Tips for Making a Game You'll ACTUALLY Finish | Extra Credits Gaming

So, James recently just did exactly what this episode is titled. He made a game from scratch, specifically Cyberpunk Legends, a narrative-driven co-op Cyberpunk card game designed to be learned in 10 minutes. It's also on Kickstarter right now. Link's in the description. I'm sure he would appreciate the support. But, here is the other neat part. He just handed me this script on the topic of designing a game from scratch in hopes that what he's learned across the last few years making this thing can help you with your future projects. And not to put too fine a point on it, but the information here is kind of invaluable. It's actually informed a couple projects that I'm working on. So, I'm going to read it to you here right now verbatim in the first person. You ready? Let's begin. So, you want to design a game? Well, I'm going to say the no-fun thing up front. The best way to start your game design is to start from your constraints. Because remember, your job as a designer is to make the best game possible, not

just dream up the best imaginable game, and that is a trap all too easy to fall into. For Cyberpunk Legends, I knew I mostly was working solo on it, and that I wanted to finally make the game that I truly thought was as good as I could make it. Not chipped away at by publishers or marketing departments. So, knowing that, I had to ask myself, what do those constraints mean in practical terms? Solo. This means scope has to be small, probably a tabletop game because my coding skills just aren't at the level where I could do everything I wanted in a video game. And no publisher? Well, that meant that the entire budget had to come from my savings, so it better be something I really believed in. And while I do draw a wicked stick figure, I also don't have a lot of artistic abilities. So, most of my money was going to go to hiring amazing artists, a pedigree I've enjoyed since the early EC days. But, beyond that, it also meant that I was going to have to dedicate time to learning about manufacturing, distribution, marketing,

and editing to get this thing out. Meaning, I probably didn't want to do a game like Nemesis, which while awesome, has 10,000 fiddly bits that I'd have to figure out how to get made. So, once I have my constraints, I always try to write down my strengths and any market holes that I can see. Luckily for me in this case, my personal strengths and marketing holes lined up nicely on this one. As a designer, I'm strongest at systems and narrative design. And the tabletop area I've worked on the most happens to be card games. Looking around, there were a million competitive card games out there, but outside of Arkham, there just weren't a lot of co-op campaign-based narrative card games to be found. So, that's what I aimed to create. Now, I could start setting out my design goals. But, what are design goals? Design goals are the guiding principles that, when you're unsure about a design decision, you can look back at and ask yourself, "Does this deliver on what I set out to do?" Simple, yes, but also laying these out

at the start will be a huge help throughout your design. They should come from what you've already laid out about your constraints, your strengths, and market holes that you found, plus what you're passionate about as a designer. For example, I was building Cyberpunk Legends during the pandemic for those who longed for those days to be over. So, I knew I wanted it to be something that felt like playing an RPG with my friends, but I knew people's lives would get busy, so I wanted something that you could learn in 5 minutes and that you could pick up and play anywhere without a ton of setup time. You know, something you could grab and bring over whenever people had a minute or, you know, play at Denny's at 3:00 a.m. Anyway, my design goals were: low setup time, under 10 minutes, 5 minutes to learn, strong narrative feel, portable, and co-op. Great, design begun. Any future decisions I make now better have a really good reason behind them if they negatively impact these goals. So, now we finally get to what most people would normally think of as real game design. But, even there, we start by building

the biggest, broadest elements of the game that we can. Let's go down the list. Low setup time. Let's go with no setup time. Let's have player decks and a scenario deck, and that's it. Players will use cards from their decks to overcome obstacles the scenario deck presents them. When they get to the bottom of each scenario deck, they beat that scenario. Done. Now, what are the obstacles? How do they overcome them? No, no, no, no, no. That's future James's problem. It's important to remember to start super broad here. Next up, 5 minutes to learn. Easy. We're going to make the cardinal rule of the game be that you flip over the top card of the scenario deck, follow any instructions on it, and when you've done that, flip the next card. This allows me to put a lot of rules on cards, meaning you can jump in right away, but as a designer, I can add as much complexity or put in as many twists as I want as you get further into the scenario deck. Next up, strong narrative feel. Well, here is really where thinking through

the design implications of the medium you're working with comes into play. Because in my case, cards have two modes. They can provide you with randomization, and they can serve to sequence data. Now, I'm going to have the player cards be randomized, shuffled up so they have to find novel solutions to whatever I throw at them every time. But, the scenario cards? Well, it's hard to make a randomized narrative very compelling, but if we have the scenario decks come in a fixed order, not only can I control things like the difficulty curve, but I can use it to craft narrative moments. I can have a card that makes you make a narrative choice, and have it say, "If you chose A, draw the next card. Otherwise, discard the next card without looking at it." I can also create the puzzle aspect of RPGs by presenting you with a puzzle, and then having the next card you draw say, "If you answered the correct answer, draw the next card. Otherwise, discard it without looking at it." So, non-randomized scenario cards. That lets me get the narrative feel of an RPG.

Portable? Well, that's built in since there's nothing but cards. But, co-op? I made the goal that players as a team have to get to the end of each scenario deck. So, we're halfway there. But, now let's give the players a shared life total. You either make it or you don't as a crew. Okay, design goals fleshed out. Now, we have to design a core mechanic. Here we got a little help. I showed an early version of this game to Mike Pondsmith and he said, "We got to do this with Cyberpunk." So, now we had a theme, but you always want your core mechanic to feel like your theme. To me, Cyberpunk is all about big risks for big rewards. Gambling your life to become a legend. It's also about the family you find and the people you run with. But, luckily, we're already co-op. So, we just need to find that feeling of chaos and risk as a team. So, after throwing out a half dozen core mechanics, I looked to poker for inspiration. What if you had to make a co-op poker hand? I also wanted the turns to flow quickly. So, I decided everyone plays one card on

their turn and that when you hit five cards, we'd check to see what happened. But, how to integrate that? Well, to make every combat feel like a wager, I decided to make it the two hit value on enemies. You didn't encounter something, it would have an amount of health, damage it would do to you if it survived the round, and right in the middle, a two hit requirement. Something like two pair. And if you didn't make the two hit requirements, you wouldn't do damage to it. But, to make this work, the player cards would have to be wild, Cyberpunk themed versions of standard playing cards. They had to do way more than just standard playing cards could. So, instead of one number and one suit like normal playing cards, they could have any number of numbers and suits and would have a big rules area in the center to tell you how much damage they did and any special rules related to them. Because if the game was to feel like an RPG, I also needed to make sure I could make new and interesting cards

for the players to acquire as they grew their decks and faced later scenarios. But there was one last thing missing. Cyberpunk fights are wild and chaotic and whatever can go wrong will. So I didn't want players just asking each other, "I have a five. Do you have a five?" So I put in table talk rules saying that you couldn't say numbers, suits, or card names. But since it was Night City, I encouraged players to talk around that as much as possible because Night City is also about bending the rules. Then I tested a bunch and then tested some more and it turned out to be easy to pick up, strategic yet fast, and it got people talking. Heck, it even got non-RPG players RPing a bit. So we had our central mechanic and with that we had our core design. The rest is just content. So for all of you looking to go from a blank page to a game design, here

are the steps again that made this process far less daunting for me. One, list your constraints. Two, list your strengths. Three, look for a hole in the market where you can really stand out. Four, create your design goals around points one and three. Five, build the absolute broadest framework of a game you can that aligns with your design goals. Six, create a core mechanic that works within that framework that really enhances your theme if you've got one and that really emphasizes your design goals. Seven, test. Eight, cry. Nine, rebuild six and maybe five until they're right. And then once you're there, you get to do all of the fun stuff. Making the monsters, writing the story, creating the characters. And so long as you go through that list first, they'll all come together to make a coherent game. Good luck and design boldly. I can't wait to see what you create. Okay, Matt here again with his own words. Uh I loved this script. I loved everything about it. It actually has helped inform

me of a couple designs that I am working on. And I hope that all of you watching this right now really take this stuff to heart because it cracked a bunch of creative roadblocks for me. And uh yeah, and I'm psyched you all get to use it, too. Again, Cyberpunk Legends is kickstarting right now. I have play-tested it a bunch. It is an absolute joy to play from start to finish. Actually, IRL Matt, you got anything to add? Actually, animated Matt, yeah, I do. I believe in this game so much that a few days back I headed to Indianapolis for Gen Con to help run additional play-tests because the original slots sold out in something like 19 minutes. And it was so fun to see everyone's eyes light up as they got to use like the specialty class decks, work through all the choices, puzzles, and combat, and came up together as a crew to shape the outcome of their own stories. It was awesome. Which again, you can set up in minutes, learn in about five, and then dive straight into the action with no GM required. You really do have to check this thing out. Just go to the link in the description or Yeah, there should be a QR code that I

just put right there. You will not be disappointed, and you can trust IRL Matt. I'm the trustworthy one. Would Would they let someone who lies wear a power glove? Cuz it's so bad. Well, I can't argue with that. To check out the Cyberpunk Legends Kickstarter for yourself, click or scan here. And then once you've dropped some eddies, check out our next video here. Huzzah, friends. Zilliad's Architectures, Lotus Wolf, Joseph Blame, Hunter Z, Dominic Valenciana, Arles Arles Posting, and Angelo Valenciana are truly the best among us as legendary patrons.