Hits & Misses

I've been making games for most of my life, ever since I was a kid. In my twenties I got a job as a professional game designer. After that I created a lot, in a lot of mediums: Web games, Palm Pilot games, card and dice games, conceptual games, board games. 

One thing I've learned is that every game you make can't be your best game. Sometimes due to circumstances, your game is underdeveloped. Sometimes you try a new idea, and it doesn't work out. Sometimes you make a good game, but it falls flat anyway. Sometimes there are hits, and sometimes there are misses. 

This is not to say that your effort has no influence. It's to remind you that there are circumstances and influences in the world in addition to you that affect what happens. Development timelines, funding, marketing, shifting costs and norms, what medium you're working in, who's on your team, publishers and distributors going out of business or being acquired, trouble in your family and personal life: all these can impact your project.

I remember a period of time when I was having incredibly bad insomnia, and was still developing web games. I got through my current one, The Journey to New Earth, and it worked! But afterwards I kept finding very weird bugs and also realized the game needed much more development to play well. So I took the opportunity to revise it.

My games on the Palm Pilot gained dedicated and excited players. Many players of Adventure Solitaire counted it as their favorite game on the Palm OS. And I made a modest living for a while. But then the Palm OS itself got overshadowed by new and exciting cell phone technology -- smart phones. So there went that for me. And yes, I could have ported them to phones, and then other phones, and so on. But learning each phone and OS is a big project, and I decided against it.

I ported one of my web games to Java. It took four months. Did anyone play it? Maybe one guy. So much time, so little result. I ported some Palm Pilot games to Windows. Same thing. They'd been successful on those other platforms, but not on the new ones. So then I chose to make board games, in part to avoid the obsolescence issue for digital games.

Some luck's bad, some luck's good. Majesty wouldn't have been the game it was if it hadn't had several extra years of development due to switching publishers a couple of times, once at least because the then current publisher was going out of business. So that was some good luck that led to a great game.

I think it is helpful to think of your entire pantheon of created games as an iterative, interactive process of design. You can learn something from each one, and that experience contributes in some way to the next one. This view also helps you not get too attached to whether one particular game succeeds or fails. Work as well as you can on your current game, understanding that all the circumstances and events will have effects, and see what happens. And then make your next game!

The Magic Portal!

For the online games, there are items which each player can build on their hero roster, in order to add capabilties and discounts for play, including the Altar of Quickness which doubles how many turns they recieve a day, and the Sundial which shows how many turns a hero has used.

Most of the buildings were added a while ago, but it has been on my mind to make some more, and now the first of those is here! I was thinking of long term play and value for players who will be around for a while, and I came up with the Magic Portal, which reduces the cost of all basic and advanced games by 1/2 their credit cost, which is a subsantial discount in the long run. I still want advanced games to hold an air of prestige and mystery, so building the portal requires 99 credits.

Playtesters needed!

I have just revised the heck out of the website, and many of the games on it, and now I need about 100 playtesters to pour over it and play the games on a variety of platforms and browsers, like android, iphone, ipad, laptop, and so forth.

Arcane Journeys features a series of 14 text-based, turn-based, fantasy adventure games. Very "retro" and minimalist in presentation, but with a focus on deep game play and replay-ability.

I will give up to 700 credits to every playtester. 100 credits for first signing up, and 100 credits a month after that if they decide to continue.

You will have to create multiple accounts and play the games on the website, as well as report bugs, submit "game reports", and things like that.

Visit Arcane Journeys to see what it is like and if you might like to play the games on it.

Also view this document with instructions on how it works.

Send me a message if you are interested or have any questions.

2015 in Review

At the begining of 2015, I had a game release event for Arcane Journeys the Fantasy Adventure Board Game, at Off the Wall Games. It was a fun time, and I sold all the copies I had made, which was the culmination of over a year of work making it.

In 2015, I did a lot of work on the online games, to make them compatible with mobile devices and tablets. That spurred on a lot of changes to layout, internal changes for speed, and refinement of the game play of almost all the games on the site. All in all, a very satisfying experience, with more work to do.

Additionally this year, I posted more articles about game design here, including Don't confuse 'good design' and your own preferred style of game play and Don't be Perfect.

And lastly, I started a series on symbolism in games. Which was a really fun thing for me. I hope to keep thinking about it in the future.

I hope the coming year is good for you!

Major Update for the Ruins

The Ruins of Ashkelon is perhaps my favorite of the basic games on Arcane Journeys. It is one of the only games to feature a map you move around on, and at a casual count there are at least 10 different strategies I want to try playing through it with to see how they do. It has a lot of variety and complexity, and lots of reasons to replay it. Even still, there are always things to update.

This time around I changed a lot of the parameters for interacting with other player's heroes in the game. It has never been entirely satisfying to me in the past, and because of that, I hadn't paid enough attention to it. Now, though, I think it has been refined to the next level, and it seems more in line with the rest of the game. To the point where it could be part of a charisma based strategy. So I am pleased with the results.

See more about the changes at Arcane Journeys.

Incentives for Old Players

One thing I think about when developing my online games is how to keep people's interest in the site over a long period of time. One way, of course, is to offer lots of games that have lots of replay value. I think I've done that. Even still, people stop playing sometimes, and maybe there are reasons other than that they have played out all the games. I haven't even done that yet!

So I decided to put in some rewards for previously active players who haven't visited the site for over 6 months: some free credits! I thought it would be a thing I would like if I returned to an old favorite site after a while, so I added it to Arcane Journeys.

I'm sure there are other things I could add and do to bring back old players. I'll keep thinking about it. If you have any ideas, send them my way!

The Great Desert, History + updated!

The second game I made on the site is called the Great Desert, and I took the idea of extreme simplification of movement and location to an even greater extreme, by removing it altogether. You are just in a desert, and when you explore or wander, it just sees what you find, so there is the idea of moving from place to place, but no actual places to move around to like in a game based on a map or abstract map.

At the same time, I decided to see if I could take out themes of violence and replace them with very positive themes. In The Great Desert, you are going around trying to meditate to create tranquility, and making art from junk, in order to make the world better. So the struggle is you against the environment and the clock. I worried at first that it wouldn't be as engaging, but people have liked it very much over the years. It turns out that if you put a theme in the background and people like to play they game, they can just accept the theme easily.

Even though the game is fun, I have been updating it in the last 4 months, to add even more fun encounters and polish. Recently I added some new encounters: A sand barge and a burial ground. Lots of little things have changed too. One thing I really like is now when a 'fixed' encounter is coming up, a line of text appears, saying, "You have a feeling something interesting will happen in X years." Even though you might have known that if you had played before, having it stated explicitly adds drama and interest in the timeline in that small section.

Take a look at The Great Desert, or read about The Symbolism of Deserts.

CSS drop down menus

The create a hero screen on Arcane Journeys seemed to me to be getting cramped and cluttered, because there were so many games, and so much extra info I wanted to show in the long menu list of the games, like which games were updated or free trials, so I decided to put the games into drop down menus by category. This was pretty easy to implement, since there was code to assemble the long side menu and with a few minor changes, I made the new lists easily. The slightly more complicated part was figuring out the CSS and integrating a demo from another site into my current CSS. Along the way, I learned about box-shadow, which is nice simple way to put shadows under things like menus and pop-up windows.

I can't say I understood everything about what I have done, but it is working how I want it to.

The overall result is to make the create a hero page look less cluttered and more streamlined. I think it will be easier for a person to focus on what's going on there.

Here's the result:

More credits per dollar!

I increased the credit per dollar rate to 4 credits per dollar. That's double what it was! So now you get 100 credits for 25 dollars, as opposed to the previous 50 credits.

So you get even more value in the online games now.

Why did I do it? It seems like everybody these days needs to make their dollars stretch farther, myself included, and this was an easy way to do it. I think it should work out for everyone.

If you appreciate it, please share the site with your friends.

Thanks,
-Jim DuBois

Arcane Journeys

Complexity Thresholds

One of my favorite things that happens when creating a game is when something I didn't plan in the design happens, or when there is so much going on that I forget what a thing does exactly, and I encounter it anew. In both those cases, a certain level of complexity has been achieved, so that the game develops a life of its own. I think that's one sign of a good game. Of course not every game needs that to happen to be a good game, but for the kind of games I make, and adventure games in particular, and for the kind of feelings I want to evoke when making games, I consider it important and special when it does happen.

Below the complexity threshold, a game can seem dry and predictable. The number of plays which a player feels they can get out of it is low. The stories they tell about the play of the game seem dull. They don't have an 'if only this had happened, or this, or this, then it would have been different.'

So when I make games for my website, Arcane Journeys, I do it in several stages, over a number of years, adding more things as time goes on, and refining the play as well. One time I was testing the game, The Journey to New Earth, and I got caught in a storm on a planet, and heard a strange alien sound nearby. The thing is I did not remember in any way putting this into the game, and the moment was magical for me. I was like, what the heck is this?

Some ways to achieve a complexity threshold are increasing the amount and variety of encounters, or units or situations in your game. In automated systems, adding an AI of some kind to run a simulation in the background really helps.

On computers, achieving this threshold can cause spectacular things to happen. Take Minecraft as an example. But even off the computer there are good examples, like Magic the Gathering, and Chess.

I think the complexity threshold is like a lot of things in game design: you know when you have achieved it, but there isn't an exact formula for making it happen.

Evolution of The Ruins of Ashkelon

One of my favorite games on Arcane Journeys, The Ruins of Ashkelon, has just gotten updated to be responsive for mobile and tablet devices. It was a little harder to convert than the other games, because it is more complex and had more information that needed to be displayed. I ended up re-arranging the main screen even for non-mobile devices, and I think the result is greater clarity.

Here are some screen shots of the game over the years, culminating with the new release.

The earliest one I could find, 2006.

From 2007, and shows the header before it was re-designed. I like to see how the layout get better over time on the site.

2009.

2015, shows the item and powers box floating to the right of the main box. That makes it easier to read, manage the information in the game, and adjust for responsive design.

More website and online game updates

Well, you know how it goes? You go into your code to change one thing... and you decide you need to update to HTML5 and CSS3, and etc and so forth. You go further and further down the rabbit hole. And that is what happened to me a couple of months ago, when I started making my site responsive for mobile devices. It has been great, and I have been doing things on the site and games I have been meaning to do for many years... but there is a lot more to do. Luckily I am enjoying it.

I have updated 10 of the 14 games so far, as well as all the supporting infrastructure, with responsive design, and often with game-play changes. I feel like it should all lead me somewhere good, and it is invigorating.

I think I will try and do a 're-release' of the site and games when I am done, which could be 3 to 6 months from now.

A screen shot of a game, featuring the mobile layout.

Evolution of an Online Game

Way back in 2001, just after I quit my job making computer games, I started working on my online game, The Well. I had to learn a lot about web programming, and servers, and databases, just to get it off the ground. After that first game, I added 13 more online games, as exercises to keep my design and programming skills alive, and just for something fun to do with my time.

Over the years, I've made many refinements to the look and game play of The Well. I realized it could play faster and be a little fancier, and have learned a little about layout and graphic design. It's been a great off and on project, and after this latest update, I feel it plays better than ever, and has been optimized to play on small screens as well as regular sized ones.

If you want to, go play it on Arcane Journeys.

Unfortunately, no screen shots from the pre-css era have survived, but here are a few, with their capture dates.
Sept 1, 2006
Aug 21, 2008
May 7, 2009
June 26, 2015

Online Games updated!

Periodically, I go on a spree and make updates to the online games on Arcane Journeys. I've been doing that for the last few weeks, mostly to get them in shape to work with responsive design (see CSS and Responsive Design for more details). But along the way I have been updating other things, cleaning up some bits of code, making the games a little more fun, and so forth. I think it is a long term work in progress.

If you have never played the online games, here is a brief summary: they are like condensed statistical solitaire adventures that can be played many times, and you play a few turns a day. You can play some free, and you can get credits in a variety of ways to play more. If that sounds interesting to you, go to the website for the online games.

Symbolism of Deserts

I made a bunch of online games many years ago, and the setting for each one was super important. The style of game was like a minimalist statistical adventure game, and I tried hard to make the theme function well with the mechanics. (Read about theme in game design) I also decided that games, like any human creation, can have meanings and mythic relevance to our lives, and I tried to think through some of the symbols and meaning in my games. Over the next few months, I will post little pieces about particular ideas.

Today's theme is 'The Desert'

The desert is a place where all extraneous things are stripped away. Life is reduced to some of its bare requirements. You get to examine some core concepts directly, without the interference of society. Life, death, eating, breeding, building a social structure.

The deserts found in my online games are hinted at being not 'natural' deserts, but deserts left behind by some terrible cataclysm that occurred in the world. There are old bunkers and robots in the midst of the wilderness. Nobody knows where they are from exactly. These deserts represent a chance to start over, a chance to build new societies, and contain warnings to people of what didn't work before.

2014 in review for Arcane Journeys

In the past year, I

1) completed the first run of Arcane Journeys the Fantasy Adventure Board Game, made many expansions, videos and scenarios for it.

2) Ran a contest for a book of my games.

3) Wrote some game design entries, with my favorite ones being, Theme is a Metaphor, and My Favorite Tools when Designing a Board Game.

4) Started a youtube channel for Arcane Journeys, with videos about my games.

5) Listed some games on DriveThruRPG: Tribes, Armies of the Dead, and the first edition of Seven Treasures.

6) Put out my book of games on the Kindle.

7) Put out some videos and new rules for Armies of the Dead.

8) Edited some older online games, on a whim, The Well, and the Subterranean Realms.


Plans for the new year include having demos and shows of Arcane Journeys the Fantasy Adventure Board Game at local stores, and development of more scenarios and expansions for that game.

Changes to The Well

Arcane Journeys originally started out as a platform for experimenting with computer game design, and all the games I made during that period are still available to play. Over time, I have moved towards making board games more than the online games, but the other day I was adjusting something minor about the website, and I started to play The Well, the first game on Arcane Journeys. As I played it, I realized that my design skills had gotten better over the years, and that my design sensibilities have changed too. So, I decided to edit the game, and after about a week, I have made a bunch of changes that make the game better, and in fact more like what I had originally intended.

So if you've played, here's the list of changes.

If you haven't played, go here to sign up for an account: Arcane Journeys.

The Journey to New Earth, updated again

I got a suggestion for a useful feature in this game, and while I was adding it, I decided to add some new items and encounters. Also changed some numbers to make it play better, and keep things moving. As I mentioned in a previous post, I initially made this game when very sleep deprived, and thought the result was thin, but as I keep adding to it and refining it, the game I intended to make keeps showing itself more and more.

Here's what's new:

- Added a new planet encounter, the storm in the wilderness.
- Added a new city encounter, a shady person.
- Added Mining Lasers, as well as two new secret mystery items.
- Now, in relevant encounters it shows how much stuff you have, so you can better determine a course of action.
- Now, there is a limit of 7 shrines per planet, down from 12. Also, shrines give you double their previous reward for building them.
- Added a small virtue reward for talking to people but failing to convince them of anything.
- Widened the main display, adjusted some encounter chances, and fixed a few typos.

The Journey to New Earth

I made some changes to this online game to make it easier to find the quests you need to do in order to win. I originally made this game when very sleep deprived, and until the last major revision, I thought it was kind of a thin game. But while adding these new hints for the quests, I was reminded of how much better it is now. I used to find all sorts of weird bugs, which had been introduced due to lack of sleep. I think there are some more minor changes to be made to make the game better, but it is fairly good anyway.

Updates to the online game, The Well

I got excited that my new local server is working, so I made some changes to The Well, to make it more visually interesting and streamlined, as well as fix some minor bugs.

One of the main things I did was add pictures to five of the non-monster encounters. Also, I took away some boring text, and added more informational text that shows up when you hover over a monster's special ability. Overall, the encounter screens are prettier and more streamlined.

Another thing I did was change an encounter, the altar, that showed up on some fixed levels, so that has a random chance of appearing every 5 levels of The Well. The overall chance is about the same, but this is more exciting.