Probably Designed: My Conversation With a Ludokultist
In this week's episode we have a conversation with Fabian Fisher. Fabian is a game designer and developer here in Germany, and he's worked on quite a few games. Some highlights are Crimson Company, Hyperdrome, and his most recent game Rack and Slay, which is a roguelike billiards game. Fabian has also done a ton of writing on games and game design. I recommend you check out his, his website, Ludokultur.de. I'm really excited to bring you this episode with Fabian: he has a a really clear point of view about design and he's a pillar of community for other game designers.
Conversation
Fabian: All right. So I guess the obvious background of me always having played video games like many people have. My dad got me started actually playing on a C64 back in the day, which was, I think, obsolete basically when I used it already. But we still had it around in the living room.
And so I played my first few games there and did barely understand anything that was going on. I didn't really get into making games or game dev until much later. That was probably in the 2000s when I tried out a few tools like RPG Maker and a few modding things like making Warcraft 3 maps or whatever.
But it was all not very serious. Like it wasn't on my radar that you could do this for a living somehow. So I started studying computer science in 2010, and not with the intention of becoming a game developer, but more just, okay, I know my way around how to use a computer, this is probably kind of interesting to me. And you can make a living being a developer of some kind of software, like this was probably the original intention. But during my studies actually, on the side I stumbled onto the topic of game design more or less.
The initial spark I think was reading blog posts by Keith Burgun, if you have heard from him. He made Auro: A Monster Bumping Adventure and 100 Rogues on iOS. So that was very early on in the Roguelike Renaissance days. And I got into that whole genre because I was kind of tired of big triple-A games and I was kind of like, okay, maybe have I grown out of gaming or something?
But then this whole indie boom started and the roguelike stuff started, and then I got really deep into it. And then I actually, for the first time, seriously thought, hey, there are people designing and making these games, and that could be a thing that you do in your life.
Yeah, so actually, when I finished my studies, I wrote a master's thesis on educational game design and put a lot of the non-educational game design stuff that I had read about in the meantime in there. So I had an excuse to kind of read through all the well-known game design books out there and put them in my sources. So that was more or less like a theoretical entry to the whole topic.
In practice, I was playtesting some of the games that Keith Burgun was working on and like, discussing design and feedback and stuff on their forums and things like that.
But I wasn't making games yet. I was like on a, more or less on a game design theory level. But at some point I started writing my own blog and kind of formulating my own thoughts on all the stuff that I had taken in. And I think that was actually the main thing that got me my first game design job because after finishing my studies, my first job was basically already game designer at Travian Games in Munich.
Harry: Okay.
Fabian: Who are making in Germany at least quite well-known browser games.
And I had read about getting into game development, especially in Germany isn't easy because there aren't that many companies and at the time there were even fewer than today. And I was kind of expecting like I would have to go probably into QA or something and make my way across to game design more or less. But yeah, I ended up getting a game design position just based on the fact that I had written a lot of blog posts and had some nice letter of recommendation written by Keith Burgun from having worked with him, like on a volunteer basis on his games.
Harry: I think that's super interesting in that you kind of started your blog then while you were still, while you're still in your studies, right? In university then?
Fabian: Yeah.
Harry: You don't hear about a lot of folks who come from this kind of more pure kind of theorycrafting sort of space.
What were the first few games that you ended up working on? Did you kind of put together some games on your own along the way? Or did you kind of first start working on other games with larger teams?
Fabian: I did make a couple very, very small things during my studies just to practice programming a bit. But those were like super mini, not even game jam projects, I would say. But more like try to get something on the screen, try to get it to move when you input some keys or buttons.
And that was it basically. So the first real games I started working on were Auro and Empire by Keith. Yeah, where I was basically like a volunteer QA design feedback person more or less. And the first professional thing was at Travian Games where I got into the Travian Kingdoms team, which was like the latest iteration of their Travian browser-based strategy MMO game at the time.
I basically did that for quite a while, and it was probably a couple of years after that until I started getting the itch to make my own stuff. And actually picked up Unity and learned how to code properly. Like not just my studies, but for actual projects and making games.
And yeah, that's when I did my first few smaller game jam projects.
Harry: What was it about, um, about roguelikes that pulled you in? Because you've mentioned that that was kind of a turning point for you.
Fabian: I think it was mostly the fact that your decisions seem to matter much more. Things you did had real consequences and that was just something that was not really happening at the time in big video games. Like, I guess today it's happening a bit more with all the soulslikes and stuff. But back then it was really like everything focused on the cinematic aspects and gameplay was mostly like press X to win and see a lot of cool animations. And even if you didn't make it, then you can just reload and do it again, and just don't frustrate the player at all in any possible way and just lead them through this nice, shiny experience basically.
The roguelike trend seemed like the anti thing to that.
Harry: It felt to me like there was a time in the early 2000s in particular where the medium of games kind of was overrun with this idea that it was the next Hollywood, the next kind of place for interactive fiction.
Fabian: Yeah.
Harry: You know, that's so different than like a game you play with like your family or your friends, like cards and dice are pretty mechanical.
Fabian: Yep.
Harry: And it feels like, in some ways, like some of the emergence of roguelikes, for maybe a lack of a better term, but we'll take it. Is some ways just kind of a reaction to that, not just for you, but maybe kind of in general as well?
Fabian: Yeah, I mean I guess it existed before the roguelike boom already in board games kind of. I actually, I retroactively got into board games through roguelikes more or less. But they had that already. Like when the whole designer board game era started, they were really all about coming up with interesting systems and mechanics and, I mean, they had to, because the board games are the mechanics basically.
Like they're really at the forefront for board games. So it makes sense that they would develop all this stuff that you sometimes much later see in video games, like deck building comes from board games and the whole set collection thing that we see in all the auto chess, auto battler games, that's basically board games.
Harry: My kind of working theory, I know that people like to talk about what it means to be a roguelike, but my kind of working theory is it's a name of course, but that a lot of these games that we talk about in that space are kind of these single-player board games.
Like it's a lot of board game mechanics, board games are kind of run-based or whatever else. You start over when you finish. There are additional things that you can do in the digital space that are really interesting. Like you can have some sort of interesting kind of persistence and you can have bigger sets of things that are random or random maps are certainly a lot easier, but there's kind of this shared vibe.
Um, which I think is, for me as someone who likes board games and card games is great. But it's different. It's a different kind of experience. There are probably some people that surely, surely a lot of people who do like an interactive movie, but that's not what I come to games for.
Fabian: Yeah. Same here.
Harry: Do you want to talk about maybe a couple of your projects? The project that I'm most familiar with is Rack and Slay, which came out last year. And it sounds like maybe you've got some other stuff probably brewing. I don't know if you want to start with Rack and Slay and talk about that a little bit and how you kind of approach the design.
One of the things that I think is interesting in that game, and it is something that I've also talked to Brian from Ballionaire about, um, and they're both of course, games with balls in them, which is important to note. But, um, the, uh, kind of the randomness of physics and kind of how physics can play into this other kind of chance and randomness I think is interesting. Of course, in billiards, you have a lot more kind of control over what happens than you do in a plinko, or plinko, Pachinko. I always get it wrong.
Pachinko. But I would love to hear some of your thoughts around what pulled you into that design, and what you think is exciting or interesting about it.
Fabian: Yeah. So to me, the nice thing about the billiards mechanics was that it kind of allows you to plan ahead. Like you can kind of try to imagine where you will end up after a shot and what to do next. But it's never 100%. So there's always some uncertainty kind of baked into it. That's actually like a thing that I realized from the very early prototypes with this project, that it was already kind of fun, even when there are no abilities, like, which is probably, you think, well, duh, it's billiards and people have played that for forever without special abilities. But I mean, it's like a simple 2D top-down game, right? So it's almost like these old flash billiards games, when you look at it. But I think that was kind of a good sign, like if the core mechanics are already interesting and have something special about them, or something that generates uncertain decisions by themselves already, then building the whole items roguelike drafting on top can just make that stuff more interesting.
And as opposed, when you have a core that's not very interesting, then everything has to come from the framework and that's, I think a lot harder to achieve.
Harry: For sure I find myself, when I've played the game, I get sucked into the actual billiards part. Like the aiming and I feel, because you get it right, it's one of those things where you feel real clever, you know? And I think that that's a really nice thing for players is when the players get the chance to feel like their master plan comes together or that they master the system in some sort of way.
And so you get this, when you make a bank shot or like you hit two or three balls and it kind of does what you want it to do. You feel really good. And I wonder, um, I was going to ask you actually do you play pool in real life? Are you a billiards player or is it just something you got into as an idea for this game?
Fabian: No, I probably played it like two or three times in my life, in real life. Um. Um, I mean, I played it a bit more digitally, I guess, throughout the years, but, um, actually, I don't even think it started as a billiards idea. I just wanted to make kind of a top-down tactics thing where you control one character, like basically a traditional roguelike almost.
But I wanted it to be about physics and momentum and bring all that stuff in, and then it kind of naturally turned into a billiards thing kind of.
Harry: It's interesting because, I mean, it translates so well like the things that are exciting about playing pool in real life are the same. It translates very well, I think into a digital game. And it's kind of like, um, I guess you're a UFO 50 fan right? I think I've got some talk about Party House I want to have later, but in UFO 50, they have like six golf games or something, right? And it turns out that golf just translates really well. And I think billiards is like that in some sort of way. And maybe 'cause it shares some similar properties with golf around, just how simple it is to reason about the physics in 2D, or I'm not sure.
Fabian: Yeah. I mean, I think they get, the digital versions usually get rid of the complexity of making your body move in the right way, which is a big part of those games when you play them in real life. They're basically the abstraction so that you can get to the core part of thinking about, okay, where do I want the golf ball to go and where do I want to end up for my next shot? In real life, you can't really do that unless you're already physically good enough to have the balls go where you want. But in a digital game, you can kind of access that part immediately, which is kind of nice.
Harry: Yeah, I mean, like in real life, I think golf feels impossible to me.
Fabian: Yeah.
Harry: How do you even hit the thing, let alone make it go where you want. Like billiards is a bit more. Um, I actually had a pool table growing up, but it was one of those things where my dad got it at a garage sale or something and he was super excited about it.
And then I would have all my friends who wanted to play it and I never wanted to play 'cause it was at my house. I'm like, oh, that's not, let's go do something else in the, you know, in the woods or something. I don't know. Um, but billiards I think is a bit more accessible for mortals than golf.
Fabian: I guess there's mini golf as a—
Harry: Yeah, I guess that's right. Yeah. I guess mini golf is definitely more accessible. Was there anything that you took away from having released that now? Like what did you take away from that adaptation? Is there something that you would do again?
Or is there something that you would do differently in terms of the mechanics?
Fabian: I mean, I think in terms of the billiards part, one of the feedbacks I got the most was you should be able to put spin on the ball. I think if I started again, I might look into this from the start and try to integrate it in a good way. I played around with it a little bit, but it just seemed to make things more complicated and more complicated to control.
And I get why you need that in like a pure billiards game because you don't have that many options to do things. But with all the effects from the items that happen and all the combinations you can get, I had the feeling it was just a little too much and I really wanted to like, just have the player worry about straight aiming and shooting power basically, and not fiddle around with a spin and stuff like that.
But I think there might be a way to do it so that it doesn't interfere with the game too much, maybe just through some special items or things like that. But—
Harry: Yeah, spin, I don't know, I guess, players who've mastered the linear mechanics, who've sunk like 30 hours in or something, or 40 hours. Just want something a bit more tricky?
Fabian: It seems like those are the billiards fans or billiards game fans that the game attracted, that asked for spin. But I get the idea because it's kind of, it, in theory, it enables you to make some really cool shots that you can like record and show to your friends or something.
Harry: Is there another game like that or translation that you've kind of thought about, that you'd be interested in or kind of, on a wishlist or maybe a someday maybe kind of list where there's some other kind of physics interaction that you'd like to put into a different context in a design?
Fabian: You mean like, a different game than billiards?
Harry: Yeah.
Fabian: Yeah, I mean, I have a few things on my list. I'd like to make a very simplified soccer game, for example. That basically puts you in random soccer situations and you have to come up with creative solutions a little bit, like, I don't know if you know it, there's this game called New Star Soccer on mobile? It's really like a quick-fire thing of, oh, now here's a free kick. Now you are on offense. Now you're on defense and you have to perform these little mini games, basically. But I would like to take this more into like a more formal roguelike-y experience maybe, but I'm not sure if I'm ever going to do it, to be honest.
I mean, soccer is kind of popular, but it also is kind of: if you make a soccer game, then do you try to attract the soccer players? But why should they play your game and not the big simulation games? So is it really good to have this kind of theme on your game? I'm not sure about that.
Harry: It's interesting. I think it's pretty accessible. Like everyone's kicked a ball around a little bit, so it could be a broader audience and you know, that soccer's kind of the metaphor if the game's fun and not just people who are deep into soccer, but if it was just folks who are deep into soccer, there's so many of 'em.
It's such a, I mean, the world's most popular sport basically, right? Or cricket might be, I don't know. Cricket's up there.
Fabian: Yeah. The thing is, if you attract the soccer fans, then you're going to get feedback like, why can't I do the thing as in the EA game?
Harry: Why can't I put spin on the ball? Right?
Fabian: Yeah. Basically.
Harry: It might be interesting then to talk about some of your other projects. I was looking through your website and you've got like a ton of stuff on there, which is really awesome. One thing you probably don't want to talk about, but kind of was interesting to me was this all the way in your distant past, there's this airline sim that kind of stood out to me.
I've got this like obsession with spreadsheet games. So that was kind of interesting.
Fabian: Actually, that's not so distant for me. Like it's an old game, but it's still running. It's basically a browser-based economy sim where you lead an airline and hundreds of other players are at the same time and you're like competing for passengers and stuff. This is made by Simulogics, which is the company I still work for as a game designer. Uh, not full-time anymore, but I was full-time until last year and, yeah, so I really only recently worked on this, but the game is much older.
Harry: Yeah, I just saw the date being 2007 on the game, so I didn't actually, I didn't realize that it was more recent work, but it looks like it's still live, and it looks just really fascinating, like detail and economies and all sorts of stuff going on there, which I think is kind of interesting 'cause, because there's this whole, um, well for me, it's interesting, I don't know if this, it's not like a big class of games, but this class of games where you're kind of like running software that's like business software somehow, I don't know, like I am just fascinated.
Fabian: Actually, you might be interested also in Prosperous Universe then, which is like the other Simulogics project, which is sort of my main project with them. Where the basic idea is it's like a space economy sim and you're like managing ships and bases that produce commodities and you sell them on markets and transfer them there.
And the whole idea of the game is that it's like an SAP-like user interface that you can customize and make your own screens and your own widgets and stuff and—
Harry: You come home from work and you're like, I just need more.
Fabian: More work.
Harry: But I, I mean, I think some of these games are I think just really fascinating 'cause the level of detail in some of the simulation parts, it's just really, really like deep. There is something that, it kind of scratches for a player, right? Like getting all these details in order and kind of making sure that everything is lined up properly and seeing the impacts and kind of the numbers.
I don't know, I mean. There's an argument that our whole world has become gamified in this way. But it's definitely something that's really satisfying, I think, for players.
Fabian: Yeah, I mean I think it takes a certain type of player, like the dedication among the player base of these games is pretty, pretty crazy. They basically design their own super detailed spreadsheets that simulate everything where they can exactly predict how much of which material they will need during which week.
And it's like really when you see these, the spreadsheets they make for the game, which also looks—
Harry: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Fabian: —like even more impressive.
Harry: Yeah, that's pretty awesome. Any other projects that you would be interested in talking about?
Fabian: I guess in the spirit of talking about randomness, we could probably talk about Crimson Company, which was a physical card game that I made with a colleague. And later on we also made a digital adaptation. It's basically, it's kind of like Marvel Snap, but before Marvel Snap.
So the basic idea was that you have three lanes and you play these characters that have certain strength points. And when a lane is filled basically with characters, then you compete for who wins this lane. And whoever wins two out of three lanes wins the game. And characters have special abilities of course, and can move other characters around or destroy them or trigger the effects again, stuff like that.
And we kind of had this tagline of it's Magic the Gathering meets chess. Because we really had the idea to reduce randomness.
It was probably because we were big into Hearthstone at the time and kind of sick of RNG and so yeah, we basically stripped the game from a lot of the stuff that you have in card games usually. Like you don't have a hand of cards, you just buy characters from an open market and put them on the board directly. And you don't have a private deck that you bring, both players share one single deck and, um, yeah, basically it's almost like they aren't cards anymore.
Really. The only card-like thing they really do is you can flip them and flipping them kind of disables them, but then when you flip them face up again, then you can reuse the effects. So that's kind of the card-like thing you do. Otherwise you don't play cards from your hand or draw from a deck, really?
Harry: So there's no shuffling or...?
Fabian: Yeah.
Harry: How does the card pool work then? Or the play piece pool or whatever it is.
Fabian: Yeah, so basically the card pool is just all the characters you have, the base game had like 30 different characters and then we made some expansions that added more and you could just shuffle them all together and then they would show up like four at a time and there's a bidding mechanism where one player makes an offer, I want to buy this character for this much gold.
And then the other player can either buy them out or leave the character to the opponent basically. And that's like a self-balancing mechanism almost where you decide what a character is worth in the current situation. Yeah, you have this open market and you also see the top card of the deck that's coming up next, which is confusing for players.
They are always like, should the deck be face up? We never saw that in any game and we were like, no, yes, you should see that. This was kind of like, our way of having this idea of an information horizon where the new random information that enters the game shouldn't immediately hit you in the face, but you should kind of have the ability to plan for it.
So if you buy a character, for example, that you don't want to have destroyed and you see on top of the deck, the next character it's coming up, has a destroy effect. Then you can factor that in. And you're not like, okay, randomly destroy effect appeared out of nowhere. Guess I lose.
Harry: But, so there is a deck then, but basically this deck is the market...
Fabian: Yeah, the deck refills the market basically as soon as one character is bought. Then you refill this from the deck.
Harry: I see. So each player brings a pool of cards or maybe there's just a set?
Fabian: Yeah. In the physical game, there was basically just the set. In the app version we made, we actually had a system where you bring half of the deck and your opponent brings half of the deck. You would still both play with the same deck, so you could also use your opponent's cards.
But I guess the advantage that you have from bringing them yourself is that you know that they are in there.
Harry: Mm-hmm.
Fabian: And you don't know the other half. But yeah, we basically introduced that whole system to have some sort of progression in the digital version because you could collect these cards by playing and if you didn't have your own half of the deck to bring, then there would be no reason to collect cards basically.
Harry: How did synergies work between cards? Like, so like in most cases, you know, you're giving yourself a bit of a run identity by having a collection of cards that work well together. And it sounds like in this case you've got the randomness or the uncertainty around what cards your opponent is going to bring.
And so there could be new synergies or unseen synergies or were synergies kind of not even a focus, it was more about individual impact of the cards?
Fabian: I mean, they weren't a focus in the sense of, like in auto battlers for example, you often have these, like, if you have three warriors, you get like the warrior bonus, and that's like a really, hammer on the head kind of synergy.
So we didn't have a system like that, but there are certain cards that work with others.
For example, one card might have an effect that gives you extra gold when it's destroyed or something, and then you can combine it with another card that would destroy it. Or a card that gets a bonus when it moves and then you have a card that could move another card. So there are these little pockets of synergies that you form between cards, basically.
But you usually don't, you wouldn't build a whole deck or half of the deck around one specific synergy, but you might put in a couple or a triple of cards that work well together and then try to plan for that. While your opponent doesn't necessarily know that those cards will come up. So that's kind of your edge you have by bringing your own deck or half deck.
Harry: Right. So it's less about designing your strategy around those synergies and more about kind of nudging the direction of the gameplay a bit?
Fabian: Yeah.
Harry: Interesting. It kind of reminds me a little bit of and maybe I'm just, I could be mis-imagining it but almost a little bit like if you're playing Dominion and you have the random selection of what you can buy, of course. Then you have the deck building and that's a whole different set of mechanics, but you kind of have this random card pool and you kind of have to buy into what you want to invest in? What did you like about the design? 'Cause it's pretty unusual actually, right? Like everything you've described to me is novel enough that I have to think about it.
Fabian: Yeah, I mean, what I like is, I think the lane system is really strong in the game. Like, basically we started from having played Hearthstone and Gwent and Gwent also had lanes, but they didn't really mean much in the game. You had certain units that you could only play in certain lanes, but the lanes themselves didn't really get compared against one another or interact in specific ways.
Basically just all lanes were one container in the end for points. And we wanted to push that more in the direction of the lanes having more meaning. Basically in the process of trying to get there, we got rid of a lot of traditional card game stuff. So we didn't want hidden hands because then you could just have these gotcha moments where you didn't see something coming and then you get destroyed.
And we wanted it to be like more thinky, more chess-like, and like you're interacting not with the chessboard, but with the three lanes. But it's the same feeling of kind of like spatial combat and maneuvering and trying to outsmart your opponent. And then even the bidding system kind of plays into that because you always need to think about how much is a card worth to you, but also to your opponent because they might just take it from you if they pay more than you are willing to bid.
And how bad would it be for you if they took the card? It's basically the thought that you have all the time.
Harry: It almost feels like, you don't even want to call it a card game, right? I could imagine at least how calling it a card game almost brings all these assumptions from the player or expectations about, oh, I'm going to have a hand, I'm going to have a deck, 'cause it's kind of just a metaphor for these things?
Fabian: I actually wrote a game design essay on the game at some point, and I called it "How We Made a Card Game, but it was barely card game in the end." I think it still made sense kind of marketing-wise to call it a card game because I think it appeals to players that would also like Magic and Hearthstone and Gwent and stuff. It has kind of the same kind of thinking just with less randomness. Yeah, so I think it made sense, but yeah, you are completely correct you have to throw out a lot of assumptions you have about card games.
Harry: Which is super interesting, I think in the design space. But then there's always this tension about the description of your game or the metaphor of say, dice or cards or whatever 'cause in a way it's just a way of communicating certain types of randomness it feels like, to your players or certain types of affordances that they're maybe going to get when they try to play. It's super interesting. I'm definitely going to check that out. I didn't know that much about it, but it looks super interesting and I'm a fan of both chess and Magic so it's right up my alley. I wanted to talk to you or ask you a little bit about, 'cause I, I feel like, I know that you are, or I strongly suspect that you are a fan of Party House in UFO 50?
Fabian: Mm-hmm.
Harry: I think that this game is super fun. I was talking to Brian from Ballionaire, his hypothesis was that Party House was going to like, spawn a whole generation of press your luck games.
I don't know if that's actually going to happen or not, but I know that you're a huge fan of Party House and I'd love to talk a little bit about what excited you about that design 'cause it's a really simple game, right?
Fabian: Yeah. I mean like that is a hot take. I wonder if it's, it's kind of like it already has happened with Luck Be a Landlord, I think.
To me they are very closely related, these games. I think Party House is kind of like, you take Dominion and Luck Be a Landlord and put them together in a very elegant and interesting way.
But, but still they have the same feeling to me. Like you pull random stuff in a random order and then some stuff gives bonuses to other stuff that feels really Landlord-like to me. But then you have of course the much more structured market basically where you have this, like in Dominion, you would have the random Kingdom with the random set of cards and you basically have the same thing in Party House where as Luck Be a Landlord is much more raw random where you just get like three different picks from the full pool basically every turn. Yeah, I think it kind of marries those two games. And, um, I, yeah, I don't know if it will spawn a whole new thing, but it's certainly a very cool way to marry these. And it feels to me like that's the most modern game in all of UFO 50, basically, because in no way would this game have existed like in the eighties or something?
Harry: It's kind of like there are very few games in that collection that probably would have, 'cause they all do have some pretty modern design takes, it seems like. While paying homage of course to this era of gaming, they definitely have a lot of modern twists.
But so, with Party House then I guess I'm not hearing so much about the press your luck part of it, as the interesting bit of the design to you.
Fabian: I mean, yeah, it has this element, but I don't know if it felt that central to me while playing it. To me it mostly felt like, okay, I need to build a synergistic enough set of characters so that I can reliably have them score enough points with the parties that I reach the required amount basically, and make enough money and get goal cards basically.
But I think the push your luck comes in occasionally. If you're thinking, okay, maybe I can do one more, but I think the winning strategy in that game is not to push your luck. Like it's almost always to play it safe and just have a synergistic enough deck that just reliably works and doesn't require you to push your luck.
If you get into push your luck territory, you're on the brink of failing, I think.
Harry: Thematically to me, I want the push your luck to be a bigger, right? Because it's like thematically, I want it to be about: make the party as crazy as possible without getting the cops called.
Fabian: Yeah, I think you, you know, you might be able to do that, like it would probably take a different kind of scoring mechanism, at least, like, yeah, a different game. But you could probably turn Party House more into that by just incentivizing different things like making the biggest, craziest party more of a thing, which right now it's not really a thing like it's more about reliably having good parties rather than one enormous one.
Harry: I really like the game, but you're making me almost a little bit sad about it 'cause it sounds like such like a. Like just reliably have decent parties. Don't try to have a crazy one. Just reliably have a pretty good party and you're in business.
Fabian: Yeah. I guess it's more like a party throwing business rather than yeah, a crazy private party group.
Harry: That's funny. Can you talk a little bit about what you're up to now or what you're excited about building and some of the design things you're exploring currently?
Fabian: Um, yeah, sure. I am kind of working on two projects right now. At the end of last year, I did a few prototype explorations, and those two were those that stuck basically. But the first one is sort of the main project right now, which is like, again, an auto battler and a deck builder. Kind of a more traditional card game, like Slay the Spire or something that's not an auto chess-like, but it plays itself automatically. Imagine Slay the Spire, but your deck plays itself basically. So the challenge there is to figure out how to make the cards work together and synergies work together when the player doesn't decide what card to play.
It's very much about building a machine that works, that creates value for you basically. I wanted to get rid of the micromanagement of having to optimize your turn and maximizing your damage output by playing one card first and then another.
I just wanted to have the raw synergy building aspect of it basically.
Harry: This probably appeals to a specific kind of player, right? 'Cause there are some people who will get really excited about the tactical play or more excited about the tactical play.
And this is really focused on the engine building, like solely, right?
Fabian: Yeah, that's basically the idea. Like I am someone who is more excited by the engine building and less excited figuring out the mathematical optimal turn with my hand of cards or something. So, um, yeah it's kind of in this whole Luck Be a Landlord line of games in that sense that it's all about drafting basically, but it combines that with more traditional card game things.
Like you have a collection of cards and you modify your deck, basically you see an upcoming fight, and then you can adjust your deck to that fight and put in certain types of effects or take others out that would potentially be a negative for you in that specific fight and stuff like that.
So it's more about collection building and then deck building based on your collection basically.
Harry: So there's some chance involved because you're, you're still using a deck. Shuffling and hand drawing kind of mechanics it sounds like? So how deterministic do you imagine it being?
Fabian: Yeah, so that's one part I'm still kind of figuring out. Like currently I'm working with rather small decks, you have around eight to 12 cards in your deck at any given time. So you kind of draw through your deck every fight multiple times usually. And the variance is more in the order of the effect.
So that's part of how you build your deck, because there are certain effects that are better or worse depending on the order they're played in. But there are also things which I call triggers basically, which are cards that spawn a trigger that will be executed by another card.
And it doesn't matter if the other card comes in later or in your next deck cycle, basically the trigger will just be a persistent thing until it's triggered. So that's kind of how you can make cards work together, even though you don't decide which cards to play when.
But of course, you can also build around some crazy effect that will hopefully probably happen and you have a little bit of wiggle room because I don't want to just end your run basically as soon as you lose one fight. So you kind of have a Super Auto Pets-like life system, where if you lose a couple times during a run that you can still win the run overall. So if you build a deck that works 80 or 90% of the time, that might be good enough depending on how strong it is.
Harry: Do you imagine that like if you build your deck right, then you should be winning 90 plus percent of the time? The variance is actually pretty small in that case, right?
Fabian: Yeah, if you keep repeating the same fights than it is, yeah. But of course the enemies you're facing will grow exponentially stronger throughout the run. So you kind of have to try and keep up with that and add better synergies, upgrade your cards, modify your cards. That's also a thing you can do.
And then of course there's also a passive relic kind of system where you have relics that trigger off of playing certain types of cards or get stronger the more of a certain card type you have in your deck or something like that. So you kind of build this whole machine of different parts that works together.
Harry: That sounds super interesting. You're working on this over the next, over the next year or something?
Fabian: Yeah. I mean, I would like to not have it like, become super big in scope so that I can kind of finish it next year maybe. But we'll see about that. It's definitely already bigger in scope than Rack and Slay, I think, which is fine because I also have more time now to spend on my own projects.
So Rack and Slay was something that I made like entirely on the side while working full-time. So it had to be kind of doable as that.
Harry: I think the scope question is super interesting also. You know, we live in a world with so many games and there's a lot of good games, and we have so many tools that allow people to both develop and to distribute games pretty easily, which I think is a better world, I think it's great that there's this democratization of being able to build stuff. There are some downsides of course, as well. But then the question becomes, gosh, you know, like, should we be making more small games or, and I think it depends on the designer and of course what you're trying to do, or what you care about.
But it's a really interesting question to think about. It's like, oh gosh, if I'm getting into this or I want to build games, should I just like work with myself or one person and try to make a bunch of small games or do it quickly or, how should someone manage scope in order to make it kind of viable?
Fabian: Yeah, and it's, I think it's also on multiple levels. Like there's scope in terms of content or systemic complexity, I guess, of how much you build into a game. But then there's also like the scope of the polishing work that you put in, like you, in theory, you can polish a game for years and just improve little things here and there, and they will make it better, but by how much is the question and how much is enough, basically.
Or it's also a question of risk management at that point, basically because you probably have less risk if you don't focus on one project for too long and instead make multiple projects that are kind of polished, but not super polished maybe. So yeah, it's a wide field of questions to answer.
Harry: You're someone who is visible and active in like game developer and in indie game kind of community, and one of the things that I've noticed is that you do play a lot of games and you spend a lot of time looking at other folks' designs.
I'd love to talk about some things that you're excited about, some games that you're playing now or some stuff that you're excited about that's out in the world.
Fabian: I mean, I feel like anytime someone asks this kind of thing, I have to plug Mosa Lina 'cause it's kind of my favorite game of the past few years. Maybe even in forever. I don't know.
Harry: One question for you about Mosa Lina, 'cause I know you're a huge fan. When you play a session of Mosa Lina, how long do you play? Because I find myself like playing and I'm like 15, 20 minutes and then I bounce, but then I come back and I do it again.
But I would just be curious.
Fabian: So I usually play five minutes at a time.
Harry: Okay.
Fabian: And I do one run basically, where I finish all nine levels and then I'm done. The thing is, I really played this game a lot and I did a little bit of amateur speedrunning. So we talked previously about the physical requirements of playing billiards or golf.
And Mosa Lina has the same thing. Like you need to get good at just like the controls part of it.
But when you have this down, then it's just like this super quick-fire generator of interesting little decisions and interactions and emergence and yeah, you can do a full run basically in five minutes and then you're done, and then you play another one like a couple hours later maybe.
Harry: See, I think I've never gotten over that hump of the controls. 'cause I play it and I'm like, oh, this is interesting. But I'm kind of like, what am I doing? Or I'm thinking too much and then, you know, I'm just like, oh, I just fell off that thing too many times. I'm going to go do something else.
Fabian: Yeah, I kind of remember having the same experience initially, like when I first played the demo, I think. But I could feel like there is something here, something more interesting than being a platformer basically.
And so I kind of got over the platforming hump to access that part.
It's kind of like Spelunky actually. But in Spelunky, the difference is that the platforming always stays kind of difficult because it has a lot of precision platform elements almost. But it also has this super interesting system of emergent interactions and objects and enemies and yourself interacting in all kinds of different ways.
But to get to that, you kind of have to get good enough at the basic platforming part to access that.
Harry: I wish I was better at it. I guess I just have to put the time in.
Fabian: Yeah, I mean, you don't have to, but I recommend it.
Harry: I want to.
Fabian: I think it's really rewarding. Like it's one of the most rewarding gaming experiences I've had, getting good at the game and it keeps putting me into interesting places. Like of course now that there's a community level editor thing, you basically have an infinite supply of new levels and they just combine with different sets of tools every time.
And it's just, there's always something happening where I'm thinking, oh, I haven't seen that before. And that's really rare. Like if you play a game for really long that you can still see that kind of stuff regularly.
Harry: Yeah. That's really cool. What else, aside from Mosa Lina?
Fabian: Another like hidden gem recommendation I always give is Auro: A Monster Bumping Adventure, which I talked about before, which was kind of my path into making games, I guess. But it's also one of my favorites of all time, basically. So that's really also something that holds a special place in my heart, I guess.
Harry: Anything brand new that you're excited about?
Fabian: I mean the latest game I really got into was The Bazaar, which is controversially coming to Steam now, and it's like a lot of discussions about monetization and stuff like that. And uh—
Harry: I'm not really familiar with the monetization controversy. Is it going to be a service kind of oriented game, or are there going to be some sort of like...
Fabian: It went through some iterations now. So first of all, they sold access to the closed beta as if they sold the game for a premium price. But that was just basically for the early adopters. And then they went full free-to-play for the open beta and tried to go with mostly cosmetics-driven monetization, which is fine, but they probably saw that it wouldn't work all that well, which is also not uncommon with the cosmetics-driven stuff.
And so then they tried to introduce some slight pay-to-win-ish components by having card expansions that you could buy. So you would have more potential than players who didn't have the cards. And then players hated that, so they tuned that back and moved more into cosmetics again, which probably again didn't work.
So now they are making it a premium game to sell on Steam for full price and are moving away from free-to-play completely, basically. So yeah, it's like a lot of back and forth.
Harry: It's really easy to be grumpy about some of that stuff, but it's a really hard problem to solve. Like if you really want to run a business, if you want the game to continue to get updates and if it requires servers and all this sort of stuff, it's really hard.
It's really hard to figure out how to make work without I don't know, there's so many dark patterns to fall into.
Fabian: I mean, they had this subscription model in there where you could get more cosmetics basically for less playing time or something. It was more or less like a supporter package thing. People who wanted to could support the game, but you didn't have to. So most people probably won't.
And then when you have a big team, I don't think that's really sustainable. I guess it's sustainable for something like, or was sustainable for something like Dwarf Fortress, which was purely donation-based until it came to Steam. But that's like two people and The Bazaar has like a huge team behind it.
So yeah, they probably were looking at the numbers and it didn't pan out.
Harry: Yeah, for sure. I mean it seems like I don't know, making $5 million is a lot of money, but it goes really quick if you've got a team of 20 people, right? It's in terms of salaries and time or whatever and then of course minus all the cuts and everything else.
It's interesting. I mean, Dwarf Fortress of course has the advantage of like 20 years of mythology that kind of come with it, right? That that's kind of this marketing of this passion project that's been going for so long. So I guess we don't need to go into the weeds of the sad parts of game monetization, but it's a hard problem and I have sympathy for people who are trying to build companies and not just, you know, not just solo developers putting games out because it's great working with other people and collaborating, having a team. I think that, that, like, there should be a path for people to build game companies where they have colleagues and build multiple games and have teams and can, you know, can afford to do things.
Um, and so it's kind of a challenging thing to navigate.
Fabian: Yeah, for sure.
Harry: I would just thank you very much for taking the time and having the conversation with me.
Fabian: Yeah. Thank you very much, was great having a talk.