Design Process: Scared Ninjas

GDC was amazing. One of my favorite parts was participating in design workshops on Monday and Tuesday (thanks again to XBox Women in Gaming for this amazing opportunity!). I figured it might be cool to walk through the design process for the games I worked on both days, starting with the first.

In the first design workshop, we were given a game called Sissyfight and were told to alter it to make a new game. Therefore, the best place to start would be to explain how the base game works. In Sissyfight, you and five other people take on the roles of children on a playground. Each player starts with ten self esteem chips, and throughout the game you attack other players (think of it like insulting them or teasing them like children so often do) and try to be the last one (or one of two) with chips at the end! Each player has a designated color, as well as a hand of cards. In this hand are the colors for each of the other players, as well as cards for solo attack, team attack, and defending. Each round, you choose a target card and an action card, placing them face down. Then everybody flips and things are resolved. Solo attacks work regardless of whether or not other players attack the same target. Team attacks are stronger, but only work if two or more players attack the same target. Defending will half the damage you take from an attack, rounded down, but if you defend when nobody is attacking you lose a chip.

One of the most important parts of this game is communication. Players are required to talk out loud and try to get other players to attack the same person as they want to as well as try to fool people. Nothing is under the table; everybody knows what the other people are planning (or at least saying they're planning).

The thing about Sissyfight, though, is it can seem kind of mean-spirited. Not everybody is okay with the idea of breaking down other people's self esteem and insulting them to win. One of our teammates mostly kept quiet and a low profile because she didn't want to attack anybody. We realized this was a flaw, and we wanted to fix this.

Everybody came up with their own ideas for a new setting to put the game into. They ranged from mafia to bees and flowers to coworker struggles... but our favorite after throwing ideas back and forth was about ninjas on a suicide mission. Sensei has plans, but the ninjas who go on the mission won't be coming back. The ninjas are scared; they don't want to die! But sensei doesn't need everybody. So how can the ninjas try to weasel their way out of the mission?

Simple. Just make sensei think that the other ninjas are much more qualified for the job.

While it was based on Sissyfight, Scared Ninjas had a totally different feel. Instead of putting down and insulting the other players, you talked them up. "Oh, but Blue is just so accurate with his throwing stars; he amazes me every time." We found that this setting was so much easier to really roleplay in. We jumped into character throughout the game, thinking of different ways to talk up other players to try to get people to join in on our "attack". In Sissyfight this didn't happen; we felt mean doing so. But who doesn't love a good compliment?

One thing we knew from the beginning was that we wanted to have players gain chips instead of losing them. You start the game with zero, and when you get ten you are officially a part of the suicide mission. In Sissyfight, when a player ran out of chips they were out of the game, which sometimes happened very quickly and then they'd just have to sit around and be bored. We didn't want that for Scared Ninjas. We decided that once you got to ten chips, now called "votes of confidence", you stay in the game and can keep talking up the other players but can no longer be attacked.

Then we realized we only had 50 chips. So what did we decide to do?

Sensei doesn't really need five people on the mission. He just needs to be super confident in the team he is sending out. We decided players could exceed ten tokens, but cannot be attacked after they do so. Therefore, if players teamed up to make final attacks on other players huge, they could lower the number of people who had to go on the suicide mission. This requires coordination and cooperation, which doesn't always happen thanks to people holding grudges. But when it did work, there was quite a bit of yelling involved.

We wanted to give the players on the suicide mission a little extra something special to do. We gave them a redirect power, in the game world called "Trusted Advisor". Each player can only use this power once in the game, and can only use it when they have the most chips above ten. They can use this power to redirect the highest damage done in the round to a player of their choice. This gave them a powerful sway in the game to get revenge on those who got them on the suicide mission in the first place. "I hear what they're saying about White, sensei. But honestly? This is a night mission! Who better to camouflage and blend in than Black here? He's the stealthiest of us all!"

One thing we really wanted to work out was some team defense mechanic. Team attacks worked so well, so could we make a powerful team defense to promote helping others and teaming up? After spending a lot of time on this mechanic, we realized it was much too complicated. Where team attacks were simple -- either two or more people team attacked someone and it went through or only one person did and it failed -- team defense had a lot more to it. Sure, defending yourself cut incoming damage in half, and defending with other people defending you would have them absorb damage... but what about when you didn't defend but somebody defended you? And if different amounts of people defended you but no team attack was done? It created this weird power vacuum and had far too many components, so we decided it was best to cut it.

But we learned from team defense. In game design, something that sounds like a really cool idea or mechanic just isn't always feasible. It can break the flow of the game and make it too complicated, or it could just feel wrong. Sissyfight was meant to be a short game that you can play over and over, but team defense just made everything far too complicated. But once we took that out, Scared Ninjas was really a joy to play. It was simple, and some work needed to be done with the redirect power since it often happened too late in the game, but we really enjoyed working on it and playing it. When sharing our idea and setting with the other teams, they responded really positively. It was a great start to GDC, and I met some great people. The week just kept getting better frm there!

#designprocess #sissyfight #analog #scaredninjas