Random Thoughts: Parallel Design and Permission to Design

     Welcome back to TwistedSpoon Studio! Week by week, we've been designing a custom Magic set: FUR, the festival of beast-folk. We've spent a lot of time talking about the beast-folk, but not so much the Festival. That changes today!

    Setting is about more than just the place-- it's also about the time. Diehard would be a very different movie if it took place on Palm Sunday instead of Christmas Eve. War of the Spark would just be another Ravnica set without the eponymous war. Innistrad: Midnight Hunt without the festival would be... wait, wait, wait. Midnight Hunt has a festival? But that's our thing! Ugh, I hate it when Wizards does this.

    My old college roommate and I have a joke that R&D listens to our private conversations. When Kaladesh came out, we conspired to create our own artifacts-matter set based on a novel he was writing. Originally, it was full of thopters. One day I said "You know what? No one's going to get damage through if there's all these 1/1 flyers hanging around." So we replaced the thopters with something a bit more unique-- a noncreature artifact token with "Sacrifice this artifact: Add {1} to your mana pool." We called them scrap.

    Four months later, another Magic set came out-- as they do-- and we noticed something. The Tezzeret from Aether Revolt had an ability that made Etherium Cells. Do you know what they did? "Sacrifice this artifact: Add {1} to your mana pool." Jokes aside, obviously Wizards makes these sets years in advance, so there was no correlation, but it felt good to see our mechanic in print. Especially when Ixalan came around two blocks later, with its treasure tokens and all.

    Another mechanic that we made for the set-- it was called Minor Fifth, if you know, you know-- was called Unburden. Red/green has always been my baby, and I wanted to try something that blended aggressive R/G decks with rampier ones. What resulted was a mechanic that read: "Unburden (You may have this creature enter the battlefield with a +1/+1 counter. As long as there are no counters on it, it has haste.)" The wording was not as elegant as Wizard's take years later in Ravnica Allegiance, but hey, I still got to see "my" mechanic in print. (And this time, the timeline works out that they could have been listening. They probably weren't, but you know. They could have.)

    As Mark Rosewater says all the time, "Magic is a hungry beast." This is one of the reasons that I want so badly to finish FUR. It's only a matter of time before Magic makes a furry set. They already have all the pieces. Hell, I pitched in the introductory article why it would make a good fit. The point is, I'm going to do it first. I'll be able to look at WotC's set and say, "Hm, that's interesting. Here's how I did it." And as design progresses, I find myself more and more surprised that crafting hasn't already been done. Vibrant is a play on Adamant, and Tradition is based on a scrapped mechanic for the Azorius, but crafting is intuitive and holds a lot of potential. I could genuinely imagine the same implementation with slightly different flavor in any standard set. Whenever it does happen, just remember that it happened here first.

    And while you're at it, you should race Wizards too! Put your own ideas out there and reap the satisfaction of having somebody print "your" designs. And it's great practice-- I've already learned a lot about the nitty-gritty of design by going through the steps, even though FUR can never be published commercially. A game design practice that I love, is designing games for IPs that you will never have rights to. I made a dice-rolling game based on Money Heist because I couldn't wrap my head around design in dice-rolling games, and having a flavorful top-down approach helped. I made a Star Wars tactical combat game because I had an idea for a mechanic and it seemed like it would be fun. I might just make an unlicensed Redwall Magic set just because FUR has reminded me how much I loved Redwall as a kid (and just how much of it there was). 

    The bottom line is, you don't need permission to be creative. You don't need permission to make games. You need permission to make money, but that's not what game design is about. It's about games and the people who play them. It's about creating an experience, for others and for yourself. It's about the inside jokes that you slip into titles and mechanics. It's about the elbow grease that you put into the machine to make it sing. It's about the little doodles in the margins of a notebook, the numbers with question marks next to them, the ideas that are banging around the inside of your skull looking for a way out. It's about the way that your heart skips a beat when it all comes together. It's about the friend, or the sibling, or the parent, or the child, or the stranger, who asks: "Can we play again?"

    See you soon!