Game Design: Introduction.

Welcome to Game Design! An article series were we dive under the hood of H&G and discuss how we've gone about designing this thing. To start it off I wanted to share what influenced the design of Honor and Glory.

Before we get into it, it's worth stating a good game experience requires three pillars, meaningful decisions, unpredictable outcomes and measurable results. Remove one or more of these and your game looks more like gambling, a puzzle, a coin toss or a spectator experience.
I found over the years TCG's often strip players of one of these pillars in some way. The biggest way a lot of games do it is in their resource systems.

Resources (the big one)

A lot of TCG's (Trading Card Games) use a linear progression system, especially with their resources. In most games, you start with zero resources and gain more each turn. You play your cheap and weaker cards early in the game and your most powerful and expensive cards at the end of the game.
The advantages of this style of system is the difficulty of playing is reduced early on in the game. That and it's also meant to prevent people from playing game winning cards on turn one.

Unfortunately these systems come with two major issues depending on how the resources are included in the game.

Traditional games use resource cards that are shuffled into the deck alongside regular cards. the issue with this is resource flood/screw leading to non games, dead draws and a lack of player agency especially in later turns.
Modern games have tried to solve that issue through systems like  "every card is a resource" , Giving players +1 resource per turn without cards or putting the resource cards in a separate deck. While this eliminates the issues of traditional systems, it brings in a new issue where games are won and lost by how efficiently you manage your resources, which with the fact you're drawing random cards from your deck, can still create dead draws or dead games, just to a lesser degree for those who have experience in playing the game.

A few games in the last few years have had extremely innovative resource systems that break away from linear resource progression with the promise of more flexibility. Some systems focus more on consistency where every card can be used to attack, defend or create resources, others lean more into RNG which allows you to play something every turn. These kind of systems while clever are still trading one issue for another. Games that lean on consistency become more about knowledge and force you to play only the most optimised lines while those that focus more on RNG while they give you more agency, it can backfire if luck isn't on your side. Both of these also make deck building extremely complex which makes it unfriendly for newer players to have deck building agency. This brings me to my next point, restriction.

Restriction

So restriction and limiting players is required for a game to not devolve into a complete mess. It's why resources generally exist. A lot of games though wind up restricting players in other ways that reduce agency in a bad way. The 43 ways I found this happened was.

1. The Knowlege problem
   Is when the depth of a game becomes so heavily tied to player knowledge, not just how to play, that meaningful decisions and agency become impossible. With this the winner usually isn't the better strategist in the moment but the player who's memorised more data, more cards, more combos, more matchups.
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2. Over Optimisation
   Is when games promise more flexibility through complexity, but usually leads to games being solvable as there is often one correct line of play and deviating from that is no longer creative, but wrong.
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3. Deckbuilding Rock-Paper-Scissors
   Many games front load agency into the deckbuilding stage, so once you're in the game the winner and loser can be determined both by what your matchup is and if you built an objectively good deck. All of the meaningful desicions are outside the actual game.

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Resolution

So with that, I knew the system we needed to build did the following.
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• No dead games, draws, or turns.
• Player agency both in game and in deck building needs to be more important than optimisation.
• Depth needs to come from in game interactions, not outside the game.
• Players should be rewarded for adaptation, not punished for a lack of knowlege.
• The rock-paper-scissors of the game needs to stay inside the game.
• Allows for players to do big impressive things but not immediately.

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