Caravan Experiment Newsletter #6
Hey everybody!
Six weeks down and 10 more to go! I’m feeling… a little stressed but resolute. Lots of uncertainty about coronavirus has got me worrying about my family.
Thanks for reading, and please continue to reply with comments and suggestions or just give me a call. I’d love to hear from all of you.
Call to Action: Help Me with Healthcare?
My final date to elect for COBRA (the federal law that requires my ex-employer to keep me on their insurance plan) coverage is March 31st. Since planning this experiment I’ve assumed I would do COBRA and stay on this plan, so the cost is budgeted for. But now that I’m nearing the date I’m wondering if I should change my insurance? Is there anybody out there who knows health insurance (you probably know more than I do) and wouldn’t mind having a chat to talk over my options with me?
Design Notes: Changing the Rules
Consider this “script” that I’ve written to play chess against a 5-year-old:
Choose one of your pieces at random and move it to a random viable location
Deep Blue it is not. But, hey, it might take a win every now and then… It follows the rules and doesn’t get cranky. Let’s see if we can make it better:
Are you in check?
Yes: Choose your King and move it to a random viable location
No: Choose one of your pieces at random and move it to a random viable location
This is a hell of a strategic improvement. How much better does this fare against our 5-year-old? 50% more wins? 90% more wins? Let’s keep going:
Are you in check?
Yes: Choose your King and move it to a random viable location
No: Can any of your pieces take an opponent’s piece?
Yes: Take one of your opponent’s pieces at random
No: Choose one of your pieces at random and move it to a random viable location
And there you have it: we’ve more or less reached my actual 29-year-old chess strategy. How much better does this fare against our 5-year-old? 10% more wins? 30% more wins? Can I eke out a few more percentage points? Hmm… If I thought for a while, I probably could, but that would be hard!
Sets of rules with a high skill ceiling (like the rules of chess) take big ol’ brains and years of practice to master. And that act of continually rewriting your chess script gets harder and harder and yields less and less results the more time you put into it.
We want to create a game that doesn’t suck as bad as chess. So, taking for granted that the “rewriting your script” part is actually fun, how do we provide the player with ample opportunities to rewrite their script without them ever reaching a point of painfully diminishing returns?
By keeping scripts simple and by constantly changing the rules. And, by my decree, the rules of chess have just changed:
taking an opponent’s Bishop now also let’s you take any other piece (besides their King) of your choosing
Chess grandmasters are rioting in the streets. It will take them years to recover. What will happen to the Sicilian Defense!? But you and I (provided you are not some kind of chess freak) are not worried. Our simple script takes only a few moments to modify:
Are you in check?
Yes: Choose your King and move it to a random viable location
No: Can any of your pieces take an opponent’s Bishop?
Yes: Take your opponent’s Bishop and another piece at random
No: Can any of your pieces take an opponent’s non-Bishop piece?
Yes: Take one of your opponent’s pieces at random
No: Choose one of your pieces at random and move it to a random viable location
The ability to change the rules is most important tool for engineering fun in Caravan (and other games in the “roguelike” genre). The mechanism for doing this in Caravan is called a “mutation”, which is a commodity in the game which you can attach to a creature, changing its rules in some interesting way. For example, you could give a creature the mutation called “pacifism” which makes it so that all of the damage that creature deals is reduced to 0%, but all of the damage done by the rest of the party is increased by 50%. It’s a net positive for your party, but you can imagine that you would not want to be attacking with that creature anymore!
It’s a difficult thing to measure, but I’m striving for a rate of rule change of about once every 5 minutes in Caravan. You might imagine that that amount of rule changing could be overwhelming. Compensating for that is a huge part of designing it: a rule can’t exist that the player can’t take into account. That’s why, relevant to the “pacifism” example, I always show the damage a creature will deal before it attacks. Even if the player forgot that the creature was a pacifist, the effects of the rule-change will be shown to them so they can’t forget.