my own games, most notably mana hosing and watching helplessly as my opponent got a head start that I could never recover from due to bad luck.
After writing up an initial set of rules and doing card balancing to re-imagine Genegrafter as a CCG, I decided it was time to put a little polish on the index cards and hired a graphic designer. This is where I learned the difference between CMYK and RGB and the challenges inherent in printing vs digital media. After much playtesting, I decided to focus on making Genegrafter a solid standalone card game that could be played out of the box but someday augmented as a CCG. Since I didn't have the funds to produce the numbers needed for such a large print run, I decided that it was better to concentrate on the core mechanisms of the boxed game and leave the CCG aspect on the shelf to be incorporated later. Every card is still designed to work in this environment, but playtesting for broken strategies hasn't happened yet. To be fair, I was normally the guy finding broken cards and exploiting them in the past, so I have a pretty good idea of what to watch out for.
At this point I had this great game with amazing art but not the slightest idea of how to get it out to the public – and then I found out about Kickstarter, this magical site where people who think your idea has merit can throw money at you to make it happen. It's obviously not that easy, but it was enough to get me seriously active in the production stages of making Genegrafter a reality. I spent a lot of time contacting foreign and domestic manufacturers determining how much it would really cost to not just get the pieces that I wanted, but also at the quality I demanded. I had already found a couple of self-print places online, so I had an idea of what kind of card stock I wanted and how the colors looked when printed. I requested many quotes and samples and definitely felt a bit like Christian Bale in American Psycho the way I started to feel every texture as I touched cards and look at the construction of games before I would even play them.
This brings us to current day (more or less) where the Kickstarter campaign for Genegrafter runs through mid-January 2012. There is still a lot more to the story, but I think where it's been is just as important as where it is going – and it's going a lot of places with everyone's help.
Thank you for taking the time to read my ramblings. I hope it's been enough to get you interested in coming on this epic journey with me.
Erik Dahlman
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