Why we are focusing on web games

When we started designing games in 2018, I set a goal to create 5 functional prototypes in different genres before deciding which prototype to finish and release. I’m interested in all sorts of games, and it was important to explore different genres and mediums to figure out where we could really thrive.

Over the next few years, we made:

• Elephant in the Room: a quick abstract strategy game that works as a physical board game or a digital game

• Beast Master: a board game with some unique mechanisms

• Contingency Plan: a fast paced strategic card battle

• The Social Game: a social game played via Discord and the browser

• A bunch of other prototypes that are too rotten to show to the public

We built Pecking Order during Covid lockdown because we wanted a game to play via chat in Discord where we were already hanging out. We wanted to play a deep game remotely and asynchronously, because our schedules didn’t always line up. The whole experience of designing and playing this game felt fresh and unique. We wanted to build a social game because social games are amazing, and fit the chat medium really well. This was not a physical game adapted to be played digitally — it was a game tailor made for the experience of chatting with your friends online throughout the day.

There’s a question that people often ask in startups, “What is the thing that you can do better than anyone else?” Michael Porter codified some brilliant ideas about business strategy that are applicable to the design process. Many of his ideas boil down to his thesis “Strategy is about being different.” Products that are easily comparable to competitors end up only differentiating on price, and have a very hard time standing out. Businesses that have products that are truly distinct tend to stand out and grow.

Pecking Order is such a unique experience that people began inviting their friends to test it. Then their friends invited more friends, and our test server grew organically in ways we never expected. We realized that ultimately the game would need to evolve into a website so people could play it outside our Discord server. Fortunately, many of us already work in software, and we have the skills to build it. We gradually realized that we were in a unique position to build something that felt genuinely new.

It turns out that being different is not just good strategy — it’s also more interesting to work on. The problems we’re working on feel novel and unique:

• When we run into game design problems, the analogs are less obvious, and so we must think creatively. When I work on Contingency Plan, it’s easy to run into a problem and ask, “How do the 10,000 other card games solve this problem?” But there are far fewer games to compare Pecking Order to, and so creative, lateral thinking is required.

• Asynchronous gameplay comes with some weird, unexpected complexity that I outlined in this other blog post. Designing around those problems has actually made the game better.

• The mediums of a web app and 24/7 chat open up new, interesting opportunities for gameplay and design. There are all sorts of cool things we can do that aren’t possible in board games.

We are over halfway done with development of the Pecking Order web version. Several members of the team are learning to write code. And now we are cooking up ideas for more web-based social games. There’s some gold in these hills, and we’re determined to find more of it.

We turned the weakest part of Pecking Order into the best part

The Social Game is a social deduction game, so we are developing it in a highly collaborative way. I had some core ideas nailed down, but was struggling to realize those ideas in a prototype. I brought in a group of friends who are a mix of experienced designers/testers, and game fans who have zero design experience. 

Here’s how it works:

• Nearly all of the designers of Pecking Order play in every test game, so we are all effectively super-testers of the game. And we play constantly.

• The game will eventually be managed by a Bot. But until we build the bot, the game is managed by one of us. The bot is effectively a dungeon master for the game. We intentionally give the person in this role leeway to design their own challenges, make judgment calls when there’s ambiguity about rules, come up with a theme, and to run the game as they see fit (within the parameters of the rules we agreed on beforehand).

• At the end of each game, we have a comprehensive retrospective where we review how things went, what new rules we were testing, and what changes we want to make next. We invite everyone to this retro. Pretty much all design decisions are made by majority consensus, and I can say with some honesty that’s it’s been a pretty consistently ego-less, creative discussion every time.

By playing the game a lot and taking turns serving as the bot, we have learned a ton, really fast. Each bot has brought their own flavor to the game, and has introduced new ideas. This structure has also helped us to embrace the best ideas, because every single one of us has had great ideas and horrible ideas — and the merits of each idea are pretty obvious when you’re testing and reviewing as a group. Here’s a case study of how this structure very quickly turned a weak idea into a great idea.

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The game mechanism: Pecking Order takes a week to play, and we wanted to have a daily Challenge so that players have short term daily goals and ways to get ahead outside of the big picture victory condition at the end of the week. Winning the Challenge gives you a token, which can be used to buy yourself advantages later in the game.

Version 0: At a random time of day, the bot will post some random Sudoku or Crossword puzzle, and the first player to respond with a correct answer wins a token.

• Version 0 bot observation: there is a lot of information in the game that could be used to quiz players such as, “who has the most tokens right now?” It’s much more interesting to make the challenge questions integrate with what’s going on in the game, and to reward players for paying close attention to gameplay.

Version 1: At a random time of day, the bot will post a question about the current state of the game, and the first player to respond with a correct answer wins a token.

• Version 1 player observation: there are very few tokens in the game, but tokens and advantages are the most fun part of the game. We wish there were significantly more tokens in play.

• Version 1 bot observation: A lot of players are submitting correct answers after another player already won the challenge. This creates a ton of urgency and then bad feelings for players who had the correct answer, but 2 minutes late.

Version 2: At a random time of day, the bot will post a question about the current state of the game, and all players who respond with a correct answer win a token.

• Version 2 player observation: this “at a random time of day” structure creates a ton of stress and frustration. Players with kids or demanding jobs or weird life schedules are at an automatic disadvantage on all Challenges. It would be better to leave the challenge open all day, and let players answer on their own time.

• Side note: this crucial realization led us to do an overhaul of a whole bunch of other rules to make it so that players never have the experience of urgently needing to take action at any unexpected time of day. Ironically, this improvement is a complete reversal of the original design of the daily challenges.

Version 3: At the beginning of each round, the bot will post a question about the current state of the game, and all players who respond with a correct answer any time this round win a token.

• Bot observation: asking questions about the future state of the game would be significantly more interesting than asking questions about the current state of the game. For example, a challenge might say, “who will be in first place tomorrow?” Now players are empowered to affect the future and manipulate the challenge answer by coordinating others to upvote one player and downvote another. Suddenly, a much more interesting layer of strategy emerges for how you will vote, how you talk to your alliances, and how you approach the Challenge. Now challenges reward your amount of knowledge and your ability to control outcomes round to round.

Version 4: At the beginning of each round, the bot will post a question about the future state of the game, and all players who respond with a correct answer any time this round win a token.

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Challenges started as arbitrary puzzles that were disconnected from gameplay, and frustrating to players who were not able to check their phones throughout the day. Challenges ended up as questions that drive the core gameplay of voting, and reward players with the best deduction skills and the best ability to coordinate with others to control outcomes round to round. Now, Challenges are probably the most universally beloved part of Pecking Order.

We were able to efficiently diagnose problems and develop this mechanism because we were all super-testers, and all had a chance to manage the game and observe player behavior as the bot. I’ll probably write up some more examples of how this kind of collaborative design helped us move fast and embrace the best ideas in the future. Hyper-collaborative, consensus-driven design is probably not the right path for most projects, but it has worked wonders for Pecking Order.