Chapter 5: The Pivot

              I had recently come upon a major stumbling block in my plans to game development: how would I monetize my product?  And what would the target audience be?  Having a good product is not enough to succeed.  For example, the first electric cars were invented in the 1890s, then reinvented in the 1990s, but it was not until Tesla debuted its first car in 2008 that they first became popular with the public.

              I had a similar problem.  Mechwar was an enjoyable board game that achieved all of my design goals, but the problem with very strategic board games is that they take a long time to play.  This problem is not unique to Mechwar – chess games also take a long time to play – but one advantage that chess has over Mechwar is that you can use chess notation to save the configuration of a game.  This means that if you have to interrupt a chess match to do other things, you don’t have to leave the board physically set up in your house occupying table space.  Instead you use chess notation to recreate the game, or simply take a photograph of the board.  In chess, the players don’t even need to physically be present to play against each other: they can just email or text each other the moves in chess notation and play against each other entirely virtually.  This property of chess is not replicable in Mechwar because the features that prevent it from being easily winnable by AI (randomized maps, and hidden tactics cards) mean that you can’t easily represent a Mechwar game through anything similar to chess notation.

              But computers can do that kind of thing easily.  As my friend Mark had pointed out to me, I’m a tech guy and I was making a mistake by focusing exclusively on a physical project rather than a digital project.  Everything about the game state could easily be represented with a JSON file.  In fact, some might say that just as the first electric cars were just primitive versions of the Tesla, chess notation is just a primitive version of a JSON file.  Computer games also have the advantage that people are willing to spend a lot more time on them.  The number of people who are willing to devote fifty hours to a single chess game is painfully small.  But people frequently spent thousands of hours on a strategic game like Civilization 6.  There are many more computer gamers than chess players.  Additionally, digital product sales scale much more easily than physical products, because all you need to create is the original game.

              Initially, shifting the project from a board game to a digital game seemed disheartening, with all the effort that I had put in thus far being nothing but a sunk cost.  But when I stopped to think about it in more detail, this wasn’t really the case.  A lot of the revisions that I had made were thanks to my ability to get feedback during playtesting: something which would have been impossible without having a physical version of the game to playtest.  Additionally, the files that Jordan had designed for the 3D models of the playing pieces to be 3D printed were OBJ files, which can easily be used in game engines such as Unity.  The randomized map board (which had been designed to make the game more challenging for AI) could easily be made even more random using a map generated with Perlin noise.  And the expansion sets which I had anticipated making the bulk of my profit on could easily be changed to DLC content.

              What I ultimately visualized was an asynchronous online game that you could easily play on your phone during breaks in the workday.  Your opponents would make a move, and you’d be sent a notification that it was your turn.  Then after you made your move, the opponents would be notified.  A timer would count down from the moment that the notification was sent, and if you took too long to respond you would automatically pass your turn.  Since passing a turn isn’t a huge drawback in Mechwar – and in some situations, it can even be a useful strategy when you want to hold position – this would disincentivize people from dropping or ignoring a game in progress, while at the same time not penalizing them too harshly.  A lot of thought went into this decision, because online asynchronous games are fairly new in the games industry.  If I failed to penalize players for ignoring a game in progress, then I would be faced with the problem of gamers getting bored and dropping a game.  That would only make the userbase angry.  But if I penalized players too harshly with a game-changing penalty, that would result in situations like exciting games effectively being forfeited by accident simply because one player was stuck in a work meeting and couldn’t get to their phones in time.  Holding position seemed like the best compromise, since much like a real military operation a lot of time can be spent in a holding pattern, and just like in a real military operation, in Mechwar a holding pattern is neither advantageous nor disadvantageous.  Additionally, passing a turn three times in a row would trigger a forfeit, causing a dip in that players ELO rating as well as their credibility rating.  The purpose of a “credibility rating” in addition to ELO rating would be to gradually create a bubble sort that would filter out unsportsmanlike players (and bots) by matching them to other players of similar credibility.  While I felt a little unpatriotic by adopting what was effectively a game version of China’s “social credit” system, game-design is not a democracy and it seemed like the most effective way to filter out troublemakers.  Since I was already a “niche internet microcelebrity” on an online cat gossip forum where a lot of hackers from the Anonymous organization frequently hung out, I knew that there would be a certain rogue element of troublemakers involving themselves in my game, so I wanted to make the system as robust as possible to discourage players from breaking it.  In the worst-case scenario that a player ended up matched to somebody who was determined to ruin their experience, the “three passes = loss” situation would quickly boot out troublemaking players, make them more likely to be matched to each other, and reward the more honest player with a higher ELO and credibility boost as compensation for briefly dealing with the troublemaking player’s bullshit.

              Everything considered, there was a lot of work to be done in transforming my project from a board game to a computer game.  However, now that I had conceptualized it, I knew that the project was theoretically quite achievable, and that’s always the first step in beginning a project.