No Quarter: Ideation

This is my first attempt at a design diary for one of my games, so think of this as an experiment.

It’s not the first game I’ve designed that I intend to publish, but it is the one with the closest deadline, as well the simplest game in my personal library, so it seemed like a good place to start.

The way I’m going to do this for now is a three-part series, with at least one post between each part.  The first part(this post) will be called Ideation, and will cover the ‘birth’ of the game;  Where the idea came from, first thoughts, and early iterations.

Next will be the Design post, where I talk about the meat of the design process.  How the original idea changed, how the current mechanics came to be, what I had to throw away, and my general design process.  If I do a design diary with a similar format for a more complex game, I may make several Design posts.

Finally comes Publication, where I discuss the process the game took to getting into the hands of the public.  That may be through kickstarter, getting picked up by a publisher, winning a contest, or if nothing else Print on Demand/Print ’n Play.  This post may take awhile to come out, as publication usually doesn’t come overnight.

So, without further ado, the article you came here to read!

In the Beginning…

No Quarter(as mentioned in my post on Scarcity) is, of course, for the current Mint Tin Contest from The Game Crafter.  For those of you not aware, the contest rules mostly boil down to fitting your game inside a mint tin(think Altoids).  If you want to get in on it, there’s still about a month left before entries are due.

My entry for this contest began one fateful day on TGC’s Facebook group, when I saw the one-day-early announce-mint(pun intended) for the contest.  My mind started flipping the moment I did— there were so many possibilities, and I’ve always loved pocket games.

The first thing I did was to ask a friend— who happened to be shopping that very minute— to pick me up a pack of Altoids.  I then grabbed a notebook, a mechanical pencil, and my little box of game bits, threw them all in my messenger bag, and went on a hike.  At the end of the hike, I sat down at a picnic table and started scribbling away.

First Thoughts

My first idea was a superhero dice game(based off a card game I’m working on;  I might write a post about that one day), but it didn’t speak to me.  Which was a good thing, because a week later I discovered a game called DC DiceMasters, which was a fairly popular superhero dice game with very similar mechanics.

I then started thinking about the tin, and what it resembled.  A treasure chest?  Pandora’s box?  A safe?  I liked the treasure chest idea, so I took some coins from my box, which included several foreign coins and a few pennies.  I wanted to do something with flipping, so I was looking for a quarter, which I did not seem to have.  I had no quarter.

Them’s Fightin’ Words

No Quarter.  Something sparked, and within moments I had the beginnings of a game.  The idea struck, as I’m sure many of my readers can relate to, like lightning.  Though it happened almost instantaneously, I’ll do my best to describe the process here.

Unlike my other games, where good names tend to evade me, this one started with a name, which in turn sprang from a chance mental phrase.  No Quarter first made me think of the magazine for the wargame Warmachine/Hordes, then of boxing.  

Progression

The first idea was irrelevant, but forced me to recognize “No Quarter” as a fighting phrase.  The second one was absolutely crucial.  I love puns, and immediately thought of a boxing game which used coins as the core mechanic.  Coins have two sides, and people have two arms.  Left and right.  And in boxing, moves essentially boil down to hits and blocks.  Another coin flip.

Again unlike my other games, I immediately knew what aesthetic i would use(coins), what characters would be in the game(Washington, Lincoln…  the other two came a moment later with a chuckle, the Queen of England and the Buffalo on the buffalo coin), even what the cover art would look like(a dollar bill, but where the portrait of Washington usually is, it’s him and Elisabeth duking it out).  Things were falling into place.

Within a few minutes, I had a very rough prototype, which consisted of just twelve coins and a HP tracker.  I grabbed a guinea pig, played a round(it was dull, but I had a few ideas to fix that), and went back to my hole to make some changes.

That’s All!

That’s about as far as I’ll go for the Ideation post, but there’s still a lot to talk about in the Design article.  So what do you guys think of this format so far?  Would you change anything about it?  Would it be fine to use again for my other games?  If you have anything to say about either the format or No Quarter, please comment below, and as always, keep on geekin’ on!