Sunday, May 26, 2013

Something Like Alive

My entry in the 2013 Game Chef competition.



Elevator Pitch: Saving a spaceship that doesn’t want your help, in a world where wounds never heal. A game of perfect infection, and the imperfect cure.

9 comments:

  1. I reviewed your game for the Game Chef contest, and here are my quick thoughts on your entry.

    You did take a simple idea and turn it into a fully fleshed out, really epic game. There was so much going on that this would be better suited to its own game system rather than restricted to the contest at hand. The ability for the alien players to morph their characters during play was also intriguing.

    The game as presented had many flaws, though. First, the contest did state that the game had to be 4000 words or fewer, and this game wasn’t. There were also numerous grammatical errors throughout the instructions, which should have been fixed before submitting. The design of the ship is too complex for easy setup of games, and I would have preferred either an easy default setup or fewer types of rooms needed to play (think Faster Than Light setups). There were also rules where it was unclear what happens (for example, when rolling dice, the row consists of the first three dice; when rolled, a roll of 1 or 6 fails the entire roll. Yet when additional dice are rolled, the first fails on a 1, the second on a 1 or 2 . . . What happened to the 6?). There are also many, many steps to playing this game that is pitched more as a board game than a role-playing game that would warrant this many aspects to be tracked, resolved and applied. At one point, there’s also the ability to get a PA band setup so players can talk to each other, but only if those players share their codes. Nowhere does it mention how to share the codes, nor how these players talk so that only those players can communicate while no one else at the table can listen. My suggestions would be to either expand this into a full RPG style game, or toss out quite a bit of the unnecessary bits to make this a streamlined board game that can be played without having to track so many different kinds of information.

    Good luck in the contest, and thank you for sharing it with the rest of us developers.

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    1. You're actually allowed up to a 100 words over, FYI.
      Unfortunately, due to the GDoc format, I can't open it up and check out the document until judging it over, but that "6 fails the entire row" must be a typo or a misunderstanding.
      One thing that does seem unclear is that the game is primarily intended to be played online (over for example, AIM, or Roll20) and so the spreadsheet itself is meant to serve as the "map" that all players can share. Thanks for your feedback!

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  2. Hi there,

    I’m one of your Game Chef reviewers. As well as reading it through, my wife and I sat down with all the games to review this week and tried to play them. I’m quite experienced with narrative rpgs and story games, she less so, but very familiar with board games. We both have some but not much experience with more traditional rpgs.


    Both on the name and the elevator pitch, we chose ‘Something Like Alive’ to play first. We were both intrigued by the ‘living ship’ angle, being reminded of Farscape.

    We followed the rulebook as it written. We used the spaceship provided, chose that the gravity fields had broken and, after reading of the different factions, my wife chose to be one of the Maggot Cult, while I aligned myself with Second Command.

    We then read and enjoyed the setting information. I liked the angle of the parasite infections and my wife was excited to read that we were Queen infected, wondering if that meant that we would ultimately turn into Queens.

    We started to stumble, however, when we reached the mechanics. I didn’t really understand how damage was taken and how damage and non-lethal damage was distinguished. We also got confused over the dice rolls. I believe that we misread that the 3 dice together formed a row – and therefore we were looking to see where it said how many rows we would roll each time. Looking at it now, it looks clearer that each dice on its own forms a row, so you are actually rolling 3 rows of 1 dice each time, which you can then add onto.

    My wife was confused by the menus, however I am familiar with the *World type games and felt comfortable that it was almost akin to purchasing a series of ‘moves’ at once. I’m sure that that wasn’t in your head as you designed it; it was just where my mind went.

    We didn’t understand Keywords and Lockwords at all. My wife said at this point she wanted a character sheet to be able to understand what decisions she should be making for her character and started to lose interest in the game. Looking at Keywords & Lockwords now, I think Lockwords appear to be effects that the GM may apply to an area/roll, which can then be overcome if the players have a skill that provides the relevant keyword.

    I found that the skill list was quite extensive for the length of the game but that, while there were a lot of interesting ideas in there, none of it was really helping me learn how to play the game.

    Looking at the Common Menus, they appear to connect to the Skills, but I couldn’t understand, for example, how the ‘Order’ skillset impacted the Order Menus.

    On the VC, my wife wanted to know how much we started with. I was puzzled that they were introduced and then immediately told that they were rarely traded. This seems to reduce their relevance as a currency.

    At this point, we felt we couldn’t proceed any further. We read the GM Advice, but we didn’t feel it was enough we could create a character and actually start playing.



    In summary, what we enjoyed about it was the premise, the setting, the factions and their motivations. We liked the Queen infection concept.

    Areas that we felt needed improvement/revision are:
    - we felt we needed more help getting started with a game
    - we didn’t immediately understand the keywords/lockwords section and the relevance of the shopping section
    - we didn’t really get how the mechanics / skills / menus connected and interacted with each other
    - the ‘living ship’ concept of the pitch gets a little lost; we would be interested if it was more a driving element of the kind of missions that white cards might be sent on/go on

    Game Chef – intentionally – restricts how far games can be developed, and also the depth in which they can be reviewed. In its current state, ‘Something Like Alive’ feels to me as a really great setting, but which could use more work to help players to connect the mechanical elements and get them into the game.

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    1. Thanks! Yeah, I got way too ambitious since I didn't really have a feel for how little 4,000 words would be. I'm sorry it was so hard to get started. I didn't have time to playtest with a GM other than myself, so I'm sure that's how a lot of the confusion made it through to the final text.

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  4. I'm not sure what the problem was--I've been trying since Tues or Weds to post my review, and it just kept failing silently. However, I seem to be able to post now, so, here you go:

    Something Like Alive Review

    In the interest of getting this in in a timely fashion, I'm going to just clean up my notes, rather than try to put a more coherent narrative to them. So this is a slightly disjoint list of points.

    1: Where's the theme? It might be there, but it's not obvious. Best guess is that you're taking the intended meaning of the icon, which is elevator, in which case it doesn't feel like a central theme to the game, but just a peripheral element. The central theme of the game seems to be evolution or adaptation. But maybe you've decided that the theme is interpreted as adaptation in some way, and so it *is* fairly central?

    2: Where are the ingredients? Again, they could well be incorporated--the worm-thing coming out of an apple is almost certainly the inspiration for the queen infections, but it never actually says that. And I don't see obvious derivatives of any of the other ingredients.

    3: I like the dice mechanic. It could be better explained--does it only grow from the bottom end? are 6s always failures? Are we simply adding all the dice in rows that don't fail? I like how it's applied to "buy" results. Making up new result tables might be annoying, but the provided ones seem to cover a lot of the general cases, and provide good examples to extrapolate from.

    4: Similarly, buying off negatives is well done, and a nice way to build in difficulties while still giving players options (they can choose which consequence they want, if they can't buy them all off).

    5: Lockwords and Keywords didn't make sense to me. How are they different? which things in the game are examples of each? I'm guessing that the green highlighted words are one of them, and the blue highlighted are the other, but it's not clear. I think I see where they're going, and I could probably suss them out, but I'm not confident I'd be using them the same way the author is. Maybe the idea is that you need Keywords to do something, and Lockwords make it possible to do something? Or vice versa?

    6: The setup is an odd mix of specific and broad. There's a specific year that the aliens came aboard, yet the game can take place anywhere in a century span. Various other historical happenings are pinned down, too. And yet the very ship itself is pretty loosely defined. But, no matter what else is true, there are a small number of specific factions. I think a bit more setting would be good, in this case, but maybe make some of the other things less specific--in particular, I'd ditch the timeline in favor of indeterminate amounts of time in the past, and let any past history be created/discovered in play.

    [to be continued--wordcount limit)

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  5. (Continuing where I left off...)

    7: I'm guessing the whole thing would make more sense to me if I'd ever played a computer game other than Asteroids or Galaga (and/or more recently than 1987). There is at least one explicit call-out to a genre of computer game I've never played in the GM Advice section, and I'm guessing referring to success conditions/options as "menus" is meant to evoke a text-driven computer interface. Is "gate" a term of art in the computer-game world? Does it just mean "obstacle"? This may or may not be an actual flaw in the game. I know what someone means if they refer to "bangs" or "crucible", because of the sorts of games I'm familiar with--but I bet someone coming from WoW wouldn't. You need to pitch to your audience. Or, keep the terminology, but add definitions/explanations.

    8: Are the aliens good, bad, or ambiguous? Or is that uncertainty part of the point of the game?

    9: Overall, it feels a little *too* open-ended. I think more narrowly constrained story possibilities, or maybe a more detailed ship description (but not both--keep some of that openness, because it's also appealing)

    So, to summarize: interesting idea, probably not my cup of tea, and simply too much to explain in ~4k words. I particularly like the dice mechanics, though they could use some clarification. I think the setting should be more detailed, but the history less detailed. And, specifically from a Game Chef standpoint, it needs either to better express the theme and ingredients, or you need to better explain how it already does.

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    1. Thanks, what an exhaustive review! I did put a lot of work into integrating the themes, but it's my first Game Chef, so I didn't know I needed to explain the connections explicitly. I'll definitely be taking all this into consideration going forward, it hadn't really occurred to me that people wouldn't be familiar with the same computer RPGs as me, doy.

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    2. Well, you don't *have* to explain the connections. And when the ingredients are words or ideas, it is often obvious--but with images that can have multiple interpretations, it often isn't obvious. It wasn't just you--I have read several games this year where the connection wasn't obvious, and only 1 game that bothered to explain the connections. I ran out of time myself, and didn't include an explanation.

      And there are any number of criteria that one can judge a Game Chef entry on. As seen from the other two reviews here, not everyone weights use of the ingredients highly. Personally, when I'm looking at them, I care how well they embody the theme & ingredients, because I see that as the point of Game Chef, as opposed to other design competitions, or just designing a game on your own--in fact, the one I voted for was not as polished as another of the games I reviewed, but I thought it better used the ingredients (and was more daring).

      So, no, you didn't do anything "wrong" by not explicitly explaining how you fit into the parameters--there's no obligation or even expectation--but I think it's a nice thing to do, particularly if it's not obvious.

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