How can we have a game about movie-making and simultaneous actions without having a film reel as an essential component? However, we did not stumble upon the current version of the film reel at our first iteration. In ScreenPlay, players don’t take turns like in regular card games, where one player gets to play while the other waits. Instead, players frame a scene at the same time: they decide what they want to happen during the next turn and once both are ready - filming starts and all the actions play out in sequence. This method cuts a lot of the idle time and allows for gameplay that makes more sense in a game about filming movies. [b]Birth of the Reel[/b] When designing ScreenPlay we knew we wanted simultaneous turns. Turn-based combat made little sense for a game based on movie-making, in which players are trying to mess up each other’s story while filming their own. With so many different types of actions a player could take in a scene, how do you figure out their order in a turn? This part of the game’s design went through a lot of vastly different iterations. An early solution was to give each type of action a different speed and priority. Playing a trope, playing a character, attacking, dodging, activating an ability, etc. all had differing levels of priority, which would determine the time at which the effect would resolve. [img]https://clan.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/images//41622509/66eee7c7d43389f4034734a39bd18171da1aa2bc.png[/img] [i]an early game build with placeholder art from some random game or other[/i] didn’t take long for this system to become overly convoluted with just how many different types of effects and abilities we had in the game. Not to mention, it was hard for players to remember the precise rules on ordering because of how arbitrary they felt, and it made turns play out predictably, working against the theme of creative movie-making. We wanted to give players the ability to choose their own order of actions scene by scene, so some other solution had to be found. This is how the reel was born. The idea was simple – you would have a set number of ‘frames’ available each scene, and each frame could house one action (for the most part). Frame 1 would happen first, then frame 2, etc. After some testing we figured out that we needed each scene to contain 2 to 3 actions, so that each one would be relatively short but still have room for outplays and unpredictable outcomes. You would start the game with 2 frames in act 1, which increased to 3 frames in act 2 and 3, to increase the pace of the game. This new system cleared up the ordering of actions nicely, and it added an element of timing – would you attack in the first frame or the second? Could you catch your opponent before they attacked? This new design helped out the competitive fighting game combat mechanics out massively, but not all problems were solved just yet. One thing we need to mention is how speed ties are resolved in games with simultaneous turns. With all effects now having the same speed, we now had a speed tie in every frame of the game. The way speed ties were and still are resolved in ScreenPlay is with the Spotlight. The player with the spotlight’s actions happens first, and the spotlight moves back and forth from player to player each scene. While this worked fine for solving speed ties in previous iterations of the game, now it made scenes too predictable. With all actions having the same speed, it meant that if you had the spotlight, you knew that your first action was “safe” and couldn’t be messed with by your opponent. Your first attack couldn’t be dodged, for instance. This didn’t work for us at all. We had to keep different speeds into the game. The predictability messed with the game’s competitive fighting game mechanics too much. [b]Perfecting the Reel[/b] A quick fix to the problem was to introduce a stat to all cards, called Speed, harkening back to pre-reel designs. The higher the speed, the faster the card or effect would happen within the limits of the frame it’s in. [img]https://clan.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/images//41622509/18e96ef18e98c12c78bd56e3a3716ed1aadcd792.png[/img] Suddenly, frame 1 wasn’t safe anymore. Turning the old rule into a variable stat gave us more flexibility in terms of designing various effects and abilities. We could now have slow trope cards, or fast crew abilities! Furthermore, you could now see how fast all the cards were by just looking at them, instead of having to remember an arbitrary rule. But again, complications arose. For one thing, ordering became confusing again. The priority system now took into account first the number of the frame, then the speed of the cards, and then who had the spotlight. It was just too much for an average player to keep track of, and people got confused. - “Is an attack with 2 speed in frame one faster or slower than an attack with speed 5 in frame 2? Why did you dodge my attack, if your character is slower?” We had to find a way to streamline the timing system. Luckily, the solution was staring us in the face. We knew that the Spotlight was necessary to break speed ties, so the only thing that could be done to simplify the priority system was to merge the frames idea with the speed idea. This is how the final iteration of the reel came into existence. By giving you more frames per scene, and making different actions cost different amounts of frames, slower and more powerful actions would take up more time on the reel, while faster and weaker actions would take up less time. We managed to create a simple, easy to follow timeline, which clearly shows you what is going on and in which order. By visually offsetting the two reels (yours and your opponent’s) horizontally, you would now be able to follow the order of all the actions left-to-right, like you would on any timeline of an online video, or in an editing software. It made sense and worked great! [img]https://clan.cloudflare.steamstatic.com/images//41622509/3b878be9226e43e02083d11d9939d39009311806.png[/img] As it usually happens in game design, it takes many iterations to come up with a clean, effective, and intuitive system, and rarely do you get to see the steps that it took to get there. Stay tuned for more dev diary updates and other posts every Thursday!