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DETAILED GAME DESIGN PROCESS

STEEL HUMANS

This page details the systems of the game Steel Humans. It mostly describes the main game loop, the systems interactions and gives some insight on the issues I've been confronted with as the Lead Game Designer for my first team project.

I. OVERVIEW OF THE GAME LOOP

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In Steel Humans, 3 to 4 gang leaders fight in the cyberpunk city of Unimate for its control. Each player can choose his way to establish his domination over the city.

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Let’s first take a look at the game loop and deconstruct it. It is still one of the core systems I’m the proudest of to this day. This page mostly covers what makes this loop functioning. It also covers the double-edged sword aspect of it, as it contributed to make the game a little bit too complex.

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​Steel Human's win condition is very straight forward: the first player that reaches 15 Victory Points wins the game. These points represent the influence of each gang in the city.

However, there are three distinct ways to earn these points, and each one interacts together.​ These three paths are written in green in the game loop. Players can earn Victory Points by:

   killing enemy players (as we can expect: reduce their health to 0) to instil fear in the enemies,

   hacking the city's core to take control of its structures,

   having the control of several buildings of a same district to ensure domination.

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• Red arrows represent the player's input to the game,

• Purple arrows represent the resource generation,

• Yellow arrows represent the ways to spend resources,

• Green arrows represent the paths to earn Victory Points,

• Blue arrows represent "bridges", meaning interactions between the game elements.

II. IDENTIFYING THE GAME'S CORE

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The first important thing to notice in this loop is its core: the controlling of the city’s buildings.

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It is at the centre of the loop for good reason, as the whole game is actually about territorial control.

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In the game, the board is a top-view plan of the city and the buildings are 3D-printed pieces placed in the city’s districts. Controlling buildings is obviously a way to earn Victory Points, but it's also the main way to gather resources and tools.

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The  buildings are 3D pieces with a hole in each of them (see above).

When a player takes control of a building, he puts a 3D-printed flag of his color into the hole to indicate he owns the place. He then gets each turn the resources produced by this building.

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The resources are tokens that can be spent to buy different tools or to use abilities (see below).

The resources are money and hacking points. Both are equally important, but players can decide to focus more on one of these two.

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Buildings produce resources (money & hacking points) at the beginning of each turn for the player who controls them. Therefore, obviously, the more building a player controls, the more resources will be available for him (purple arrows in the loop above).

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Buildings can also be looted by the players, whether they control it or not, granting them new powerful allies or high-end cybernetic equipment. The dynamic between this mechanic is that it’s always possible for a player to exploit a building that he doesn’t control, but it’s going to be much more dangerous, as he’ll be stepping in enemy territory.

Buildings produce resources (money & hacking points) at the beginning of each turn for the player who controls them. Therefore, obviously, the more building a player controls, the more resources will be available for him (purple arrows in the loop above).

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Buildings can also be looted by the players, whether they control it or not, granting them new powerful allies or high-end cybernetic equipment. The dynamic between this mechanic is that it’s always possible for a player to exploit a building that he doesn’t control, but it’s going to be much more dangerous, as he’ll be stepping in enemy territory.

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Allies and cybernetic equipment are cards.

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The first one are kept in hand and can be used to defend buildings, to attack enemy buildings or to use powerful effects.

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The second ones are placed on the character to give him combat stats or new effects.

For all these reasons, controlling the different buildings is the main stake of the game. This gives the game a clear direction that players can understand quickly. As the game offers three paths to victory, and many ways to get there, this direction helps narrowing the player’s possibilities.

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During production, realizing that territorial domination is the actual core of our game really helped us to simplify it and to avoid the players being lost in too many choices, which is an issue we’ve faced for a long time.

III. CREATING 'BRIDGES' FEATURES

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The second important thing about this game loop is the links that exist between the game’s core (controlling the buildings) and the other ways to win (kill the other players or hack the city’s systems).

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What I wanted to avoid was having distinct tools used for distinct win conditions with no link between them.

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​In this game's design, there is no absolute link between these tools and a way to win. Obviously, hacking points can be used to win by hacking the city, equipment can be used to fight opponents and kill them, and allies can be used to get the control of the city’s districts.​

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​However, I attached a particular importance to the fact that all of these tools have several uses. This allows player to build very surprising strategies and to feel very smart and ingenious. 

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These 3 allies card are an excellent example to illustrate my point.

Allies can be 'engaged' by the players who own them in order to defend his controlled buildings against attacks. They can also be kept in hand to lead assaults on enemy buildings or to be discarded later, granting an instant effect (see the dirty cop on the right).

In conclusion: allies are the key to the building controlling part of the game.

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However, each ally has an other specific use and can therefore be useful to a player that aims for another path to victory. For instance, the street thug (on the left) grants additional damage and strengthens his owner in combat. The netrunner (middle) helps for a hacking victory.

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It was also an amazing way to avoid the 'over-commitment' to a strategy. This over-commitment issue was very problematic during the tests of our first prototype because players had very few ways to change their strategies in mid-game. In most games, people could tell if they had a shot at the win after a few game turns.

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The game loop translates this with the yellow arrows, showing that each resource produced by the building has multiple uses that eventually can lead to any of the 3 ways to win. It’s also shown with the blue arrows that are all possible interactions between the actors of the game.

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There are other small interactions between the game features that do not appear on the game loop overview, but that strengthen the game design. For example, some cybernetic equipment brings more than combat statistics and grants its owner new abilities than can affect other parts of the game than combat.

Here are 3 examples of cybernetic implants (equipment that doesn't give direct combat strength by passive or active abilities).

These 3 implants are shuffled in the same deck and obtained by the same way (bought with money or looted at random in some buildings). However, they all support very different strategies.

The first of these gives its owner a significant edge towards a hacking victory, as it grants free hacking points each turn, even though implants are not earned the same way than hacking points.

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These kind of 'bridges' between features allow players to adopt hybrid strategies or to adapt during a game to their opponent's moves.

In hindsight, even if the loop is very cohesive this way, I would say that there are probably too many of these side interactions, that I like to call ‘bridges’, as they connect different systems together. It was my very first major project, and I probably got a little bit excited about the game, thus making me miss the fact that the game was maybe too complex for mid-core players.

IV. CONCLUSION: UPS & DOWNS

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Aside from the game complexity, this loop contributed making the interactions between the systems very fun to manipulate. We conducted a lot of test sessions and observed several amazing behaviours from our players.

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The winners of our tests often won by ‘thinking outside the box’ and finding intelligent ways to spend the different resources, for example the hacking points or the allies cards. We also witnessed huge reversals in games, where a player manages to adapt a losing strategy into better one by transitioning his resources from one game plan to another within a few very good turns.

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In the end, the game perfectly respects my initial intentions: emphasize the chaos of a cyberpunk city and allow the player to act as merciless gang leaders, backstabbing and conspiring against their rivals. I am very happy with the systems of the game and how they interact together: I think it works really well and allows an excellent replay value for the game.

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However, I think there is a small mistake in my initial intentions: I should have focused myself on ‘keeping it simple’. I am convinced that it is possible to design the same game, similar loop, same depth of gameplay with less complexity.

It probably comes from less secondary interactions and the removal of the asymmetry component (the different gang leaders that the players embody have distinct abilities, adding a layer of complexity to the system).

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