GDS2 Chronicles: Conclusion

As you probably know, I was eliminated from the Great Designer Search 2.

I finished in fourth place, the highest result not invited to Wizards of the Coast headquarters for tour and interview. Two weeks later, I'm finally in a place where I can talk a bit about the contest and my feelings regarding it.

As stressful and eventually heartbreaking as the contest was, I'm very glad I took part. It did a lot for both my skills and confidence as a game designer, and certainly got my name out into certain areas of the industry.

In the end, I can't say that I disagree with the outcome. As passionate and knowledgeable as I am about Magic design, I don't have the professional or personal experience to do my dream job justice just yet. I have a ways to go as a person before I'm ready to make a creative passion my career. Some day I will design games for a living, but not today, and maybe not for a while.

In the mean time, I've been taking a break from Magic design and getting into some RPG system theory. I've got a huge post on RPG skills that will probably go up later tonight. I think my goal for the coming year is going to be getting a homebrew system into a shape where I can submit it to some publishers or just publish it myself online.

Finally, the GDS2 was a wonderful experience for just how much support I got from friends, family, and random strangers on the internet. One last time, thanks to you all.

GDS2 Chronicles: The Final Challenge

Tonight the fifth and final Great Designer Search 2 challenge begins. Of the four remaining contestants, one will get eliminated and three will get flown up to Renton for a job interview.

I'm currently sitting at the bottom of the four, so this is the round that I really need to make count. Mark Rosewater has emphasized that my card design skills are top notch, but I'm failing to present a clear and cohesive vision for my set.

I've been working on how best to do this, and here's what I've come up with for my write-up so far:

I think that "a peaceful world converting tools into weapons" is a good thematic concept for Utopia in the same way that "a world where destructive natural forces have made civilization impossible" was a good concept for Zendikar. But Zendikar wasn't known for its complex societal ideas - it was known as "Adventure World."

I need a simple, resonant, saleable theme for Utopia to complement its more complicated ideas. My answer is to make Utopia the "City Set." Ravnica used a city as its flavor backdrop, but it was too full of multicolor and guild themes to represent idea of a "City World" in gameplay.

The final challenge's assignment is to design an intro deck for our set. On the one hand, I think it really plays to my strengths - I can design a fun deck made of interesting cards as well as anyone. On the other hand, they already know my strengths: I need to show the Vision that I have so far failed to demonstrate.

GDS2: Utopia and Crutches

Color identity is my favorite aspect of Magic, so it's not surprising that my original set concept was about exploring the color pie in new ways. I wanted to depict the rarely-seen aspects, and the concept of a peaceful world adapting for war provided a framework for integrating these ideas into the gameplay of Magic.

This is not, however, an easy concept to design for. I struggled with whether or not it was doable at all, until I eventually settled on using enchantments as a mechanical touchstone to tie things together. The problem was that I quickly came to lean on enchantments too heavily, and they usurped the focus of my set. It was so much easier to design good "enchantments-matter" cards than "weaponized paradise" cards that it completely overran my submission.

Rosewater addressed this by deftly kicking the "enchantments-matter" crutch out from under me and telling me to start jogging. With the same update, my existing mechanics were condemned to the scrap heap and I was given four days to design 18 commons to show off my set's mechanics. Hoo boy.

I should mention that I don't think this was necessarily bad for my status in the GDS2. I was given clear instructions and a very difficult challenge, which is pretty much the perfect situation for trying to prove myself as a designer. It did make the process rather stressful, though.

On Wednesday, I narrowed my colors down to blue or black. On Thursday, I invented the Gold counter mechanic and shifted my focus towards black. I came up with the idea of life-payment Mercenaries late Friday and powered through the submission itself over the weekend. There was not as much time for playtesting or direction changes as I might have liked.

The end result is far from perfect, but I'm very satisfied with it. The mechanics are somewhat questionable, but they show my ability to adapt with feedback and convey a unified flavor. I made good use of collaboration with the online community, and I think it shows. I have no idea whether I will be eliminated this week, but I hope that I have demonstrated enough potential that some questionable mechanical decisions will be excused.

GDS2 Chronicles: Finalist and Input

October was not a good month for this blog. I spent two weeks pouring all of my energy into my Great Designer Search 2 submission, a week recovering, and then a week banned from talking about the search.

The good news is that after all that, I am one of the 8 finalists. My full submission is on the Wizards page here and I've revamped my Wiki page here.

Up to this point, I've pretty much done all the creative and mechanical work on Utopia myself. My big theme for this week is trying to change that. As proud as I am of the work I've done, I know that I can't brainstorm an entire set's worth of mechanics on my own.

I still want to show off my vision for the set, but I need to demonstrate that I can do that by taking suggestions and accepting other people's ideas. So give me all the input that you can, and I will make Utopia as awesome as it can be.

GDS2 Chronicles: Epiphany

I have all of my best mental breakthroughs at 2:00 AM. Really, I don't know why I bother trying to make serious decisions at any other time of day.

I've been very conflicted about the whole "Weaponized Paradise" theme for my Great Designer Search set. On the one hand, I feel like it's a very interesting concept with a lot of depth and available design space. On the other hand, it's very open-ended and difficult to implement. Feedback has been largely positive, but I agree with the concerns that the idea may be *too* high concept. I'd even gained some confidence with a few cool mechanics, but had been struggling with whether the idea was strong enough for a set. I considered just letting the theme go despite my interest in it.

Tonight's epiphany was that the best course of action is to give a set both a textured philosophical theme and a simple mechanical one. Invasion block's themes were "an epic worldwide conflict centuries in the making" and "multicolor." Zendikar had "adventure world full of deadly peril" and "lands." Now we have Scars of Mirrodin, with "a world corrupted by ancient evil" and "artifacts."

"Weaponized paradise" is the exact theme I need to drive the flavor of the set and determine how I want it to feel. But I also need a more basic mechanical concept to ensure synergy and focus my design. "Enchanments" is a strong (if obvious) choice that evokes a certain "powerful magic we had lying around" concept, but I'm not attached to the idea yet.

I'm pretty ecstatic about this breakthrough, though, and feeling like I'm back on track.

I've put up my page on the GDS Wiki here, but it tends to update a few days behind my thought processes on this blog.

GDS2 Chronicles: Conceptualizing

To compete in the GDS2, I will need to design an interesting world that leads to fun mechanics and gameplay. I'm not going to commit myself to anything this early, but I wanted to share my thought process for a first attempt at a concept.

Step 1: What do I Like?

My favorite conceptual aspect of Magic is the color wheel. I love the philosophical and idealogical aspects of each color, and how that translates into mechanics.

My favorite set theme was Shards of Alara. It explored the color pie in a way that had never been done before, giving us five worlds that embodied different aspects (and absences) of each color. I like the way it gave each segment a distinct mechanical identity.

My favorite unexplored space in Magic is the color wheel aspects outside of their stereotypes. People forget that red is the color of passion and love, and black is the color of open-mindedness and dealmaking.

Step 2: World Concept

Imagine, if you will, a world where each color has found peace and lives in harmony with its ideals. Red is the color of artists and lovers. Blue is the color of teachers and philosophers. Black is the color of idealized Randian capitalists, living in a mutually-beneficial society of enlightened self-interest. Magic is powerful and widespread, but not used for violence.

Now, this world comes under attack by some horrible outside force, shattering the peace and prosperity. Utopia is under attack by violent forces they do not understand. Finally, here is the lynchpin of the theme: They fight back.

Step 3: Thematic Concept

In two words, "Weaponized Paradise."

What does it look like when red mages kill you with love and creativity rather than rage? How does blue act when it outthinks you with benevolent wisdom instead of callous arrogance? How do I get around the fact that black has been stereotyped as a bad guy for 17 years?

Each color has aspects rarely seen in Magic because they don't make much sense in a game that is fundamentally about conflict and combat. I want to take these aspects, and force them to fit. Let's make art and creativity and wisdom badass.

Step 4: Mechanics

"The colors like you've never seen them before."

I want to explore the boundaries of the color pie as thoroughly as possible without breaking them. I want the colors to explore new space in a way that fits with their ideas. All sounds good and shiny, but what the hell does that mean in terms of the actual game?

I want to take a page out of the Shards playbook and give each color a recognizable keyword or mechanic that really summarizes what I'm trying to show with the color.

Enemy color hybrid seems like it might be a good to show off some of their non-stereotypical interpretations. Improvisation and creativity represented by blue/red spells that draw cards with an emphasis on randomness, or black/white spells about power and authority.

Step 5: Skepticism

I'm not sure I'll stick with this idea. I'm in love with it right now, but I recognize that ideas have a honeymoon period before you start recognizing their flaws. Feedback is encouraged.

GDS2 Chronicles: Vision

Today we got our first taste of the Great Designer Search 2.

The contest hasn't even properly started, and it's already blown my mind and completely defied my expectations. In retrospect, it was silly of me to assume that Maro would want to run the same contest twice - he's a sucker the unexpected.

The biggest change is that instead of discrete design challenges for random set concepts, each contestant has to design their own world/Magic set and develop it over the course of the contest. Moreover, they have provided a wiki on which we can discuss and share our ideas, and receive input and ideas from other people online.

Maro said the most important sentence in the article was "If GDS1 was about furniture building, then GDS2 is about interior design." I think the most important concept is one word: Vision.

We can't just think up a silly new keyword or new template for a cool ability. We are essentially being asked to step into the roll of Lead Designer, conceptualizing a set from the ground up and adapting the ideas of others to fit our core vision. It goes without saying that this is no small task.

Designing a compelling and mechanically-relevant world will be key to advancing in the GDS2, and we don't know how much time we have to do it. Gentlemen, start your creative engines.