Bailey (xir/xir/xirself)
CREATOR
over 1 year ago
Project Update: Game Development Team Interview
Greetings to all 8787 of you! (Seriously, it blows me away how many of you there are and how fast you’re getting through those achievements.) For today’s update, I was able to have a lovely interview with the development team for Spirit Island: Nature Incarnate. They brought some excellent insights on how game development, some excitement, and some teasers for later revealing… Find out more in our interview with Ted, Emilia, Nick, and Christopher below!
Hello, everyone! Please introduce yourselves with your name, pronouns, and role on the dev team.
Ted: I’m Ted! Pronouns are he/him. I’m lead dev for the team. I kind of view a lead as having a couple of roles. One of them is building a consensus — making sure whatever we’re doing, we’re doing as a team. Another important aspect is making sure when there’s a problem that the right person is working towards it. The third thing is bit of a “the buck stops here” thing. We’re making sure Eric’s vision is being met, and that we’re making a game that’s balanced, fun, and approachable by players.
Emilia: I’m Emilia. I use she/her pronouns. It’s sort of hard to say what particular role I play. Everyone is sort of involved in every part of the process. One thing I’ll say that I do more than others is the broader, more conceptual reworks. Sometimes Spirits need changes that are tweeks, and sometimes Spirits need changes where it’s completely different. I like doing that a lot.
Nick: Nick! Pronouns: he/him. In terms of what I do, like Emilia said, we all kind of touch on a lot of things. But what’s kind of distinctive to me? I prepare the test files for the playtesters. I’m also the one who has to tell everyone, “No, we can’t do that. The rules can’t handle it.”
Christopher: Hi, I’m Christopher. My pronouns are he/him. I’m just a simple member of the dev team. I have less encyclopedic knowledge of the rules than Nick does, and less complete/overall of the mechanics than Emilia does, and less concrete idea of Eric’s vision than Ted does. I’m the caboose! But, what I do have is direct communication with Rae (lead graphic designer for Greater Than Games). I have some good ideas for naming things! I’m here for the product design side of Spirit Island, which has been my role with Spirit Island since the beginning.
What drew you all to Spirit Island in the first place?
Ted: I obviously first heard about it when it was a prototype when it was at one of Eric’s game nights. Spirit Island had a lot of the things I like. And I told him, “Y’know what I want more from this game? More powers, and cool effects, and stuff that you can get that other people might not have.” It was just fascinating and kept giving him more feedback.
Emilia: I actually got into Spirit Island indirectly through Sentinels of the Multiverse. After about y’know, two-thousand hours of Sentinels of the Multiverse, I thought, “This is great! What other games do Greater Than Games make?” I found Spirit Island and really loved it. A lot of the same thoughts as Ted, but obviously I came way later. Branch & Claw had already been released for a little bit. But, I liked the diversity of gameplay experiences. Games of Spirit Island are very different from each other in a way that a lot of other board games aren’t. And I thought it was great that there was a board game that was anti-colonialist!
Nick: I suppose that puts me in the middle of the timeline. I randomly stumbled upon the original Kickstarter. Completely at random! I don’t even remember why I was on Kickstarter that day. I saw one of the Spirit panels. I had no idea what it was doing… but I wanted it. There were a lot of co-op games at the time, but they were all played from a generic player standpoint where later in development there might be one special ability the rest of the table doesn’t have. That’s great and easy for players to switch it up, but I had been kinda getting over it. But these two panels are wildly different from each other! Then I backed it and forgot about it for two years until I received it.
Can you explain the process of developing a Spirit in general?
Ted: I would say the very first thing I do when I look at a Spirit is say, “could this even work in the first place?” Sometimes you have this initial idea of what the Spirit is trying to be, but the actual attempted implementation just doesn’t work at all. At that point I have to go back to Eric and ask what the vibe is he’s going for. Assuming it’s functional, there’s a three step process.
Step one is to make sure that there’s a good and engaging mechanical hook that people are excited about. A good example of this would be like if you’re playing as Ocean’s Hungry Deeps? You want to start drowning invaders. That’s the schtick of the game plan and you want to do that. You want to make sure that’s good and enjoyable for players regardless of whatever else is going on.
Step two of design is taking all the pieces that make sure they can contribute to the overall gameplay experience.
The third step is about making sure all of the numbers match. How strong and weak it is at different points of the game are going to provide a good arc throughout the game. And that there’s going to be different kinds of play experience.
Christopher: That’s so interesting to me because I come at a Spirit completely differently. I look at it and say, “Okay, what is the thing that is going to entice people? What’s the initial ‘ooh! This is what I’m excited about’?” That thing that Nick first ran into when he saw that Spirit panel. That’s the structure we’re going to build the whole scaffolding around.
Emilia: To go into more specific detail, sometimes we get handed off a Spirit with everything already figured out and sometimes it’s “Here’s a Spirit that does these things! This one does fear… somehow.” The exact details are always different. We take it, fill it out, test it among the four of us, and reiterate it to a point where we think we can get playtesting feedback. And then we iterate it again, and so on and so on. The first step - and maybe even first two steps that Ted mentioned - will all be internal to the devs. Sometimes the playtesters find things and we have to go back.
Does that process look different for aspects, major/minor powers, events, etc.?
Christopher: It really only looks differently in that you have to approach things completely differently. You have to approach a Spirit differently than an event, but all of them have the same thousand yard thing of Ted’s three steps. Sometimes playtesters break things. Sometimes playtesters find a thing and they say, “here’s a thing! We think this is great!”
Ted: There is one important caveat here. Aspects and Spirits need a hook, whereas most things don’t. Major and minor powers can have a hook, but not all of them do. Event cards are role players, but don't have to be as exciting. There’s a little more flexibility there.
Emilia: Compared to Spirits, parts of the game that are a little smaller are more likely to change radically. It’s hard to sort of express that idea in a way that resonates with players. With things like event cards and fear cards, they can just be totally different if they’re not working out.
Nick: One of those things with the smaller items is that sometimes the right answer is to just cut them. Whereas with a Spirit we probably have enough that we can make the balance and the polish work. Sometimes the answer is just to cut them.
Ted: I’ll also say that Eric gave us about 40 aspects for this expansion. To which I said to most of them, “Very cool, not for this expansion.”
Christopher: Yeah, but I’m surprised and satisfied with how much we didn’t cut.
Christopher: Yeah, but I’m surprised and satisfied with how much we didn’t cut.
Are you all working together at once?
Ted: We have weekly meetings. The vibe that ended up working best though was us working in pairs! We’d split up all the different issues and every week we choose a different pairing of two devs. You two take a look at these three Spirits and these aspects and so on. We have a list of what we’re trying to get done. It was super helpful to be able to mix and match and change perspectives. Someone could be running with an idea for a while. Nick, I know you worked on the adversary for a while, but when you got burnt out you were able to take a break.
Christopher: It was fun to break into the duos, not just for the utility but also for the different strengths. Like Ted was saying, Nick would be working with Emilia but then next week working on the same thing with Ted. The dynamic is so different. Any two of us are a very different creative thing. Someone’s feeling burnt out on this thing? Swap it out. There are certain things other people have paid more attention to, but overall it’s great.
How long does the development question process generally take?
Ted: How long can Paul give us? It takes that much time.
(That’s Paul Bender - President of Greater Than Games)
Christopher: We’ll take as much time as we have, but some things we work on and it’s like: boom! We’re done! Okay great! Some things… are not…
Ted: The trade off is that we want this to be balanced and complete and well rounded, but we also want people to have it. If you gave us a year, there are probably things that we could do to make Nature Incarnate better. But better enough for people to go another year without playing it? What I can say if you’re looking for rough estimates! Adversaries take approximately 12 months. A very high complexity Spirit is also 9-12 months. High difficulty is probably 6 or so.
Christopher: That’s obviously not 6-12 months of us doing only this thing, of course.
Ted: And also sometimes you need to have an idea rest in the back of your head for a couple of months or weeks.
What item (Spirit, Aspect, etc.) gave you the most trouble in terms of development? Why? And by contract, the least resistant!
Christopher: Well there was that one power where we changed nothing.
Nick: There was a tie where we considered changing something about an aspect, didn’t, and put it in.
Ted: I’ll put this to a vote, but I definitely think that the adversary and one of the Incarna Spirits.
(Vigorous nodding from everyone.)
Emilia: One of the Spirits took a while but when it was good, it was good. There was a gradual iterative process. It took ages to get it right just because of the amount of things, but by and large there was gradual progress over time. My vote is for most trouble in terms of development is a different Spirit. The story with that Spirit is basically we had an iteration that was fairly different from the current iteration. Innate powers were the same, but the tracks were different. The rules were different. One of their special rules worked in a totally different way. It was good enough where it was fairly balanced, but it was a little more complicated than we wanted. We thought we could go back to the drawing board and get a little more into this.
Ted: More precisely, Eric said, “Please rework this.” He was right!
Emilia: This was a couple of months ago, though, so this was pretty close to the end of the process. It was a very rapid process. That said, I’m really happy with where it ended up!
Nick: That last sprint was definitely the most stressful. In terms of effort overall? Only just barely that Spirit over the adversary. We completely rebuilt that Spirit three times. Where we had a week at the end!
Can you give examples of what it’s like feeling out something? Do you have any examples of knowing when something is too hard or not hard enough or things like that? Are there any hard metrics used?
Nick: The most effective objective metric you have is: did you win? One of the problems we have when people do testing is when people are playing something too hard or too easy for them, they want to compare the Spirits. “Oh with this Spirit I added two blight, but not this one!” Yeah, but you easily won with both of them. Those Spirits might both be equally good at a good challenge. That’s the most objective thing we have, I think.
Ted: I feel one of the games needs to have to be fun is a moment of tension. You feel like there’s a chance you could win or lose. If you win, it feels fair. If you lose, you’re good with that and ah well, maybe you got some bad luck. You should always feel like it could go either way. Does it feel like I credibly could have lost? If not, then there’s a chance it’s probably too easy.
Christopher: Most people play a game because of how it makes them feel when they play that game. So how a Spirit feels is probably the most important thing. If you have a strong character who feels passive and a passive character who hits hard, it doesn’t work.
Were there any unique challenges to Incarna that came about in game development, if any?
Nick: Oh yeah. A really, really big one was figuring out how much mobility to give the Incarna. The entire point of the piece is that it’s special in what it can do. If that piece can be anywhere at any point, then it shouldn’t exist. Just have it be tied to a power or something like that. The fact that it’s one piece, it’s constrained. How mobile should these Incarna be? Some of them you’re supposed to be running them all over the board. The other half… are deliberately difficult to move. Moving them is supposed to require distinct effort. There were constant conversations with playtesters about “can we just move this just a little bit more?”
Christopher: And we tested it! What if there is 1.1% more movement, is that okay? Nooo.
Ted: I love how we have the same mechanic for both ends of the spectrum of hypermobility and being stationary!
Nick: The second one on my list was empowering for all the Spirits. What do they get for the power, how do they get power, how often do they want to empower? The Spirits have a pretty big range for how much we think they ought to be empowered. On the one hand you have Behemoth where empowering is easily available and we expect everyone to do it by about the middle of the game. The Spirit is balanced around that. But then we have other Spirits where only a particular strategy empowers because powers are gated behind certain other things beforehand. There were several where the empowering and benefits changed several times. Let’s make sure we power it enough and often enough and it doesn’t feel mandatory.
Ted: I think that was the overall goal. We wanted it to feel like it was a tactical option that you could take but you were not obligated to take it. The one exception was Behemoth because it’s fun and easy. And if it’s something that’s fun, people are going to want to do it.
What aspects are you most excited about for the previous Spirits and why?
Ted: I’m personally really excited about Deeps, the very first bit of content that I tested. When I saw Deeps, I could see players saying, “I want this expansion for Deeps.” It’s rare in a game to see an aspect that’s that enticing to play. We needed to get this in this expansion.
Emilia: One of the things that I really like in Spirit Island is the support effects. Because of that I’m really excited for one of the expansion aspects.
Nick: Weirdly enough that I’m most excited about are two that I’m never going to play once they exist. These are both of what I think of as accessibility aspects. They take spirits that are really hard to get into and make it a little bit easier to get to as a Spirit. I think they’ll give people a chance at these Spirits if they bounced off it the first time. I play both those Spirits normally!
Christopher: People said all the good ones! Thunderspeaker’s Warrior, too, though. I like going on the warpath with that Aspect, and I also like being a cult leader with another Incarna Aspect.
What makes expansion stand out for you?
Christopher: We worked on it! But seriously, Incarna. I think when people start understanding how it changes how Spirits play, it’s pretty notable. It’s like the difference between tactics and strategy. People who really like positional games or Thunderspeaker from the core game are gonna like some of that. People that don’t like that? Don’t worry, there’s Spirits in there for you!
Emilia: I think there’s a wide variety of stuff in it! Incarna as a mechanic is something new. There’s a bunch of Incarna Spirits that interact with it in a bunch of different ways. All of the non-Incarna Spirits are also really distinctive in how they’re played. There are a bunch of major powers that do a lot of really cool things. Lots of stuff, very different!
Ted: I really want to echo the major powers. We’ve gotten a lot better at balancing these things. Every one of these major powers I’m excited about. I think we’ve done a really good job of finding just the right point where it’s not overpowered but it’s really exciting and compelling. And I want to give a shoutout to blight cards! There are so many interesting blight cards. I’ve set aside the base game blight cards and only use these because they’re so fun. I think players are going to be really excited to see these in a way they were not anticipating.
Nick: I’m actually going to give a shout out to the event deck! I’m a little biased, I worked on the events a lot. I really like what we did with the more complicated events. I think we have a few choice events where people are seriously torn between the choice they take.
—
Thank you so much everyone for both the fun interview and the excellent insight!
You may have noticed a few names have been italicized, indicating redaction, or conveniently avoided. Will we reveal them at the end of the campaign?! Who can say… It’s me. I can say, and the answer is yes. In our last update, we’ll have a little reveal as a reward for everyone who’s read everything all the way through.
But, you obviously want things revealed now. Here is the revealed card for this update.
Major Power: Fragments of Yesteryear
This Major Power lets the Spirits rewind time in one land:
Return the land to the way it originally was. Or with the help of the Moon threshold, the way the Spirits wish it originally was! And yes, this Power can remove an unlimited number of Invaders and Blight.
—
That’s all for now! We’ll see you all on Friday with a brand new Spirit reveal!
Comments
20