Probably Designed: Luck Be A Ballionaire

Playful Work

— 30 min read

This week we have a really interesting conversation for you. It's a three-way conversation with myself, Brian Long, the developer and designer of Ballionaire, and Dan DiIorio, the designer and developer of Luck Be A Landlord and Maze Mice.

There's an interesting backstory here. Brian is someone that I've known for a long time and someone that I've talked to quite a bit about games and game design. And I knew from our conversations that he was a pretty big fan of Luck Be A Landlord. So I thought this might be a great opportunity to get the two of these smart developers in a room together for a conversation.

So that's what we did. The next two episodes are my conversation with Dan and Brian. I try to get out of the way as much as possible and let the conversation flow between the two developers. We talk a lot about the design of Luck Be A Landlord and Ballionaire in this episode, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Dan DiIorio: Hi. Thank you for having me. If you know me for my work or any of my work, it's probably Luck Be A Landlord. My most recent—or my second most recent game now—or my most recent game, Maze Mice, they're both roguelikes. Luck Be A Landlord is a slot machine roguelike deck builder. And Maze Mice is more of a maze running, time only moves when you move, bullet heaven. I never really had a games job other than indie stuff. I'm one of those crazy people who saw Indie Game, the Movie, and I was like, this is what I need to do, you know? Which I tell people that and they think I'm crazy because everyone in that movie looks miserable.

But yeah, I haven't really had much of a career in games other than the indie stuff. Out of high school, I started working in a comic book store, saved up, took a risk, made a game, and here we are.

Harry: Cool. Yeah. I think that some people often have the other reaction to Indie Game, the Movie. It's like, you see them doing that, and you're like, maybe I don't want to do that. But, you know, there's this draw of being the auteur and kind of building your whole world—there's definitely an allure to that. So you professionally work as a game developer now, now 'cause you've had some success with Luck Be A Landlord and Maze Mice, hopefully, as well, which just recently released.

What did you do before that? Or do you mind talking a little bit about your history before that—your professional history?

Dan: Well, my professional history is—well, I guess I'm skipping a little bit. Out of high school I was doing a YouTube series about, funnily enough, the mathematics in games. It was mostly just balance and strategy for League of Legends. And the videos are still up on my channel where I also post my game trailers. I figured it would make sense to keep them up there.

And I did that for a little while, kind of got burnt out on it because there's only so much I can really enjoy with League of Legends. Did some streaming for a little while. Honestly, just kind of didn't really do anything for a bit. Finally, I was trying to do freelance web development—that didn't really take off. Kind of was miserable working with people. Clients could be something. And eventually I got a job at a comic book store and game store because I liked Magic the Gathering and they sold a lot of Magic cards. So that was a good way for me to get on staff there. And while I was working there, eventually COVID happened, was living off unemployment for a little while 'cause I wasn't going into the store. I took a risk, decided to make a game and, you know, not work at the comic store anymore. I wasn't really working there much anyway. But I was going through my unemployment and my savings and I made Luck Be A Landlord and it launched into early access with my initial goal of getting a month's rent—just to keep, you know, to stay afloat, to keep that going, 'cause I was basically out of my savings. And that happened very quickly, so I was able to continue working on it and now work on Maze Mice and hopefully more projects.

Harry: Amazing. That's really awesome. Before—I mean, I think we can dig in a little bit on some of that stuff, but maybe we should jump over and say hi to Brian first and make sure that we get the whole room introduced.

Brian Long: Hey, yeah, thanks for having me on and I do want to say, big honor to be here with Dan, obviously, not just due to making a great game, which was a big influence on Ballionaire, but—maybe we'll talk about this—it was, you know, Luck Be A Landlord was something that kind of pulled me out of a deep abyss of disinterest in video games. It kind of showed me, you know, what games could be. It was very revelatory for me personally.

Dan: That's very flattering. Thank you.

Brian: Thank you for making the game. So yeah, my background is long. I am old. I love to advertise this fact for some reason. But, so I guess in the late nineties straight out of college, I went to a large tech company in the Pacific Northwest.

Harry: Which will not be named.

Brian: But you can guess. And I was spending like all of my waking time at home working on an Ultima Online server emulator. And so just a few months into that gig I was like, I quit. I want to go work at a game company. So I went over to Monolith Productions and worked on a few games there: Grunts, No One Lives Forever, a little bit of the No One Lives Forever sequel, the Matrix Online. Left Monolith, worked at an indie studio called S2 Games. Made Savage: Battle for Newerth, which was a Seumas McNally IGF Grand Prize winner in like 2002 or something. I kind of forgot—2003.

And then after that, just kind of with the intensity of the game industry, I decided, you know, there it might be time to kind of change careers. It was pretty brutal working conditions, I would say back then. I mean, 60, 80, a hundred hour weeks weren't uncommon and I felt like it was incompatible with having a family, which is something that I wanted.

So, I went back to other, you know, unnamed big tech companies in the Pacific Northwest and basically spent like 20 years doing that sort of career as a software developer. The big tech layoffs happened, you know, in like 2023 and I—the whole time I'd kind of stayed vaguely interested in indie game dev and indie games. But never really was able to do anything with it. And like I said earlier, I was kind of growing increasingly disillusioned with things. But I decided, you know, I really kind of missed working in a creative space. And so after the layoff happened, I just set out to making, you know, a game pretty much like the next day. I kind of have the indie development timeline of: start big game and then a couple months into big game be like, I need to take a break, I'm going to work on small game. And I can kind of go into the genesis of Ballionaire there, but small game was Ballionaire. Which we can talk about and I worked on Ballionaire for about a year from beginning to end. And, yeah, I guess that's my timeline.

So here I am today.

Harry: But wait, I guess I didn't know the big game part of that story. 'Cause you and I know each other, and I think we talked about like game design stuff, we've done a couple game jams and this and that, right? So, I guess I knew you were kind of dabbling in the space and it sounds like a funny thing to say, but I knew you were in the domain of a couple ideas that had to do with physics and balls and this sort of stuff. I didn't know though that there was a big game idea that you were working on, or maybe it's still a secret?

Brian: Oh, the funny story of that is, I mean, tell me if this sounds familiar: it was an asynchronous inventory management auto battler.

So it was basically Backpack Battles before I was aware of Backpack Battles. So luckily I don't need to return to the idea because it's been very well implemented by other people.

But I was only, I don't know, maybe five, six months into it maybe, which sounds like a long time, but it really wasn't, in terms of the amount of stuff that was just left on the table. So not a big deal. And yeah, I can just play the game now instead of having to make it, so it's all good. But I love the format. I love auto battlers, and I love async auto battlers. So.

Harry: So, not to ambush Dan too much, but I think you, Brian, introduced me to Luck Be A Landlord and you were super excited about it and I thought that would be a great opportunity for the two of you to kind of connect and talk about it 'cause I think that there's some interesting aspects there with regard to kind of luck and chance. So I actually just did the podcast with Axo and with Kev. And they're the designers of Starr Vaders and As We Descend, which are two, you know, very gritty, deep, sophisticated card games. They're very much bigger card game designs. And we talked a lot actually about drafting and run identity.

And I think that there's a thread actually that probably is interesting with how the games that the two of you've developed have this same sort of thing. And maybe it's just because of, you know, roguelike deck builder-ish types of mechanics falling out. But there's some really interesting bits around how you kind of manage that experience for the player, how you kind of balance this randomness with the ability of the player to kind of find something that feels like they've got some kind of control and are picking a direction. I think that's an interesting, maybe thread to pull on, but we could also go in other directions if you like.

Brian: Okay. Well, the first thing that comes to mind with regard to that topic is I really personally like the purity of Luck Be A Landlord in that sense, in that you're not choosing a character class, per se. And, you know, Ballionaire effectively has that experience. You know, I've always felt that Ballionaire was kind of intentionally meant to be more of a sandbox, and less of a guided experience.

But I do feel like, you know, I ultimately kind of had to make micro concessions on that front, and I'm wondering if it's just sort of player expectations have changed since Luck Be A Landlord, or not. So for example, there aren't character classes in Ballionaire, but I did kind of capitulate to have starter packs, which is something that came in very late and it was really meant to address the sort of—I think there was some player sentiment that, you know, "what do I do" basically when I'm starting, like there wasn't really a prompt about which way to go as a build. That was a feature to me to not be specific about which way to go, but I think player expectations were that they wanted some way to go.

So a starter pack was a gentle nudge in that direction. A starter pack in Ballionaire is effectively some onboard triggers and/or boons, which are Ballionaire's version of like relics or Luck Be A Landlord items. So yeah, I mean I really admired that purity. I enjoyed that, I liked the open-endedness of it.

In the case of Ballionaire though, I do feel like I had to make some compromises there with just player expectations, which seemed to maybe have changed over time, or at least the audience that, you know, Ballionaire attracted. So I'm curious, yeah, what your thoughts there were, Dan? Just for timeline's sake, you mentioned Luck Be A Landlord during COVID and I know it entered early access during COVID, but correct me if I'm wrong, did you start the game before COVID? Because I could have sworn I played it like really early on itch, like a super long time ago, but now I'm wondering if my own sense of time is messed up in that way. But for sure it came out after Slay the Spire, right? So like there were roguelike deck builders that had character classes already?

Dan: It was after Slay the Spire. The first demo was October of 2020. The first public one.

Brian: Wow. My mind is blown right now. I'm actually—I've got to like reexamine my sense of time. Okay?

Dan: Yeah. But to answer your question, regarding like giving guidance to the player or like, I don't know. I've kind of always disliked that, I think? I think for me, like if I were playing Slay the Spire, one of the least interesting concepts to me is when a deck has like a ton of the same card.

Like Claw is one of the least interesting cards to me in Slay the Spire. If anyone's not familiar, the one that just, if you have a bunch of Claws, they do more things. In Luck Be A Landlord, one of the symbols is a Cultist, which if you have more of them, they're more powerful.

And it's probably the symbol I regret adding the most. Just because so many players gravitate towards it and it's not very good. And if you do get a lot of Cultists, the run just isn't interesting. You just have a ton of one thing. The way that I think I wanted to design Luck Be A Landlord in terms of build identity and guidance is I wanted, and this is just how I like games and like things going on, I wanted just a ton of things going on at once.

And players will eventually in like endless mode will gravitate towards, "oh, I have tons of the same symbol and like one thing that buffs all of them" and that's fun too. But I just love, like, here's 20 different things, they're all doing stuff and I can watch it all happen, you know?

I've realized a lot of this after the fact, but one of the core design tenets, pillars, whatever you want to call it, of Luck Be A Landlord, was I need to be able to have it happen out of my hands. Watch it and enjoy it, from a stimulation perspective, like—I don't know if you're familiar with stimming, but like a lot of people, especially neurodivergent people such as myself, when we're excited, we sort of stim—for example, you might slap your hands or snap your fingers, sort of thing. I used to do that a lot when I was playing games and being able to make a game that I could do that with was very important for me because it needed to be something I enjoyed playing or in that case, I guess not really playing, but getting the feedback of.

And just having one of the same symbol, it's not that interesting to me.

Brian: Yeah, I mean, I think that's something that both games have in common. And maybe it's just due to some overlap in our personalities or our neuro wiring, right? Sort of like making these strategic decisions and then getting sort of your dopamine reward playing out.

Personally I find, like piloting in games to be kind of tedious, especially if there's something competitive going on.

Dan: Hmm.

Harry: I think that both games are quite juicy, right? And I think that that's actually something that people don't always talk about. And I feel like you've talked about this a lot, Brian, in different conversations—kind of this "brain feels" kind of thing, right? It's like there's this really important part about how the game feels as a player and kind of how that kind of visceral interaction that you have with it is.

And I feel like both games have that to a larger degree.

Dan: No, I remember I was listening to the NoClip Crew cast. They mentioned Ballionaire on it while it was in Steam Next Fest. And I remember, I don't remember the exact words they had, but a lot of it was like, "oh, this is just like a dopamine machine" sort of thing. And I get it, like you see the ball going around doing all this crazy stuff and all the numbers going and getting high.

And I remember for Luck Be A Landlord, I was hesitant to do too much of that. Because, well, I didn't want comparisons to slot machines to be made, besides the obvious ones. But if it has too much of the flashy lights, things going crazy, I was worried it would be like too insidious.

And then games like Vampire Survivors came out and basically did that and it's like, oh, okay, it's fine.

Harry: Like, it's so much more over the top. Like, the way that they're doing it is really over the top.

Dan: Yeah. And it's not a microtransaction, so it's not like, "oh, I feel good about this and I'm spending my"—no, you've already bought the game, it's fine. So in retrospect, I probably could have done that a little more, but I think it was right to err on the side of caution there.

Brian: I think in the case of Ballionaire, there's a couple things going on. First was that, I think as soon as I had the first prototype of a ball dropping and hitting pins on the way down in a trapezoid—and that's kind of what you see in the pyramid level is what the first prototype was—just, in black and white graphics, basically. As soon as I felt the drama of a ball dropping, it was very clear that the physical component of the game really ought to be played up. It is, I think the first trigger I ever made was a kangaroo that kind of pushed the ball back and it didn't work very well, but like watching the kangaroo push the ball back and realizing, "oh, you can go back up the board," was like, okay, physicality is a very big part of this game. And my son at the time had been, you know, really into Totally Accurate Battle Simulator. Whenever he had a friend come over, they would just make these goofy masses of armies.

And for people that—Totally Accurate Battle Simulator is kind of like a windup toy of physically modeled active ragdolls of soldiers fighting each other with real physics. And so that immediately clicked into my head like how watchable that game was. You could get a lot out of this kind of like systemic physical interactions.

And I feel like, you know, a potential component of a roguelike definition is systemic. And so I really like the idea of extending a systemic approach to physics as well. Regarding the, I guess kind of like, the dopamine reward. That's kind of a label that was applied, you know, maybe deep into development or after it came out.

I wasn't really designing from that point of view of just like, "oh, make the players' brain tickle." But I would say kind of before I even started on Ballionaire, just in, you know, times like on vacation when I would think about game design or whatever, I'd been starting to distill something that I was calling "brain tickles," which was sort of like a superset of game feel. So this idea of like juice, I think, might be the really simple summary of game feel. And so this idea of brain tickles was trying to identify these base atoms of what our brains are getting out of games.

And I had a list of those and, you know, roughly abided by them during Ballionaire, but not as a matter of extreme discipline. But I do think the game ended up mapping out of those pretty well. You know, dopamine's a cute word people talk about, but I do feel like there's always the lingering threat of like, parenthetical, pejorative when people say that.

It's like a hack, you know, like we're cheating in some way to trigger that sort of stuff. But I actually feel like, in some ways it's just like a distillation of what people are enjoying.

And certainly what I got out of Luck Be A Landlord—it did boil away all of that stuff that's not directly relevant to these kind of different like atomic brain feelings that I get out of a game. They're very laid bare and I could enjoy them directly without having to kind of wade through the chaff as it were in my mind as a player and what I like.

So I could talk about some of those atoms if you want. Or we could just—

Dan: Do you mean like from a neuroscience standpoint or—

Brian: Oh, no, no. These are just like me identifying things in games that are, you know, kind of isolated brain feelings that like a game could sort of cater towards, I guess.

Dan: No, I get you. I'd be interested in hearing that. One thing I do want to add before I forget, you mentioned like cutting out the chaff. Do you mean that from like the player perspective or like the design perspective? Because I know a lot of people say like, Luck Be A Landlord, it's like a roguelike deck builder but no combat sort of thing. It's interesting because I didn't really realize I was doing something unique there. In fact, I'm pretty sure there are roguelike deck builders without combat that existed before Luck Be A Landlord.

And I could have sworn I'd played one, but I can't remember it now. It's funny because the roguelike elements came after the slot machine. I'd like to say I was very original and it's like, "oh, I want to make a roguelike deck builder. Okay, let's add the slot machine."

But I really just wanted a slot machine game, because they were very interesting to me. And for like the dopamine reasons of just, let's just make the numbers go up and see what happens. I have a whole blog post about like, probably the first point of Luck Be A Landlord happening was when I played these freeware slot machine games on my dad's Windows 98 laptop. It was just, you'd put in the play money and you'd just go and it's like, "oh, this is fun." And then I go to an actual casino and I'm like, "this is terrible." And it was a lot of just kind of coming to terms with that and making a game out of it.

Harry: Well, it's funny though 'cause you're bringing a perspective to it, right? Like, you have to pay rent with your slot machine. So there's a layer of commentary right there around the whole construct, which I think puts it in a different place. You know, because I worked on Facebook games in like 2010, or I had to port some games to Facebook and they were slot machines and I had to like work on like Kitty Glitter or whatever this was, and it did some of the same things. Sure. But there wasn't that, you know, that level of like, what does a slot machine mean? What does it mean for the number to go up? What does it mean to actually have rent to pay as a human? You know, there's a different, really poignant commentary that you've got in that game.

Dan: Yeah, the rent came much later too. The rent aspect. When I had the slot machine, I had the roguelike, and it was originally just see how quickly you can get to a score of whatever.

And I eventually said, okay, what if we have little thresholds, of like, if you don't have a hundred coins by three spins, you're out.

And then it was like, well, why do you need that many coins? That doesn't really make sense. What if you have to pay your rent? 'Cause that sucks. And it creates an easy villain. So a lot of my designs just kind of thrash together of like, "this makes sense. Let's try it. Okay. It works."

Brian: I feel like in both of—well, when I talk about my game, I'm really talking about your game because again, just so directly inspirational. For Luck Be A Landlord and then for what I was seeking in Ballionaire, the dopamine you get from watching the evaluation of your build is nice.

But when I talked about removing kind of the chaff earlier, there is a secondary kind of dopamine, or just brain reward going on for me, which is learning, you know, discovering builds, discovering interactions, and that's incredibly rewarding.

And I think what Luck Be A Landlord did that was so revelatory to me was removing the piloting completely in terms of, say something like Slay the Spire where you build your deck and have to like play around basically—it removes that element.

Even the evaluation of it is quite brief, 'cause most people probably play on the fastest animation possible. And the really rewarding cycle I was in was mastering the game rapidly. Or feeling growth, I should say. Not mastering, but discovering new builds, discovering new lines of play and not having to endure like severe punishment after like hours of investment. Like I could really go through this build mastery, build discovery very quickly and that was incredibly rewarding to me. I think that's like actually like the real brain candy at the end of the day is getting to feel good about your progress through the game without sitting through an hour long match to figure out that like, "oh, I shouldn't have four colors in my Magic deck," or something like that.

Well, maybe your match wouldn't last an hour if you had four colors, but you know what I mean. So, yeah, I mean, I think that there is a brain reward that sits at a higher level than just the evaluation of the board. And that is the rapidity through which you can sort of come to learn the game.

The second point is talking about the score threshold. I really did rack my brain and I can't think of any game that has a score threshold.

The sort of schedule, like Luck Be A Landlord does. It does feel like you completely incepted that or created that concept. And I'm actually curious if you remember the moment where you came up with it, because it's such an elegant solution, I think. In cases where I've had, you know, good ideas pop into my head, I always think it's really interesting to see like what was going on like that caused that.

Was it just a lark out of the blue? Was it a shower thought? Was it like at the end of an eight hour mental grind session of trying to think of something? So I'd love to hear more if you remember the moment that you came up with the schedule, if you will.

Dan: So the threshold or the schedule. It's funny, one aspect of it being 12 payments—I didn't even think about the fact that a lot of people would interpret that as months. That was just complete coincidence 'cause 12 felt like a good length. But I'll take credit for it. The concept of a score being taken away from you and having to meet the thresholds?

I'm trying to think exactly how it came about. It was probably just something I was testing. Well, I remember I have early GIFs that I posted a long time ago of Luck Be A Landlord gameplay. That was just reach—I think it was like 50,000 coins or so, you know, that could have been any number.

And it just wasn't that interesting. And I added that threshold of you have X spins, have Y coins. And I'm trying to think, I know one thing I wanted to do was to not have a lot of different resources. Rather than saying, okay, you have a thousand coins and each, you know, you get one platinum bar or something and having five platinum bars, you got to pay those for the rent—it just seems redundant to me. So just having one resource, it just kind of felt natural. Like, okay, you have enough, gets taken away. You have enough, gets taken away. When I thought about like the rent thing, it's like, yeah, let's just do that. And it also creates the fun aspect of "oh, now the rent's been doubled. Now it's been tripled. Like, oh, this guy sucks. What's going on here?" I do remember it wasn't "I need to add this for tension reasons."

It was more so reaching one threshold for this long is not that fun. What if there were small thresholds in between and that's sort of your win or fail state. Yeah, I wish I remembered a little more of it. But I remember a lot of things about sort of eureka moments with the game's design. That was so early on. And I remember the first trailers I showed of the game a long time ago, people didn't really know how to interpret it. They're like, "oh, it's like an incremental game with a fail state." I'm like, "yeah, that's kind of what it is. Sure."

I remember one moment of like, "oh, this breaks the whole thing open." The first time I thought that was when I thought, okay, symbols adjacent to each other do different things or interact. Initially when I was designing the symbols, the first prototype was just, you have a bunch of different symbols and if you have three in a row like a slot machine, that creates money.

And, well, it's kind of cool. It's a cool prototype, but it wasn't that interesting. Then I think one of the first ones I added was the Bounty Hunter and destroying the Thief. It's like, okay, the Thief takes your money, but the Bounty Hunter gets next to the Thief. You destroy them and you get some money. And you get a little bit more back, and that was where it was kind of like, okay, this feels good.

And then I just added a lot from there. It just felt like there's a lot of design space there.

Brian: I feel like I could just keep asking Dan questions, but turn it over to you, Dean. I think I want to interview Dan as much as you do.

Harry: No, no, that was part of why I wanted to have the two of you on, because I knew you would. If Dan's cool. I think that if you've got more questions, please go ahead.

Dan: And I love talking about my work, so please feel free.

Brian: Yeah, it's interesting. I guess I understand why a physical slot machine, at least the old ones, tended to have a simple scoring rule. At least, you know, in terms of like the center line. They could print all the rules, like physically on the machine, right?

Like two bars and a cherry, like whatever. And then video slot machines got a little more complicated with like five lines to play and you could sort of have like branches and stuff like that.

Dan: If I can cut you off real quick. That was one of the biggest things of when I actually went to a casino, I'm like, "this is just terrible." I put in, I don't even remember how much, but I like quadrupled my money and I could not figure out why it happened. I just put in the money and it's like, "oh, you got eight bonus spins."

I'm like, "I don't know why." And it's like, I got all these spins and I quadruple my money. I'm like, this sucks. I don't know what I'm trying to do. I know I'm not trying to do anything, but there's no strategy involved. I can't even understand why I got 20 bucks or whatever. And it just felt terrible, you know?

So that's, I think where a lot of the strategy of Luck Be A Landlord came from too, of like, there needs to be something there.

Brian: It's interesting too because, I mean, I would say that I feel like both of our games have that in common. Maybe a little more Ballionaire because of the kinetic piece of it. But the sort of like, "why did I get those points?" But the nice part is, you know, with a slot machine, it's typically very ephemeral.

Like, you're not going to see that roll again, right? And so it's like, well, you know, that was fun, but I don't even know what happened. Whereas with, I think with our games, you're likely to see the same thing happen again, right? Assuming you're keeping, like in the case of Luck Be A Landlord, like a trimmed pool, so you're getting all your symbols every roll, and no more. And in Ballionaire, the ball tends to fall, at least has the same starting path on the trapezoid. But I suppose, it must have been really exciting to realize this mechanism of a slot machine and realizing they've only scratched one layer of the surface.

And there's so many ways. As you mentioned, adjacency is the simplest one, but it just immediately explodes into, gosh, there's so many ways you could score this if you could automate the scoring and make it readable.

So the question I wanted to ask you about—it came to mind after you mentioned the first symbols you created—was something I really enjoyed about Luck Be A Landlord, and again, reflected in Ballionaire, the fact that most of the symbols are everyday items or everyday concepts, even if they're kind of fictional, you understand what the idea behind it is.

So they're everyday items and in a lot of cases, the item behaves somewhat thematically. This is something I definitely wanted to bring into Ballionaire. I would say for myself in Ballionaire, I probably leaned into the theme of the item or the trigger in my case, too strongly in the early stages of design versus thinking from a holistic, "what are the elements of play in my game and how do these triggers tie into that?" You know, I had to go through a really broad discovery phase while designing the game in terms of just trying out lots of ideas that were very strongly rooted in the theme of the trigger.

And later on had to kind of reconcile some of those things from a holistic game design point of view of "these are like the X concepts in Ballionaire and these triggers need to support that." They can't all be completely bespoke on their own with completely independent concepts—that's too much design and too much for the player.

So I'm kind of curious about your journey in Luck Be A Landlord with kind of balancing the thematic of the symbols as well as ensuring that they cohered into an overall design and game vocabulary, which I feel like they did. I'm kind of curious, like if you had a journey on that or if it was sort of a straight line.

Dan: I'd say straight line is probably a little more accurate. I didn't actively think they needed to be sort of intuitive, simple, real life world objects. But when I added something, you know, it really depended on the symbol. Some of them were like, "I want to have this effect or this interaction because I know it would make this symbol that is weak, stronger." Like for example, the Diver, for a while there weren't the Puffer Fish or the Jellyfish or the Sand Dollars, which all, when they interact with a Diver, it removes them and you get some sort of bonus. The things they give you when they're removed aren't really relevant to what they are.

Like the Puffer Fish giving a re-roll token, it's not really thematic at all. But I found that like, if it's a simple effect, it doesn't really matter and like you're going to take it if you have the Diver anyway. So what it does, as long as it's a positive and there's no real chance it could be a negative, it doesn't really matter if it's that thematic. It could be interpreted as like the Diver takes something and gets a reward. Like they sell it. It doesn't really matter. For things like the Witch, I remember I kept adding symbols to the pool of symbols she buffs where I would think, "oh, well there's an Apple in the game, you know?

The Witch should probably buff that." "There's a Crow? That makes sense too." Like they didn't initially. But I found, if a player thinks, "oh, does this symbol interact with this symbol?" because they think it probably should, if it doesn't, that's a really bad thing. But if they do, it's a really good thing. If, for example, I mean, maybe it's a strange one, it's that the Toddler doesn't drink Milk. It's kind of strange that they only eat Candy, but you know, that's something that can kind of be forgiven 'cause the Cat drinks Milk.

But I think moments like that where it's like, "oh, the Toddler drinks Milk. Oh no, no they don't." That can probably be one of the game's weaker points. But I think there's a lot of points of: "oh yeah, of course. The Witch buffs the Apple." "Oh yeah, Robin Hood destroys the Apple"—which that's kind of a mistake. I forgot it was Robin Hood, not William Tell or vice versa. But you know, it doesn't really matter. It's a guy with a green hat. It's fine.

Harry: Why do you think—how do you think that you leaned into the themes too heavily, Brian?

Dan: I was curious as well, yeah.

Harry: Is it just because the interactions are physical maybe, or?

Brian: I guess, first is because it's like the first game I really designed. I mean, the first kind of deep game I designed. Just like a certain level of novice, you know, even though I've shipped other games, I was an AI engineer. So you're not making the whole game, right?

And so part of it is just lack of experience, I suppose. And secondly was, you know, sort of like the five, 10 years leading up to Ballionaire and in which I discovered Luck Be A Landlord, I was just much more into board games. I felt like they were innovating far more greatly than even indie games were, frankly. And then part of that was just coming from the constraints of working with paper and cardboard. But something I really couldn't stand in board games was when you get a game that's focused on cards, but there's duplicates.

Harry: Like duplicates—like the behavior's the same, but the card name is different, you mean?

Brian: No, like literally like there's three copies of blah, blah, blah in the game. Yeah, exactly. And so I could have the same card in my hand twice. It's just a spectrum of lack of variety from heavily repeated cards to identical cards to cards that are similar in effect.

So for me, just on a personal level, I didn't want any kind of skin swap, right? Of like this item is the same thing as that item, but themed differently maybe with a different trait on it or whatever, a class of items that it belongs to. So I really wanted everything bespoke and I just think I like overly bespoke-d the game in the first maybe six months, you know?

So half of development. Part of that was trying to exhaustively search the design space, and part of it was just overly adhering to the bespoke-ness, but it did lead to kind of a place where the synergies were too strongly coupled, if that makes sense. Like this thing works with that thing, exactly.

And nothing else. So there's just a lot of like bespoke stuff that didn't integrate well with other things, and that's not great when you're trying to make a game that is a sandbox.

And the theory of the game is that you need to adapt to what is being given you and improvise in situations and not just seek out kind of like an identical, you know, well-known and named build.

So I kind of had to loosen those synergies over time and kind of like formalize the elements of play versus, you know, them each having their own little vocabulary.

Harry: One of my immediate reactions is almost that in some ways it's a narrower or more complicated design space that you're in because in Ballionaire there's physics, right? So it's like the thing does something physically—it's not just a system where there's a clear interaction that you could put into a spreadsheet.

It's like you actually have to put it into this messy physics simulation that's actually part of it. Even though it's definitely a systems game, you have this other system, which is just the physical interaction of the stuff and how people expect a broom to fly or whatever else.

Brian: Yeah, and I actually did try to put it into a spreadsheet so many times 'cause at a certain number of items in the game I just couldn't hold them in my head anymore and I couldn't even quantify my own coverage of like the design space, if that makes sense.

And I kept trying to categorize them so that I could see like, "oh, weapons are a little thin," or "holders are overly heavy" just in terms of like their presence in the design. 'Cause like I'd say that, you know, the triggers in Ballionaire, they're kind of multidimensional in terms of like their traits or their classifications. So I would have this problem where it's like, well, it's a spreadsheet, but it's a five dimensional spreadsheet. You know, like I just cannot—it's like literally like an information management problem. I can't visualize this. And I think I went through like three, four or five attempts to do this, and they all failed and they're just dead metadata code in the game from this.

But I did ultimately land on something towards the end, like maybe two months before shipping of kind of like a condition, sort of meaning precondition and effect of just like "this thing, you know, wants you to do blah and it gives you blah." So I did end up with a two dimensional spreadsheet that I could put everything in.

They only belong to one row in one column. It had to be kind of like my best estimation of that, just to visualize where the design space was, like densely covered or sparsely covered. Not in terms of filling out the matrix itself for each thing, but just sort of like, wow, I introduced this mechanic and I only use it in three triggers.

That was something I lost the ability to manage in my head over time, and I had to be able to visualize it. I'm curious if, yeah, I'm curious if you ran into something like that, Dan.

Dan: I'm trying to think because I feel kind of bad, but I don't think I ran into that. I don't know, I keep all the symbols and items in spreadsheets, separate spreadsheets, but it's just kind of like a list of all of them. It's actually the metadata that goes into the game. I export it when I make changes just so I don't have to like actually open the code to buff or nerf something.

But I do—I have noticed just visualizing it, just looking at the list and seeing like, "oh, I have this, I've added a lot of uncommon symbols lately. Maybe I should cut back on that." Things like that. But I think—how many items, for lack of a better term, are in Ballionaire?

Brian: I think—I should really know, but it's changed. So I think I launched with between 125 and 150 triggers, and I think it was like, I want to say like, hmm, 75 boons maybe, which is like items, yeah.

Those numbers are probably off a little bit, but yeah.

Dan: Yeah, I think I have less in Luck Be A Landlord for both items—oh wait, well let's count Essences, but the symbols themselves, I definitely have less. So maybe that's just why it was easier to keep it in my head. I don't know. The Essences were weird. Like it just felt like I had a lot of design space and I was excited to make a lot more things.

I did over tune it a little bit—not over tune. I buffed it. I made them too powerful at first. But anyway,

To answer your question, I don't know. I just, I don't really have a lot of trouble keeping that sort of thing in my head, especially the balance stuff. Or the balance or like the interactions.

Like that's something I just—that just kind of, I find very easy. Maybe it's because I spent, you know, genuinely some of my formative years theorizing balance of video games on a YouTube show. I just enjoyed it. I would do it before school sometimes, and I'm like, "I should make a show out of this so other people can do it too." But if I ever have a free moment when I want to work on one of my projects, balancing and like thinking of ways things can interact is definitely something I never need energy for. Like, if it's like, "oh, I got to design some UI," it's like, "uh, why? What if I did something else?"

But if it's like, "oh, I can change a number from two to three, if that's correct to do," that's easy. Let's just look at that and see if I can do that anywhere.

Continued in part 2 next week! Thanks to Dan and Brian for joining and Alex Epton for the music.

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