Designer Diary: Dead Men Tell No Tales, or Curse You, Kevin Lanzing!

In 2010, I designed my first game, Pressure Cooker, and it got picked up by Rio Grande Games. That got me thinking...maybe I could be pretty good at this game design thing, so in January 2011 I started writing notes for a new game. I find inspiration for game designs in everything. Conversations that people are having, TV shows, commercials, seeing things out on the street, books, whatever — it always triggers a "what kind of game would that be?" question in my head. I live across the street from a fire station, so I had had the thought in my head for a while that a firefighting game would be fun. Of course, a good firefighting game would be cooperative, so I started the process of creating a cooperative firefighting game. Nobody's ever done that before (RIGHT?!?) and it's a theme that will draw people in.

The initial picture in my head was of a building that players would explore and build out of tiles as the game progressed, and each room had a die in the middle of it that showed what the fire level in that room was. Players would use actions to lower the fire level and move around, and the fire would spread and explode in a random, but semi-predictable, manner. That set the groundwork for what would become "Backdraft".

My initial thoughts on what to add to the game got a little too out of control, so I quickly had to pull things back. I wanted players to have to worry about their oxygen level, water level, where the hose was going, their fatigue, and all kinds of other things. They were working together as a team, but had to monitor their own levels to make sure they weren't becoming a hindrance.

I liked the idea, but I prefer streamlined designs over lots of things to track, so I decided to combine all of that into one thing: fatigue. The way fatigue works is that if you move from a room into a room with a higher fire level, then you increase your fatigue by the difference of those two dice. For example, if you left a 1 and went into a 4, you would take 3 fatigue. In addition, triggers along the dial mark different fire levels; once you cross those thresholds, you can no longer enter rooms with that fire level or higher. Fatigue levels increased even faster when you were carrying a person to rescue them (or carrying loot as is now the case in the published design). This worked great from the first play and hasn't changed since.

Fatigue dial

I designed several character powers as well as several other problems that players had to deal with, and everything came together just how I wanted it. It was time to show a publisher. I e-mailed a publisher and immediately got some interest. Woohoo!

And then, days later, Indie Boards & Cards announced that it was releasing Flash Point: Fire Rescue, a cooperative fire fighting game. CURSE YOU, KEVIN LANZING!!! At that point, no publishers wanted to even look at my game. One publisher did get a chance to play it during this time and the comment was, "I'd sign this game immediately, but we can't do it right after Flash Point." Back to the drawing board...

I needed a re-theme. I spent some time thinking about the other cool themes that could potentially fit. Searching a cave for treasure was one that I really liked, but the fire was a big part of the game, and I couldn't think of anything else that would work the same way. The fire going up and down and players getting fatigued as they moved through it was the core of the game. I didn't want the theme to be such a stretch that things didn't make sense, but I didn't want to change the core of the game because of the re-theme. Luckily, I have a brilliant wife. "What do you think about pirates looting a burning ship?" BOOM. There it is.

At first I tried to get away with the re-theme the easy way: Keep the game the same and just put the pirate theme on it; rename everything, change the art, and POOF, a pirate game. But it wasn't that easy. It still felt like a firefighting game. I needed to change more than just the art and the names; I needed to piratize the game. And how do you piratize a game? Battles.

"Backdraft" had tokens on the board that you could pick up and combine in specific combinations in order to purchase cards that gave special powers. I liked the idea, but in practice it didn't flow with the game as nicely as I'd want. This was the first thing to go. I decided to replace the tokens with enemies. Instead of having random things you could pick up to buy cards, I split this idea into two parts. The first part was the tokens; these became enemies that the players would need to battle, and eliminating them would provide items that would help them in future battles. The second part was the cards. I decided to change them from being things that were purchased, and instead turned them into items that the players could carry. They became a secondary power that each player would have that could be swapped out depending on their situation. This combination both made the game more interesting and more piratey. ARRRRR...

The whole theme change seemed like a let-down for me at first, but in the end I ended up with a better game because of it. And it's not like I ended up with bunnies searching for carrots or something; we have pirates looting a burning ship while fighting undead minions!

As I was putting the final touches on Dead Men Tell No Tales, I attended a Protospiel event in Milwaukee. This is a weekend when designers get together to play each other's prototypes and offer feedback. There are usually a few publishers around, too, including Minion Games. I was teaching a few people the game and had others stop by to comment on what a cool theme it was. As we were starting to play, James from Minion Games stopped by and said he'd heard good things about the game and wondered if he could join. I happily gave up my spot and walked him through the first turn since he had missed the rules explanation, and he was up and running. It was a tense game with players commenting on how they really enjoyed the tension throughout. At times they felt like things were hopeless, but they were able to turn things around and pull out the win.

Normally the process of signing a contract with a publisher can go on for months, but this was the first time I was ever offered a contract pretty much on the spot. Dead Men Tell No Tales was finally signed! The trouble of going through the theme change and re-working the game had paid off.

I'm a big believer in great art in games. For the players it makes the game more exciting and immersive; for the publisher it makes the game more marketable. As a designer, I'm interested in both of those things. So, whenever possible, I want to be involved in the art for my games. I talked to Minion about this before signing, and I was told that I would be involved.

As it turned out, Minion's normal artists were busy working on another project, so James was kind enough to grant my request to be the art director on the project. I was given full control, which included finding my own illustrator and graphic designer. This was a very fun process, but also a bit stressful at first because I knew how I wanted the game to look, and finding an artist to match that style, keep to our timeline, and stay on budget isn't necessarily an easy thing.

Luckily, I found what I was looking for with Chris Ostrowski doing the illustration and Jason David Kingsley doing the graphic design. We worked very closely with each other, me telling them exactly what I wanted and them doing amazing work to bring it to life. I'm sure I drove them nuts at times as I pushed to get the logo and cover especially just how I wanted it, but hopefully it pays off in the end. I, for one, couldn't be happier with the finished product.

Note: No Kevin Lanzings were actually cursed in the creation of this designer diary.