Hello everyone, I’m S.L. Jordan, and this is Voltaic Overdrive.

Today, I’ll be talking about when you need to kill your darlings, or to at least save them for later. When people say “kill your darlings,” what they usually mean is when you’re designing game mechanics, while they might be good ideas, make sure they fit the game or system you’re designing.

We’ve all been there; your sitting at your desk, inspiration hits, and you write out a whole new game mechanic. In your eyes, it’s pretty good, but in a vacuum. When you zoom out and look at the rest of the project, something seems wrong. The rest of the game looks fine, the new mechanic looks fine, but it doesn’t feel like it clicks. You brush past that notion and bring it to the playtest, and everyone kind of walks away with the same feeling; It just doesn’t fit.

At this point, the designer (your or me in the case) are presented with two options. One, leave it in and brush it off, or two, remove it (kill it) from the game. Let’s say we leave it in the game. How does this affect the rest of the game? It erodes a sense of cohesiveness from the game. If our design isn’t serving the goals and outcome that we want, we’re now losing our vision and focus.

Leaving It In The Game

I’ve seen this many times picking up a game, where it feels all over the place and like there’s a lack of vision. To me, this is a worse outcome than having a mediocre game that feels cohesive. If I don’t know where to start or how it all clicks, I’ll lose interest quickly and put it down, probably forever.

Killing It (For Now)

On the flip side, let’s say the designer removes it from there game. Sure, we don’t get to use it now and nobody will see our awesome creation, but that doesn’t mean it’s gone forever. If it’s an idea you feel really strong about, keep it in your back pocket for your next game. While it might now fit here, it very well could work for your next project.

By killing it for now, we’re not losing focus on our main project, instead, we’re reinforcing it and tending to it, making sure our design goals don’t get diluted or lost in the mix. By staying focused, it doesn’t bog the game down, allowing even better ideas that fit the design to be inserted as well.

While working on my new game, Segfault Daemons, I had to do this a number of times. Most commonly it was certain abilities and class features. My primary background for tabletop games are high fantasy. Nothing wrong with that, but when you’re trying to make a game that’s more sci-fi focused and features shooting instead of swords and arrows, I had an issue with weapons and attacks feeling more like bow and arrows, which doesn’t really work in a fantasy setting.

I actually got around this by adding an action point system to the game. Each turn consists of four action points, and the length of the action determines how many seconds are used, allowing each attack to take more or less amounts of time based on the kind of attack. A quick shot? Only a quarter of the turn is used. Using a grenade launcher? You bet it takes longer. By killing my initial combat system, I designed one that fits my game better, and led to a new design philosophy for how actions and abilities can be used on a turn.

Conclusion

Have you had to make this decision before? Did you leave it in, save it for later, or are you still looking for a use for it? I’m curious how this has come up in your design process and what you ended up doing. Until next time, this is S.L. Jordan of Voltaic Overdrive, out.