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Like a story, the best games have a beginning, a middle, and an end. For a cooperative game it is especially important that the players feel like they are fighting against ever-increasing odds. As a designer, you want the players to get closer to both victory and defeat simultaneously. For example, in Pandemic, as time goes on the game gets closer to winning, as more cubes get on the board and more epidemics happen – but you, the players, also get closer to winning, as you discover cures and gain tools to stem the tide.
Thus, most cooperative games are two races being run simultaneously. The players and the game are both racing to win, and usually in two very different ways. So while the players may be able to push back defeat in some areas, given enough time the game will win. In Pandemic it is epidemics or disease cubes; in Shadows over Camelot it is catapults and swords. Either way there is a sense of encroaching doom.
Ideally both the game and the players will be on the verge of winning simultaneously. This is the ultimate in tension, when both victory and defeat are at hand.
As I was putting these thoughts together for Ludology, I realized our Space Cadets prototype lacked this important ingredient. We – that is, my son Brian, my daughter Sydney and me – had known for a while that the mission structure didn't feel quite right, yet had stayed focused on the game mechanisms. But this crystallized it for us: Space Cadets did not have an arc.
In Space Cadets the players represent the bridge crew of a starship, each with specific jobs to perform, like Helm or Weapons. They must cooperate to complete the mission objectives, and win or lose together.
As the prototype mission proceeded, the players would kill enemies, and the game would become less lethal. The health of the ship degraded as the game progressed, but as enemies were destroyed the game got easier for the players, not harder, so tension did not build to a climax – which was a startling revelation, as we had been working on Space Cadets on and off for over five years. Here's a quick recap of the early development.
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One of the inspirations for Space Cadets is the old Star Trek: The Role Playing Game published by FASA in the early 1980s in which players got a bare bones paper "display" that they used for their station in ship-to-ship battles. I loved the idea, but thought it was never properly utilized (exploited?).
The flash of inspiration that led to the creation of Space Cadets was to link the performance of a station to a minigame performed by that player. We really liked the idea of bringing in different skill sets, from dexterity to spatial relations to pattern recognition, and ideally the minigames would be reflective in some way of the "real world" task you were simulating. Another key design goal we committed to was that you needed to be able to improve at the games with practice. There were many things we tried that just didn't have the skill factor we were after. We thought that was critical for replayability.
Over several months we pulled together a bunch of minigames and finally got it to the table. We lost horribly in only a few turns, but boy, was it fun. And it felt different than any other cooperative game we had ever played before. This was right around the time Space Alert came out, but Space Cadets felt like a completely different beast. The minigame concept worked really well and was tremendously thematic.
Fast forward to 2011. We had reworked the minigames, tossing out most of them and trying something new. Except perhaps tractor beams, no minigame survived in any recognizable form to the final product.
Keep It Simple, Stupid
As we tested, we realized that most people wanted simpler minigames. The focus of the game became the interaction between the players. An exciting alchemy occurred as the game provided a framework for an experience, an opportunity for role-playing and just having fun – and if the games were too complex, they started to get in the way of that. We wanted to avoid frustration. Making simpler minigames also had the advantage of opening up the game for families with children as young as seven or eight. It was terrific to see the kids take on a full role as a member of a starship crew.
For example, weapons initially had arcs (forward torpedoes and rear torpedos) and got less powerful at longer range. Plus there were more types of weapons, lasers and torpedoes, and you had to divide energy between them during the 30-second Action Phase. It just got too overwhelming, and drained the fun out when weapons couldn't be fired.
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One of the original Weapon designs
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Final Weapon station
Balancing the two goals of simplicity and skill turned out to be quite challenging, but we're pleased with the balance we ended up with. Some ideas, however, were too much fun to remove completely, so we added them back in as Advanced Systems that players could add to give more options when they got more experience.
The Hunt for Narrative Arc
In spite of these efforts, as I worked on the Ludology segment about narrative arc and started analyzing how games tackled this, I realized we had a problem.
At that time Space Cadets was played on a single hex map with multiple enemies and crystals. You simply needed to get three crystals to win. Initially, if you eliminated an enemy he stayed dead, but that didn't work because players would pick off all the enemies first, then pick up the crystals at their leisure.
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Early hex map design
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Final map tile
So we changed the design so that enemies respawned when you killed them, maybe even at a harder level as you grabbed the first few crystals – but then there was no incentive for players to kill enemies. Weapons became useless, the whole thing felt off, and the narrative arc was nonexistent.
We tried to address the problem by introducing a linked series of missions. The results of each mission would give you bonuses and determine which mission you moved to next. While this change built tension and made the outcome of each mission more important, the game got way too long.
The breakthrough came when one of the playtesters said that he wanted to have an exploration aspect, which I had never considered but instantly realized would be cool. We tried a lot of different hex tile configurations, but finally decided to switch to square tiles. This launched a whole cascade of system changes, like pushing Helm into the Maneuver card system.
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Original Helm design, with energy tokens placed under different columns to program the movement
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Final Helm design, using Manuever cards
More importantly this change makes the missions feel bigger. Because you start on a single tile and the map expands as the mission progresses, we had the opportunity to make the mission get harder as it went on.
In the original design, enemies were specified by the mission and were pretty generic. We realized that with a more complex mission design we could have different levels of enemy ships, so you will typically encounter easy ships first, then the difficulty will ramp up. We also developed special abilities for the enemies that are selected randomly during play, so replayability was dramatically improved.
The larger maps, plus random enemies of different levels, improved play in many ways. Adding special abilities to the enemies allowed for clever tactical play, creating a larger map gave the Captain more strategic options of how to proceed, and having the enemies get tougher over time added to the tension and that narrative arc. We were getting closer to the feel we wanted.
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Who ARE those guys?
We were still missing a few key elements, however, as the players had no time pressure on them and both victory and defeat, while satisfying, were anti-climactic. At this point in the design when enemies attacked, you rolled dice. If you took that last point of damage the ship blew up. When you won, you either had a successful tractor beam or weapon shot, which wasn't too bad, but didn't give closure to the mission.
For time pressure we first looked at having a maximum number of turns for the missions, but this seemed artificial and not thematic. We needed a different angle.
I'm a big fan of the movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and love the way an anonymous posse is constantly chasing them. Butch keeps saying "Who are those guys?" as they show up yet again.
What if we added that same feeling, of being hounded through space, with an implacable enemy on your heels? And so the Nemesis ship was born, an unkillable enemy that eventually would get you.
After lots of testing we designed the Nemesis system so that you could slow it down by shooting at it or by clever maneuvering, but never totally shake it. It put that time pressure on the players in a fun, thematic way.
In conjunction with Nemesis we needed a dramatic way to win the mission. After all, if Nemesis was chasing you, just completing the mission goals didn't feel like a satisfactory ending. The players needed to get away in a more concrete way, so we designed the Jump system.
"Jumping" is a ready-made science fiction trope for ending an encounter. Whether in Star Wars or Star Trek, the hyperdrive or warp drive is always used, and of course it always fails when you need it most. This system was something that players would immediately relate to, and it added to the theme. The idea that the players would need to do something to jump out of the system, with enemies bearing down on them and the ship falling apart, was too compelling not to include.
The first Jump system we designed was the "cube pusher", a dexterity game. During earlier turns, if energy was allocated to Jump, the players would earn cubes that they would place on the jump track. Then, when finally ready to win the game, whoever was in charge of the Jump Drives would have to make one giant tower of cubes, and push it from one "Containment Chamber" to the other. You would then roll a die, add the number of cubes that made it across, and if the number were ten or higher the players won.
This set-up was really dramatic. All the players would stop and watch the Jump Drive officer slowly push this massive stack of cubes across the track, and when (if) they made it to the other side, a huge cheer would erupt.
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The original Jump Track – about 12" from end to end
This version of the Jump Drive was in the game for quite a while. However, over time a lot of deficiencies became apparent. If the stack fell over and the players failed to jump, it was emotionally devastating and just not fun. Also, during the course of the game, there was really nothing going on with the jump drives, so the players would just periodically toss a few cubes that way. Finally, publishers said the jump track would add a lot of cost and be fragile.
As a result, we decided to try to develop a minigame that would allow you to build something up over the course of the game in preparation for the endgame. Dice seemed underrepresented in Space Cadets, so we focused on that. After several missteps, Brian came up with the idea of earning special abilities during the course of the game that could be used, ladder fashion, to build up to the climactic moment.
This design worked well right out of the box. It was thematic, gave the Jump Drive officer something to do during the course of the game, and got all the players involved in the endgame.
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Final Jump minigame
That left losing. For the entire life of the game, if you took enough damage in the right (or wrong) places, you blew up and lost. It was really anti-climactic. We needed to come up with an exciting way to lose, so...why not add one more minigame? And something that all the players had to do together?
We hit on the theme idea almost immediately – the Core Breach, another classic sci-fi trope with which players would instantly connect. Brian came up with the idea of having the players do something at the same time as their normal jobs. This would add to the frantic nature of the game and was a great thematic fit, simulating the ship not performing as well under this dire emergency. Matching shapes seems like a simple enough task, but add time pressure and it makes for a thrilling and dramatic conclusion. Even when players fail to repair the Core Breach and lose the game, it's fun and exciting and fulfilling.
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An early damage display – when damage was taken, a die was rolled to see which line it hit, and a marker was placed on that space to represent damage. Tokens representing the stations were randomly placed on the white spaces, and when those were hit that station suffered special damage. The ship exploded if the center space took damage.
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A later display, after we switched to the square map tiles, with pre-printed squares to make it less fiddly. We also were experimenting with different types of ships, with different armor, etc. This ship can take more damage from the front, for example.
Final damage system. A deck of cards represent the armor and special damage for the Systems. If you need to draw a card but can't a Core Breach occurs, which uses the cards on the right.
Space Cadets is an experiential game, almost a borderline role-playing game. We want you to feel like you're flying a starship through the vast reaches of space – but it is very dependent on the players to bring it to life. Each minigame on its own is not deep enough to sustain a player's interest or keep them coming back. The draw is going to be the magic that happens with a bunch of friends having a good time. Space Cadets is a framework to help that happen, and a key element of that framework is the narrative arc – the rising tension and the exciting climax in which victory and defeat hang in the balance.
The last year of development was dedicated towards building and tuning the narrative structure of the game. Watching people experience the tension and rising drama as they strive to win shows us it was time well spent.
Geoff Engelstein
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