I have some great news but I can’t tell you about it yet.

There comes a time — usually several times — during the design of each game I’m involved in at which I hate the game. Sometimes just a piece of it, sometimes huge swaths of it, and sometimes the whole bloody thing. I only have one published significant work (and it works) — Diaspora — and so I can’t yet say that I know everything will be alright, but I do know that I hated Diaspora several times during its construction, so I suspect all is cool.

In Hollowpoint right now I hate the teamwork pool but I also love it. It creates an essential tension — a resource that depletes over the course of play and that becomes essential in the endgame, so managing it between all players is a necessary part of succeeding at a mission. I don’t want to drop it because that bit gets hammered all the time in play. But a lot of the play that surrounds the teamwork pool smells a little funky and I don’t have a good solution yet to the imperfectly understood problem it represents. Because I tend to feel either neutral or extremes and nothing in between (the Fudge dice curve is no good for pegging my emotions), this imperfection means I hate the game.

Now, understand, this is an awesome game. It delivers very cool action scenes with a lot of player participation in the details. It creates a high-pressure story arc that makes the endgame tense and uncertain. It establishes a a context in which bad play means someone usually has to die in order to succeed in the mission — by three-quarters through play, it becomes clear that the only way to get enough dice to beat the enemy is to replenish the teamwork pool, and that means someone has to die. In our last playtest we had one player tactically trying to get killed so that we could beat the mission, and that’s pretty cool.

But something still itches and I don’t feel I have the perspective to address it. Fortunately, I have collaborators. Specifically, on this project, C.W. Marshall (sometimes Toph) is energetically proposing changes and fixes and generally sees the same faults that I do but from a different angle. This happened on Diaspora as well (though there I had three gung-ho collaborators with competing interests, so something different happened there) and was the reason the game went where it did. If I’d followed my original ideas through it would have been just another fan hack to do Traveller a slightly different way. My collaborators had different ideas about what made Fate fun and even what Traveller is, and so something exciting happened that I didn’t expect or intend.

So right now I’m trying not to think too hard about Hollowpoint (which is why I am writing a thousand words or so about it, right?) until there’s more external action on it. I don’t want to throw my darlings away (like the teamwork pool) but I also need to step back and let my partner do what he needs to do rather than defend something while I don’t like the game. That usually makes for a bad defense and, worse, reinforces the idea that I don’t like the game and I do. I do like it. I love it in fact, but loving something is more complex than just a shouted hurrah. It’s a dynamic thing that jerks you around all over the place. That’s just how that works.

So I’m not going to second-guess myself right now on that game.

Soft Horizon, on the other hand, I don’t hate. Reviewing the design notes, which I’ve been away from for quite a while, is funny because my ideas about how games can work have developed a great deal over the last year  and so a lot of the game seems dated — quaint even — now. It looks like something I wrote when I was a kid. A kid of 43. That’s part of why I started playing around with a different probability curve for it, really — it’s an attempt to re-energize the game and bring in a new idea that might force us to re-think other parts and consequently differentiate the game well from other games. And it did that and now it needs a lot of play and I don’t hate it. I just need to play it a lot. Not write it.

All this probably means I should play around with layout ideas for Hollowpoint, because that almost always jazzes me on the game again. Whenever a piece of the project seems intractable I go to a totally different part of the project and tinker with that, even if it’s too early (or late) to be productive. This lets me channel the game through different parts of my brain, and that tends to jog loose good ideas. It also does something essential to collaboration — it gives me time and space to detach a little from my little obsessions. There are things in each design that I will cling to because … well for no good reason other than that I invented them. Stepping back and looking at something slightly different, or from a new angle, sometimes allows me to let these go and it’s only then that I really hear my collaborators’ voices on the subject.

So there I am. A little depressed about some things, elated about others, and looking for a path through all that which leads to the release of a great game. So I’ll sit down and have a drink and let Toph blaze the trail a bit.

–BMurray