How did Undergrowth leap from my head into a game? More of a stagger than a leap!
Well, it all began in Summer 2020. Global pandemic, UK lock down and the world going crazy. I got thoroughly fed up watching the news and hearing/seeing the same things over and over and over again and decided I needed a distraction. Something to take my mind off the endless negativity being beamed into my home and brain.
The first thoughts I had about what eventually became Undergrowth were about The Wind In The Willows by Kenneth Grahame. I was always taken with the characters of Toad, Mole and Ratty as a child and my mind started imagining a board game involving them and their daily pursuits. Toad being greedy, Mole being a bit helpless, Ratty resourceful and Badger very wise. This quickly evolved into searching tunnels beneath the woodland for treasures. The WITW characters remained the protagonists as the game mechanics developed, but eventually the theme moved away from that world, towards an old English pagan forest setting.
I had been thinking for some time about the fact that there weren't many games on the market which combined the mechanics, strategy and fairly quick duration of a Euro game with the darker elements of a dungeon crawler. There are some notable examples of this, but not many. Eventually, this thought collided with the underground tunnel quest idea I was nurturing and became Undergrowth. To capture my thoughts, and try to prompt new thoughts, I made the world's least competent sketch of the sort of thing I was picturing.
Thank god for professional illustrators and designers, that's all I can say! As I write this, I actually haven't looked at this image for months and though it isn't much to look at, I have a sweet spot for this image because this is where it all began. In this post I'm going to explain how Undergrowth went from this.... to this...
...and all the stops along the way. Lesson one from this blog entry therfore, is don't feel ashamed of your early efforts. As a first time designer you can go from the sketchiest of initial sketches to board game artwork you'll be proud of. Here's how it happened for me.
The theme, aesthetics and mechanics co-evolved over the first few weeks (see the post about theme and mechanics for more details about this) and within a month I was hunting around craft shops (face mask on) for counters and component substitutes, drawing another terrible rendering of the board, and printing and cutting out cards for the first prototype.
If there was punk scene for board games this would definitely have been a hit! Talk about D.I.Y. But lesson two for this entry is that on your first game design, nothing is wasted, no endeavour is a waste of your time and everything, including your early misadventures with pens and scissors, teaches you valuable insights about directions you do and do not want to head in. For example, at this point in the process I was convinced that I wanted several different coloured tunnels in order to create a constraint mechanism dictating which tunnels a player could move through and rules governing how players moved betrween tunnels. This got ditched before play test 1. (The hours I spent colouring those tunnels!)
Once I'd had the initial idea about crawling around tunnels looking for stuff, using that stuff to help you crawl and get more stuff etc, it really snowballed. The idea that players form gangs (card tableaux) which compete to get the stuff (I hadn't worked out what they'd be looking for yet, so it was just 'stuff') followed pretty quickly and I gave myself arthritis from cutting out literally hundreds of cards!
My trusty notebook suddenly started going everywhere with me and was quickly filled with endless notes about things to add, try out, play with and discard. As soon as the pandemic lock down rules eased in the UK, I invited my games group round for a slightly odd, socially-distanced play test. The verdict was......needs refining, but there's definitely a worthwhile game in there!
Abandoning the idea of different colour-coded tunnels was a positive step forward, but it did also mean that the mark 1 prototype board became useless and I was forced to produce mark 2. As you can see I'm no artist, but....the slow process of creating each of the early hand drawn/painted elements was invaluable to the game development.
After only three play tests, lock down measures resumed in the UK and that forced me online. Putting Undergrowth onto a table top simulator was another key step in the game's evolution, mostly because it instigated a streamlining of components and mechanics. As I'm no graphic designer, I decided to shed and simplify elements as I digitised the game. Lesson three then, is about the value of revisiting game setup over and over again. Setting up a game tells you a lot about the game. this wasn't something I had ever considered when playing games, but with my designer's hat on, suddenly setting up the game became a really insightful evaluation process. Just putting out components made me think about whether they were actually necessary, or padding. Arranging decks of cards made me pause for thought about whether I had too many decks (could some be combined?) I recommend setting up your game lots of times, just to see what the process tells you about your game.
Like its predecessors, the new online prototype was no oil painting, but it enabled play testing to continue.
Once I was confident the mechanics were solid I commissioned some illustration work. The fantastic Kate Mae Parker created characters and the playing board illustration for Undergrowth. Finding Kate was more luck than judgement on my part so I don't have a lesson to share about this, except...be lucky if you can ;) I saw Kate's work on the degree show website of the university I teach at. I emailed her and the rest is history, as they say. I do have some lessons about creating a functional working relationship with your artists, but that's for another blog post.
Having seen how Kate interpreted my character ideas, I knew she'd be the perfect colllaborator for Undergrowth, so onwards and upwards with the main board. The following series of images shows how the Undergrowth board evolved over several iterations through discussion in online meetings and a good deal of back and forth between Kate and me. I have written about the importance of back and forth and flexibility between designer and artist in another post. From a game evolution point of view though, lesson four is that these iterations are way more than just steps to get the board image right. Every artist idea, interpretation, question, discussion and version feeds into your thinking about game play, game mechanics, game objectives. I've discovered that game design (probably just like product design, or any design) is recursive, not linear. By this I mean that every dilemma, every solution, every dead end, every input from others have the potential to influence a range of other decisions and considerations. So, attached to lesson 4 is my advice to try and think non-linearly about your game design. While discussing aspects of your board illustration with your version of the talented Kate Parker for example, allow their questions and suggestions to influence your thinking about other aspects of the game. By this I don't mean lose focus, just be aware that underneath a board game are a multitude of mutually connected parts. Tinkering with one, will influence how you tinker with others. I have found it useful to be aware of this when developing parts of the game.
At this point I needed a graphic designer and after a brief false start I came across Peter Marshall of Onebold Design. Again, I discuss aspects of the board game designer / graphic designer collaboration in another post, so my main focus here is how this next step in the visual creative process influenced how the game evolved. I began by adding copy to the current board illustration in order to get my ideas down and make some rough decisions about positioning. Inevitably, adding copy to the illustration made me realise that the illustration would need altering. From now until the finished image, I went back and forth between Kate and Peter and we often held meetings together. Kate and Peter also communcated without me, which proved to be really useful. This made for quite a slow process at times, I guess this is a consequence of working with a separate illustrator and designer, but it was time well spent.
Finally, approximately 13 months after my initial sketch of the Undergrowth world, 11 months after first enlisting Kate and 7 months after bringing Peter onboard, the game board was complete.
All the while, play testing continued online using this ugly duckling version of the game...
...and Kate was busy working on other elements...
The player board is an example of a game element which was a challenge to realise in graphic form. Getting it from my prototype made in Microsoft Word to the finished version proved to be way trickier than I ever imagined, and needless to say, this means I learned a lot from the process. The two challenges thrown up by the player board element were
1) the information depicted in words on the prototype were not easy to depict on the final version without using too many words, or too many icons.
2) I became way too wedded to theme and had to let go of some aesthetic ideas I had held for a long time (this was painful).
The prototype used for play testing looked like this (some of the terminology has since changed)....
It eventually became this...
...but beieve me, this wasn't a smooth process. How Kate, Peter and I reached this point will be the topic of a video coming soon on my Youtube channel. I hope you can take a look, Peter and I discuss the stages we went through, the dilemmas involved and how we collaborated to arrive at the final version (including my gradual and eventual letting go of certain ideas - there are a number of lessons here!).
In this post I'm going to focus on the issue of turning written copy into streamlined, easy to use visual communication. On the prototype you'll notice a lot of the information is written copy. This works really well for early and mid point protoyping when you need your play testers to be able to play the game relatively independently, without constanrtly asking what this or that icon mean. But, later you want to create something much more streamlined and find out if it works. This leap turned out to be large for undergrowth. You can see that the capability track titles became icons, this was straightforward. The tricky part was indicating 1) which type of treasure should/could be placed in each space on the tracks, 2) how your capability values increased with each placing of treasure, 3) what benefits you got at different stages along the tracks and 4) how to position copy for any information which just couldn't (or shouldn't) be depicted using icons. Getting this right took a lot of back and forth, printing, testing, consulting, adapting, printing again, testing again.
Lesson 5 then, is that your designer or artist can be an invaluable sounding board. Peter and I had several live consultations, screen sharing and trying out different ideas, discussing, agreeing, disagreeing and resolving some of the most challenging dilemmas. Decisions which proved almost impossible to make in my office on my own became swift and solutiuons much more obvious during these sessions. Sometimes emailing just doesn't cut it. For more on the development of the player board, check out this blog post.
Evenutally, with most assets prepared the online simulator version of the game was upated for final stages of play testing.
So, a quick recap on lessons learned:
Don't feel ashamed of your early efforts. They'll teach you a lot.
On your first game design, nothing is wasted, no endeavour is a waste of your time and everything teaches you valuable insights.
Revisiting game setup over and over again. Setting up a game tells you a lot about the game.
Design stages are way more than just steps to get the board image right.
Your designer or artist can be an invaluable sounding board. Prioritise developing a functional working relationship with your creative collaborators. They can become more than just individuals who deliver what you request.
That's all for now, feel free to comment or ask questions below. I'll do my best to respond.
Ben.
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