M.J. Newman's Blog, page 2

My Formative Gaming Moments (part II)

Hello again everyone!

Today I'm continuing my series about the moments in gaming that were not only the most memorable for me, but also influence my creative endeavors even today. We left off around the year 2000 with Perfect Dark, but we're going to take a quick step back to 1998, because I almost forgot something pretty important...

6) Metal Gear Solid (1998)—"You Like To Play Castlevania"

One of my favorite things in almost any kind of media is when the "fourth wall" is broken—that is, the conceptual wall between the work of fiction and the reader, viewer, or in this case, player. When done well, a fourth wall break can be an extremely effective means of capturing a player's attention (or in some cases, completely blowing their mind). That said, it is a very risky maneuver. Drawing attention to the fourth wall essentially acknowledges that the story being told is a work of fiction, which—while obvious—has the potential to completely ruin one's immersion within the fiction. And since immersion is one of the primary goals in gaming, this makes breaking the fourth wall a bad idea most of the time.

But when it is done well....hooooooo boy.

I can think of a few examples of games that break the fourth wall better or more comprehensively than this entry, but this is the first time I can remember it happening in a video game, so it has really stuck with me. And, of course, with many, many other gamers as well. This is probably one of the few entries here that almost everybody has heard of, but I don't care, it's so fun, I am going to talk about it anyway.

Psycho Mantis is one of the first bosses in the "tactical espionage action" game Metal Gear Solid. As a psychic, he can read all of your moves, meaning he is essentially impossible to hit. He floats around, dodging all of your attacks, all the while taunting you by reading your mind. And here's the clincher—he's reading your mind, not the mind of your character, Snake. He speaks directly to the player, reading the data off of your memory card to see what kinds of games you like. The first time he said"you like to play Castlevania, don't you?" because my memory card had Symphony of the Night data on it, I very nearly lost my shit. Then the really weird stuff happens. He demonstrates his telekineses by telling you to place your controller on a table in front of you and then activates with your controller's rumble feature. He even makes it seem like he's messing with your television set by switching to a fake "HIDEO" channel (Hideo, of course, referencing the game's director, Hideo Kojima). And the best part? The way to defeat Psycho Mantis is to unplug your controller and plug it back into the player 2 controller port, so he can no longer read your moves. Only then can you possibly defeat him.

In 1998, no other game (to my knowledge) broke the fourth wall so effectively, without breaking the player's sense of immersion. There is a sense here that Psycho Mantis is speaking directly with you, the player, and yet you never lose sight of the fact that Snake is the main character—if anything, there is this sense that Snake's reality is the true one and Psycho Mantis is reaching into a fiction that is beyond theirs. (And this isn't even the only fourth wall break in Metal Gear Solid. Don't ask me how long it took for me to find Meryl's codec number.)

Since then, I've become intrigued by stories that break the fourth wall. Doki Doki Literature Club, and even Destiny ("O, player mine!") are some examples of games I love that effectively break the fourth wall. You can see this influence, of course, in The Path to Carcosa campaign in Arkham LCG—Hastur's influence is the perfect excuse to break the fourth wall, allowing me to have some fun toying with the player's minds without breaking their sense of immersion. In fact, a good fourth wall break only adds to the immersive experience!

7) Resident Evil Outbreak (2003)—Communication Breakdown

Not many people might remember Resident Evil Outbreak, but I do. Oh, I do.

Again, I have to set the stage for this one. In 2003 when this game came out, there weren't many networked multiplayer games for consoles. The few that come to mind were Phantasy Star Online in 2000, SOCOM in 2002, and Everquest Online Adventures (yeah, the PS2 one) in 2003. Not many others. Resident Evil Outbreak was one of the first (and only) games to use Sony's network adapter for the PS2, before the PS3 made such things obsolete with the creation of the Playstation Network and so on. It was kind of primitive compared to online games for the PC, which had become commonplace by then. It was also one of the few games to use its brand new internal hard drive. In other words, the whole thing was rather fiddly. It took hours to find a game, and if your connection was even remotely shoddy, you were likely to disconnect within minutes. There was also no voice/headset support, an important distinction which I will get back to.

But the developers did some really clever things with this game's online multiplayer all the way back in 2003 that I still see emulated in many online games to this day, and what's more, many of the limitations they worked through actually made the game a far, far more effective horror experience. See, these developers knew that they were working under some serious constraints, and Outbreak was not an incredibly simple multiplayer experience. Players had to work together to solve puzzles, split up to cover more ground, trade items to get them to the character best suited for them, all while racing the clock. The developers knew most players in 2003 would not own a headset, and more importantly, they knew that voice chat would kill the game's immersion. Instead, they added a system of short, contextual messages that players could call up with a few button taps. "Here, take this." "Let's go this way." That kind of thing. Preset messages are commonplace these days, but this was pretty new all the way back in 2003 when most online games relied on the player typing their messages into a keyboard. It also ensured that the player always felt like they were in the game world because nobody ever spoke "out of character."

But the most important part of the communication in Outbreak was the fact that as soon as you left the room, you could no longer communicate with one another until you met back up again. They could have easily allowed some kind of global keyboard or voice chat, but they explicitly (and wisely) didn't. This—crucially—made the game still feel like a Resident Evil game. The second you were alone, you felt alone, and it was ten times more lonely because you knew somewhere out there, your partners were fending for themselves, possibly dying or running for their lives, and you were none the wiser. You just had to march on and hope that you would meet them again. And hope that if you did, they would be, you know. Alive. And not a zombie.

And let me tell you. The first time that happens...wow.

Let me paint you a word picture real quick. The later stages of Outbreak were pretty damn big. The hospital and university scenarios in particular forced the players to split up, sometimes for dozens of minutes at a time, in order to solve the puzzles necessary to escape in time. And if you didn't wait for your whole crew before approaching the finale (and the boss), you were likely screwed. But you had no way of knowing where they were, or how they fared. So imagine this. You'd split off from the group to go get a key item you knew the party would need to proceed onward. You'd been using the room you started in as a sort of base of operations, so you hoped that they would be there when you returned, organizing their inventories, waiting for you. But they're not there, and you're running out of time. Your infection meter is at 70%.

Now you have two choices. You can proceed onward without them and hope they catch up, or you can go looking for them. You know where they were headed, so you venture alone into the dark to follow them. You're not the group's primary fighter—you're the girl with the backpack who can hold lots of items and probably should not have gone off alone, but you were the only one with the inventory space to do so. With each door you open, you hope to find your missing teammates. You're calling out for them over and over, but...silence. Then, you hear shuffling. Oh, thank god. It's one of them! You round the corner, and—

Well. It was one of them. Your heart sinks. They stumble towards you with dead eyes. You turn and flee. But then, on your way back, you stumble into another member of your team, crawling towards you, wounded but miraculously, alive! Hope returns like a breath of fresh air. You patch them up with one of your herbs and guide them away from your zombified partner, and together you run to safety.

I love this kind of thing. Other games have dabbled in proximity-based voice chat, such as the recent Phasmaphobia, and I think that's wonderful. There's nothing scarier in a team-based game than losing contact with the rest of your team and the tension of not knowing how they are faring.

In Arkham LCG, we tried to capture this same kind of feeling with Labyrinths of Lunacy, although obviously, it is a very different experience. What I love about this scenario is that, aside from the brief glimpses you get into your friends' game areas, you have no idea how well they are doing. There is a unique tension to knowing that you have a part to play, and that your friends have their parts to play, and hoping that they are faring well. It also encourages you to help them out whenever you can, because let's be honest, you will immediately think of the worst possible situation. In all honestly, I think the best way to play Labyrinths of Lunacy is in different rooms entirely, so none of the groups can even hear one another. You have Resident Evil Outbreak to thank for that.

8) Fatal Frame 3 (2005)—Just a Dream

Fatal Frame 2 is by far the most critically acclaimed of this horror series, but the third game will forever hold a place in my heart for the way in which its entire narrative is framed, and the ways in which that framing affects the gameplay. The previous games in the series were split into linear chapters, and Fatal Frame 3 is no exception, but unlike the previous games, all of the "explore the haunted mansion" bits are dream sequences, and in between each such chapter, you awaken as the game's real main character and explore your very-much-not-haunted house.

Or is it?

You see, these segments are the game's "safe" spots. There are no ghosts to fight, not much to explore, no puzzles to solve, and nothing chasing you that you have to hide from. It is a breather. A nice bit of relaxation before you delve once more into a nightmarish world filled with jumpscares and a chilling, haunting atmosphere. It cuts up the pacing of the game nicely, giving you an opportunity to shake off your fright, chat with some of the other characters, and learn more about the world around you.

But the longer the game goes on, the more your dreams and reality begin to bleed together. You start to see things. And since you are fairly sure that there is no combat during these segments, you begin to wonder if the things you are seeing are truly real, or just a figment of your imagination. After all, you probably just got back from some other incredibly scary section of the game. So maybe your mind is just playing tricks on you.

And then it starts getting weirder. And weirder. And weirder. Sometimes you will be up on the balcony and see somebody downstairs who isn't supposed to be there. Or you'll be downstairs and see somebody up on the balcony. You keep seeing feet everywhere you look, poking out from under doors and what not. Or strange images in the pictures you snap of windows and doors. And then it starts getting absolutely terrifying.

(Warning: Volume. Headphones not recommended.)

Guhhhhhhh.

Scares are scarier when you're not expecting them. But the sensation of not expecting it growing and growing and growing into expectation slowly over the course of many chapters of gameplay is what makes this so effective. By the end of the game, you are left as utterly terrified of waking up as you are of the nightmare itself. The two become inseparable. It's incredibly effective, and to me, makes this game one of the most memorable horror experiences of my life. Silent Hill 4 also did something similar with its first-person hub, and I adore it.

What this moment taught me, like Silent Hill before it, is how important pacing is to effective horror games. If this game had simply been one long nightmare sequence (like Fatal Frame 1 and 2 before it), I have no doubt it would still be a great game, but it would lose this magic touch that made it so, so much more.

9) Shadow of the Colossus (2005)—Simple Complexity

I honestly didn't know what to expect when I first played Shadow of the Colossus. I knew that I liked Ico—Shadow's predecessor—but this game just looked so different, I wasn't sure if I was going to like it or not.

Then I played the demo a few months before the game came out, and my jaw didn't leave the floor the entire time. I'm pretty sure I played the demo at least ten times before the game even came out. There was so much to explore in just that first colossus fight alone, and that was by far the simplest part of the game. From the moment you start to explore the world of Shadow, you know you are in for a treat. This was a game in which you could ride a horse and it wasn't just "press A to go faster." You could shoot your bow from horseback and still control your trajectory, you could leap from horseback onto a colossus, you could stand on your horse and do all of the above, it was so simple and yet so, so complex in terms of what you could achieve. This is a game in which your two moves are, essentially (1) climb and (2) stab; a game with only sixteen enemies in the entire game world, and yet it managed to achieve so much interaction between the player and the game world with just a few button presses.

Shadow of the Colossus, you see, wasn't a fighting or action game. It was a puzzle game. You had to find a way to use your incredibly limited repertoire (bow, sword and hold on for dear life) in order to solve sixteen incredible puzzles, and each of those puzzles was a glorious boss fight against a mountain-sized monstrosity. It was epic...but it was incredibly minimalist in its approach. This wasn't a bloated Zelda game with 30 different items and various spells to collect. You didn't unlock any new moves or items as you progressed. You just had your sword, your bow, and your horse. That was it. And yet, somehow, you were meant to take down monsters like these:

Again, I played the demo almost a dozen times, because I thought there was no way the real game could be as good as that one single short fight, and yet looking back, that first colossus is piddly compared to the rest of them. By the time the game was over, I was practically begging for more. This game had so much of an impact on me. The world was vast, enormous, and yet completely empty. Just you and 16 bosses to find and take down. It made me want to explore even more, it made me want to find the world's secrets, but there really weren't any.

And I wasn't the only one. For over a decade, people searched and searched and searched for a hidden 17th colossus. In fact, this game hid a ton of cut content and secret areas only accessible through datamining or glitching through a wall. It was this phenomenon that really got me interested in the behind-the-scenes process of game design.

(It also really creeped me out. There's nothing quite like breaking through the wall of a game world you've become so immersed in...)

Anyway, Shadow of the Colossus taught me that simplicity can go hand-in-hand with complexity, and that sometimes a minimalist appraoch to a game's design can enhance it, rather than detract from it.

10) Dark Souls (2011)—Ash Lake

When it comes to Dark Souls, there's a lot I can talk about. I can talk about the oppressive, haunting atmosphere. I can talk about the unrelenting difficulty. I can talk about the spectacular level design, or how creepy New Londo Ruins and the Catacombs are. Instead, I'm going to talk to you about what is almost definitely the least important area of the game—Ash Lake.

In fact, Ash Lake is so unimportant to the overall structure and story of Dark Souls that you'd be forgiven if you'd played the game and never heard of it. See, Ash Lake is an entire zone hidden behind a hidden zone hidden behind a hidden door. It's also one of the coolest and creepiest areas in video game history, in my personal opinion. I mean, just look at this place:

This area may be small, but what it accomplishes with just its background alone is stellar. You arrive at Ash Lake first by finding a hidden door inside the giant tree trunk near the swamp in lower Blighttown. That door takes you down the inside of the tree trunk into a hidden optional area called the Great Hollow: a deadly, labyrinthine series of wooden platforms and ramps prowled by deadly basilisks. It's not an easy journey if you are low to mid level, and there's not much to get here. You go into this secret area expecting it to be either nothing—just a room and some loot—or incredibly important. And in the end, it's really neither.

And when you get to the bottom, you emerge from that enormous hollow tree to find yourself on the sandy beach of Ash Lake, below the very firmament of the world, surrounded by dozens, hundreds such trees. (And a big-ass hydra, the only enemy here really worth any salt.)

And that's it.

It is lonely, barren, depressing, and incredibly spooky. The inference here is that the entire world is held up by these trees, or perhaps each tree leads to a different world entirely, and Ash Lake is this sort of world beneath the world, an extradimensional hub of nothingness. When I got to the bottom of the Great Hollow and saw this place, I was just floored.

I had expected to emerge deep underground, in a cavern of some kind, not...here. It was almost dizzying. I had a sense of vertigo, thinking of how deep and infinite this ocean must be, or how far it reaches in all directions. Like in Shadow of the Colossus, I found myself wanting (and yet dreading) to swim to the edge and somehow find myself in another universe entirely. It was deeply unsettling and haunting in a way a real horror game just could not achieve.

And, again, that was it. There was really nothing else there but the aforementioned big-ass hydra and a statue where you could join the Dragon Covenant. When I got down here, I expected a boss or a shortcut to another zone, or something to justify its existence. I was thinking like a game designer—why did they put this here? Why doesn't it link up with anything? Why does it appear to serve no purpose? After all, dozens of people must have worked on this zone. Artists had to conceptualize it. 3D artists had to create its terrain. Animators had to create the few, sparse enemies inside it. Developers had to position what little items there were to find. And that creepy, haunting background had to be rendered by someone. And yet.

Nothing.

And that's when I realized: that was the point. They went through all that work and the point was that it was meaningless, empty, lonely, and yet incomprehensibly vast.

The gravity of this moment, of emerging from the tree and seeing this, I'll never forget. I've said before that one of my favorite things in video games is when you find a hidden area and it turns out to be an entire zone of the game that you never knew existed. Ash Lake is why. I didn't know Ash Lake existed until my third playthrough of this game. And when I discovered it for the first time, guided by just a simple, easily missed message in Blighttown ("invisible wall ahead"), I had to set my controller down and just...look around. It was beautiful and terrible.

I wouldn't feel that same kind of energy again until I played Bloodborne and noticed the pillars looming in the distance of the Hunter's Dream, or better yet, the scrambled, ruined architecture that can be seen in the distance of the Nightmare Frontier.

In my own work, I tried to evoke this same kind of feeling in some of the dream sequences of The Key and the Crescent. The Great Hollow and the vast, smooth pillars reaching up into the firmament of the world are quite similar to the trees in a certain nightmare in Act 3, but moreso than that, the idea of a place being an incomprehensible nexus of nightmares and worlds is very much written allllllll over Darkdrifters. Just take a look yourself, and you'll see what I mean...

Well, that's it for this time. I have one more batch of five gaming moments to talk about in my next post, so look forward to that soon! As always, have a great week! ♥♥♥

My Formative Gaming Moments (part I)

Hello everyone!

This week, I wanted to take a break from talking about Darkdrifters and Arkham Horror: The Card Game to talk about something near and dear to me: the moments in video gaming that made me drop my jaw and completely blew my mind. In some cases, these are games from my youth—the formative gaming experiences that sold me on the very concept of games as a form of art or storytelling. In other cases, they are more recent, playing instead upon my expectations as a longtime gamer. In both cases, each of these moments sparked for me a love and passion for gaming. These are the experiences I look back on and draw inspiration from; the emotions that I want others to feel in my work. Well, let's take a walk down memory lane, shall we?

In case it isn't obvious from the topic, this blog post will contain spoilers for each of the games I talk about, ranging from mild to heavy. It's pretty much unavoidable, considering the subject matter. I'll make sure there's enough space in between the name of the game I'm about to talk about and the spoiler so that you can scroll past it if you haven't played it before (although there will be images, so keep that in mind). And since I'm covering a few truly mind-blowing gaming experiences, I recommend you do just that if you've never played the game in question! Also, for the sake of keeping certain secrets...well, secret, I've ordered this list from oldest (and therefore least obscure/spoilery) to newest. Read on!

1) Super Metroid (1994)—After Mother Brain...

The very first of the entries on this list is also the earliest formative gaming moment of my life. Super Metroid released during a time when video games were almost entirely childish and silly, and it taught us that they could be so, so much more. Super Metroid was brooding, lonely, and incredibly atmospheric. It told its story almost entirely through gameplay, with very little in the way of written narrative or dialogue. So when it went out of its way to sell a story beat, it was really memorable. So imagine this. You are 8 years old (as I was when Super Metroid came out). You have spent weeks upon weeks getting to the final boss, Mother Brain. You finally destroy it, thanks to the sacrifice of the now-adult Metroid you came all this way to recover...and then, you see it, completely interrupting the victory fanfare:

This probably freaked most kids out the first time they saw it because UMMM ARE YOU KIDDING ME? I ALREADY BEAT THE BOSS!! And yet, it was cunningly foreshadowed in the very first segment of the game, which made you flee from a similar self-destruct sequence on a much smaller scale. What follows is a hectic three-minute-long flight back through many of the zones you've become familiar with. It's not particularly difficult, but it does challenge your awareness of the game's map and is pretty tense if you're not expecting it. A lot of the moments on this list encapsulate one of the things that is the best about gaming—that it has the capability to make you feel the same emotions as the character you are controlling. I've talked before on this blog about the concept of "ludonarrative," that is, the intersection between narrative and gameplay. Well, this is what is called ludonarrative harmony. This is the first time I think I ever encountered that kind of visceral emotion in a game—that exact moment in which I suddenly jumped and reached for the controller because holy shit the game isn't actually over yet and now I only have three minutes to get back to my ship before the entire planet explodes and oh my god am I going to make it back in time and which way was Crateria again was that the path to Brinstar or up to the ship ahhhhh—see, in that moment, I am Samus (albeit a lot younger and a lot more panicked). And damn was that cool.

If you're a fan of Arkham LCG, you've likely seen this same sequence before, because I just love it that much. I can't resist it. I just keep coming back to it. And if you've read The Key and the Crescent, you will recognize my love of Super Metroid there as well. Poppy is only a couple years older than I was the first time I played Super Metroid, and it's as formative for her as it was for me. The futuristic bounty hunter is also Poppy's favorite video game character, to the point where it even influences her way of interacting with the dream-worlds she traverses.

2) Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (1997)—Turning Expectations Upside-Down

I re-play Symphony of the Night every year or two. Not an exaggeration. That's how much I love this game. (Super Metroid, too, for that matter.) But I'm not too proud to admit that I didn't play the second half of this game for over a year after the game first came out, because I literally didn't know it existed. Because they hid it from players.

In order to explain how ridiculously gutsy this move was back in '97, let me set the stage. Nowadays most of a game's secrets are known before it even hits stores, and you can look up an entire playthrough on YouTube within hours of its release. But back then, the internet wasn't nearly as prevalent as it is now, and if you wanted to learn a secret about your favorite game, you had to either be told about it or look it up in a rare magazine. (Actually, some puzzle and point-and-click adventure games in the early 90s and late 80s had phone numbers you could call to get hints and walkthroughs. How cool is that?)

Enter Symphony of the Night. You're shown pretty early on that previous Castlevania protagonist Richter Belmont is now the master of the titular castle, and when you finally reach the throne room, you're certain there's nothing left of the castle to explore. You've been everywhere. It's all led to this. So you defeat Richter, and then...that's it. The game ends. But you're left wondering...is that really it? No Dracula? No epic finale?

It's not unless you view Richter with a special set of equippable glasses that you realize he is under the control of a dark priest (whose actual name is Shaft, which................okay) whom you must defeat in order to unlock the game's true ending. But it doesn't just unlock a new ending, it unlocks the entire second half of the game, which takes place in the same castle, but flipped upside-down, filled with new items and enemies, culminating in an epic confrontation with Dracula.

Considering the time this game came out, this was incredibly risky. I'm sure a lot of players, like me, got to the game's false ending and just assumed that was all there was to it, believing the game to be short and even a bit unsatisfying. To literally hide half the game's content and rely mostly on word of mouth to allow players to find the rest was unheard of.

Now, I've never managed to pull off this same kind of bait-and-switch in a game I've designed, because I think if players opened a box and over a hundred cards were hidden somewhere inside, I would be some kind of sorcerer. And I've always wanted to bring back the word-of-mouth quality in gaming that the internet has made obsolete. But, that said, the image of Castlevania flipped upside-down above its mirror image can definitely be seen as the inspiration for a certain scenario in Arkham Horror: The Card Game...

3) StarCraft (1998)—Mission Three

Before StarCraft, the story mode in most real-time strategy games consisted of playing the same mission—blow up the enemy base—on variable maps interspersed with occasional bits of narrative in the form of written dialogue or campy FMV (full-motion video) cutscenes. StarCraft was unique in that it presented a variety of gameplay situations throughout its story campaigns, the first—and perhaps most important of which—occurs all the way back in mission #3 of the Terran campaign, "Desperate Alliance."

How do you introduce an existential threat like the Zerg? We're supposed to be absolutely terrified of these swarming, world-devouring monsters, but as the Terrans, we're pretty badass ourselves. We have huge futuristic exosuits, guns, cannons, and dropships. We can blow up pretty much whatever we run into, right? Well, StarCraft answers this question pretty handily with a single objective:

Oh. OH.

Now, okay, in retrospect, this mission isn't actually that difficult, and I'm sure my experience was colored largely by the fact that I was only 12 when I played it, and not particularly good at strategy games. I remember the first 20–25 minutes or so being pretty tame, and then all hell started to break loose. The enemies were nonstop and relentless, assaulting my base in such numbers I couldn't possibly hold them off for long. By the last minute, my screen was filled to the brim with zerglings. I was floored. I'd honestly never seen this many units on a game screen before. I suddenly understood, as the Terrans did, the threat of the Zerg. And then the dropships came, and just like the climactic scene of Starship Troopers, bailed my troops out at the last possible second. Again, ludonarrative harmony: I felt such incredible relief, pride at my success, and stress about facing such overwhelming numbers again in the future. After all, this was only mission three. Yikes.

While not quite the same effect, in Arkham, I often like to give players objectives that sound inscrutable or ominous on paper. To me, there's nothing more chilling than the simple sentence "Objective — Survive," or "Objective — Escape."

4) Silent Hill (1999)—The Opening Sequence

Resident Evil (1996) was my first gaming experience with horror. Actually, no, it was my second. Alone in the Dark (1992) was my first, but it doesn't really count, since—and this is true—I never actually made it out of the very first room of that game (the attic), because I would shut the game off the very moment I was scared, which always happened within five minutes. Resident Evil was formative for me because it was the first horror game in which I felt like I could fight back. It had this delicate balance between player power and fear. Resident Evil coined the term "survival horror," and was influential not just for me, but for the entire gaming industry. So, by the time Silent Hill came out, I considered myself somewhat of a young expert on the genre of "survival horror." But I was just 13, and Silent Hill was about to make me eat those words.

At home, I mostly played video games in my basement with my brother, and we often played horror games together, either trading off lives or—more frequently—him playing, with me doing passenger-seat-navigation. I actually don't remember who was playing Silent Hill that fateful day. I'm pretty sure it was my brother Dave. I honestly can't tell you anything else about that day, because the only thing that I recall is this series of events.

We're in the moody, lonely, mysterious town of Silent Hill. There is nothing around. Not a single soul. All of the buildings are empty. A deep fog permeates the town, obscuring much of our sight.

We see our daughter, Cheryl—who we are here to find—turn around a corner. So, naturally, we give chase. And, as we do, the camera pans behind our character as it often does in third-person games.

We dart through back alleys and eventually open a gate that leads to—

Oh. Okay then.

Now like I said, I was no stranger to gore or disturbing imagery in games by this point, having played through Resident Evil and its ilk, so no big deal. We proceed onward. And as we do, the camera does something we'd never seen it do before. It moves. Not just hovering over our character or following behind us. It moves intelligently. It moves in such a way as to creep us the hell out.

I can't really show you this in screenshots, so I encourage you (once you're done reading this whole bit) to actually watch this entire sequence for yourself. You walk forward, toward the camera, and instead of cutting to a new camera like it would in Resident Evil, the camera slides up above our protagonist, looking down on them as they pass through the narrow alleyway, then sneaks back behind them, sinking low to the ground as it watches him venture onward into the dark. Games just did not do this kind of thing before Silent Hill came out. It made us feel like we were being watched. Like there was...something out there. Waiting. Stalking. It freaked me out.

Then, the true Silent Hill began. An air raid siren pierces the quiet, lonely ambiance. Slowly, we hear the industrial noises and irregular drums that are so iconic of the game's style of atmospheric horror. The daylight turns suddenly and dramatically dark—so dark that our character must take out his lighter in order to see. And when he does, things are...not as they should be.

The alleyway twists and turns nonsensically, leading us down a route that can't possibly exist in a normal town, littered, strangely, with gurneys, wheelchairs and other objects one might find in a hospital—an allusion to events yet to come. There are metal fences everywhere, for some reason, blocking our path. The noise now is overwhelming. It is loud. Unnerving. Stressful. God, I am getting goosebumps just writing about it.

Then we turn a corner, the camera low and facing our protagonist so we cannot see what he sees, but we can tell this area is covered in blood and viscera, and then—

I don't think I will ever, ever forget the impact of this moment. This hideous, unrecognizable corpse, strung up on barbed wire, haunted my nightmares for weeks. And then, as if that revelation wasn't bad enough, a bunch of bloody, murderous, deformed children suddenly attacked us from out of nowhere and unceremoniously killed us. Not in a cutscene, but in gameplay. We had no way of knowing what we were supposed to do. We could not escape. We had no weapons. We were being taught firsthand that this was not Resident Evil. This was Silent Hill. And we weren't ready.

So we died. And then we awoke. It was all a dream. Or was it?

I can't begin to describe how formative this moment was for me as a fan (and future writer) of horror. It wasn't the blood or the gore. It was the pacing. The slow, unnatural build-up of creepy atmosphere. The incremental effects—first the fog, then the camera, then the darkness, the sounds, oh god the sounds, the gurney, and then, finally, the reveal, and then the sudden onslaught.

Silent Hill taught me that horror, like comedy, is about timing. It's not enough to just show something that is scary. Horror requires investiture.

Now, obviously, I have never made a horror video game. And while the style is not quite the same, I hope that I've taken this lesson to heart in my writing—most especially in my long-form writing (that is, namely, Darkdrifters). Without spoiling much, this sequence reminds me in particular of the first nightmare sequence I wrote in The Key and the Crescent: Charlotte's nightmare in Chapter 7. I remember the day vividly—it was November 4, 2018, and my writing location of choice was a local coffee shop down the street from my then-brand-new apartment in NE Minneapolis. I know because I was keeping track of my writing on Twitter and on that day wrote, "I think I was subconsciously moving slowly because I knew this particular section would be tough to get through." Why was it tough? Because I was trying to recapture this very same feeling that I got from watching the opening minutes of Silent Hill. The sudden and oppressive loneliness. The mysterious, haunting atmosphere. The slow introduction of elements that are not as they should be. The build-up of intense, unsettling creepiness. And then, suddenly, almost from out of nowhere, a moment of stark and shocking body horror that shakes the reader to their core, made even more stunning by the affection that we feel for the characters trapped within this nightmare. If you haven't yet read my book, I hope that this perhaps inspires you to do so! (And for those of you who have, I hope I have recreated this intense emotion in my writing!)

5) Perfect Dark (2000)—Doing Literally Whatever We Wanted

My last entry for part 1 of this series is quite different from the rest: not a particular story beat or moment of gameplay, but rather, the complete absence of any curated story. Or, perhaps more accurately, the substitution of our own fun in the place of whatever the game was trying to make us do.

When Perfect Dark was released, the first-person shooter scene for consoles consisted of very few games, with GoldenEye (1997) being the standout example. I had played several shooters before it—Doom (1993), Descent (1995), and Quake (1996), to name a few. But what set GoldenEye apart was its incredibly fun (and ubiquitous) multiplayer mode. Playing GoldenEye until the wee hours of the night was a fixture of gaming sessions and sleepover parties with my friends in middle school, and Perfect Dark made the experience a hundred times better with the inclusion of an almost absurd, then-unheard-of level of customization. We had the capability to change not just our characters and the map we played on, but the game mode, the teams, the weapons and powerups that would appear, and who had access to which. Our imaginations were engaged. So 14-year-old me did then what 34-year-old me does now. We made our own modes. We iterated. We playtested. We came up with our own games to play within this game.

Aliens vs. Predator? We can do that. The Marines have access to rifles and the laptop gun, which can be placed on a wall as a sentry turret. The Predators have access to the invisibility powerup, this melee weapon, the enhanced radar powerup, this energy blast that resembles their plasmacaster, and so on. Tools for hunting. And the aliens? They have just one weapon, a melee weapon like a grinder that kills pretty much anybody it touches in less than a second. But they have super speed, low respawn timers, and 2 people on their team instead of 1. You know, to make them feel more like a swarm. Oh, but what about the screen-looking problem? It's too easy to glance down at somebody else's screen to see where they are. Oh, I know! We can tear up this lid for this old Monopoly game and tape it to the TV screen and then each sit in a different spot so we can't see each others' screens. (We actually did this.)

I still remember this game mode, twenty years later. That's how important it is to me. We made dozens more modes, too. Dozens upon dozens upon dozens. In its own way, Perfect Dark let me do what I didn't know I always wanted to do: game design. The joys of experimentation, of iteration, of exploring our creativity, of finding that EUREKA! moment when it all came together, and then the excitement of sharing our discovery with the rest of our friends at school—to me, this was one of my most formative experiences. I don't think I really need to explain why.

Well, that's it for now. The first 5 of my most formative gaming experiences. I hope reading about the moments that inspired my passion for gaming has also sparked something within you, as well. I think this series will come in either two or three installments, so look forward to seeing more soon!

Behind the Curtain – Scenarios

Hello again Arkham LCG fans!

Well, I ran another Twitter poll to see what topic you wanted me to talk about next, and "Scenario Structure" is what you voted on most! So today, I'd like to take a little bit to talk about scenario design in Arkham LCG—what goes into the structure of each scenario, from initial concepts to act/agenda makeup to encounter sets. This might be a long one, so buckle up and read on!

Where to Start?

In the early days of Arkham LCG, Nate and I were pretty much flying blind when it came to scenario design. We had LOTR to build upon, of course, but after 80+ LOTR quests, we knew Arkham had to be versatile enough to support a wide variety of different objectives. So, it was designed from the ground up with this purpose in mind. As a result, we had little to work off of when we designed Night of the Zealot and The Dunwich Legacy. We went with our gut, attempting to showcase the many different kinds of scenarios the game system could support, and writing the narrative around that. For example, The Dunwich Legacy at first looked something like this:

1) classic exploration / clue gathering

2) rescue a person / earn them if you do

3) TRAIN SCENARIO! / locations in a row

4) search for a relic / either earn it or don't

5) each agenda causes long-term repercussions?

6) going on the hunt!

7) stop the ritual / get to the ritual site before the cultists

8) lost in time and space

(this has been literally copied verbatim from my early notes which I saved)

From there, we created the story that would eventually become familiar to so many of you. "rescue a person" became the plot of both scenarios 1 and 2. The train scenario moved to #4 when we realized what the "relic" in scenario 3 should be, and where it should be found. Once we realized a lot of the early sections of the campaign would focus on the three professors from The Dunwich Horror, that led to the determination of the "long-term repercussions" in scenario 5 (that is, killing them off). And so on and so forth. (I do kinda love that my only note for scenario 8 here ended up becoming the name of the scenario.)

This process is what we in the biz call "bottom-up" design. So named because, if you were looking at a single card, you would be designing the "bottom" of the card (the game text / its mechanical impact) before designing the "top" of the card (its title and artwork / thematic implications). Just take that concept and extend it to the process of designing an entire scenario. In other words, a "bottom-up" scenario design would be one in which we thought of the gameplay mechanics of the scenario and then writing the story to suit those mechanics, whereas a "top-down" scenario design would be one in which we wrote/outlined the story, and then designed gameplay mechanics that helped to tell that story.

So, in the early days of the game, almost every scenario was a "bottom-up" design, because we wanted to showcase a particular gameplay feature. (For example, "what if all the locations in this scenario were lined up in a row from left to right? and you just were trying to get from point A to point B? What kind of narrative would fit that? Oh, I know! A train! And you're trying to get to the engine!")

It wasn't until The Path to Carcosa that we started doing more "top-down" scenario designs, because there was a particular story I wanted to tell for a scenario. (For example, "for this scenario, I want it to start off like a fancy dinner party with lots of guests to talk to, but as the scenario goes on things start going wackier and wackier, and it's unclear whether the party is filled with monsters, or you are hallucinating...")

The important thing to note is that both of these methods are totally and completely valid! In fact, most scenarios have a healthy mix of both. And a scenario that was designed from the bottom up might still contain individual cards that were designed from the top down, and vice versa. Think of this as just a starting point. These days, each campaign tends to contain both of these kinds of designs. (I wonder how many of you can guess which scenarios were designed from the top down and which were designed from the bottom up. Make your guesses in the comments below!)

Scenarios Are Like Buildings

...okay, not really, but hear me out.

Over the years, we've come to identify several different categories that scenarios (or individual acts) tend to fall into, even when we're not consciously designing them to fit into one. These categories have helped us to identify patterns, which in turn serve as either cheat sheets for making objectives feel familiar, or allow us to find potential points of departure. Think of this in the same way an architect identifies kinds of houses or buildings, based on their purpose, architectural style, aesthetic, etc. Is it a welcoming place, like a home or a lodge? Or an imposing one, like a courtroom? Does it display strength? Authority? Beauty?

Similarly, scenarios can be easily split up into a number of different categories. I'll give you some examples, and then explain what I mean.

Classic Clue Gathering: Pretty simple—get enough clues to advance. This is great for an introductory adventure, or as an act, to establish the start of a scenario. Each act might also throw some kind of wrench in the process, such as requiring you to spend those clues in a particular place or spawning an enemy that gets in your way. Generally speaking, we dislike ending scenarios with the simple expenditure of clues (we sometimes call this a "wet fart ending" because the scenario just kind of ends without any fanfare) so often, there will be some additional wrinkle during the climax, as well. (Examples: The Gathering, Extracurricular Activity, Untamed Wilds)
Race to the Finish Line: Get from point A to point B, usually while racing against the clock or fleeing from a terrifying enemy. Oftentimes such scenarios have locations that go in a straight line, so you have no other path to advance but forward. (Examples: Extracurricular Activity, The Doom of Eztli, A Thousand Shapes of Horror)
Hunt Them Down!: Find or otherwise deal with as many of a specific thing as you can. The harder it is to accomplish each one, or the more convoluted the process, the more it can become the framework for an entire scenario. This could be enemies you have to hunt down or parley, or things you have to discover at various locations. Very often this kind of scenario will be one with a non-binary win condition; that is, the more you accomplish, the better. (Examples: The Midnight Masks, The Eternal Slumber, The Wages of Sin, The Search for Kadath)
Find the Key Location: Reach a specific location, which is hidden from view—either in a deck of locations you have to dig through or by some other method of secrecy. Once at this final location, you must accomplish some important task. Sometimes, I like to close this kind of scenario out with a Super Metroid style "flee for your life" act. What can I say? I like Super Metroid. (Example: The Doom of Eztli, The Miskatonic Museum, The Secret Name)
Slay the Boss: Your classic Arkham Horror climax—an enormous enemy (perhaps even an Ancient One) has spawned, and your goal is to slay it, banish it, or otherwise stop some kind of ritual that will awaken it / send it wreaking havoc across the world. Sometimes this means shooting it with a shotgun, other times this means doing some other alternative thing (such as piecing together scenes from a certain play or assembling a pattern of hidden cards in your hand). Oftentimes we'll include both options so that all characters have an equal shot at winning.

There are a number of other smaller categories, but you get the idea. What's great about this approach is that we can easily identify what other scenarios a work-in-progress is similar to, so as to find points of departure and ways to make this new scenario unique. For example:

(spoilers from The Innsmouth Conspiracy scenarios I–III to follow)

The Pit of Despair was modeled after a "find the key location" sort of scenario—your goal is to find the exit and resign. We added some classic clue gathering to act 1 of the scenario in order to help set things up and introduce some of the new mechanics (keys, flooding, etc) before segueing into the "search for the exit" segment. The Amalgam serves as an additional ever-present threat, hunting the investigators down as they make their way through the tunnels. The point of departure here is the stretch goal of hunting down your lost memories in the form of flashbacks. Simply leaving the pit isn't too difficult—it's leaving with all of your memories that makes this scenario tough!

The Vanishing of Elina Harper was originally modeled after the "hunt them down" style scenario, in which you're trying to accomplish as much of a specific task as you can. In its first iteration, you were trying to collect keys, which made sense as a sort of "keys are important" tutorial. However, this ended up being a little close to at least one other scenario in the cycle, and I got excited to revisit one of my favorite scenario concepts from Lord of the Rings: The Card Game (Murder at the Prancing Pony). It's still kind of a "hunt them down" scenario, in that you're trying to narrow down as many leads as you can during act 1, but it then transitions into a more classic clue gathering / slay the boss style climax, where your goal is to confront Harper's kidnapper and/or find all of the clues at their hideout.

In Too Deep, on the other hand, is a classic "race to the finish line." Your only goal in this scenario is to reach the abandoned train station at the far end of town to escape from Innsmouth. But unlike other similar scenarios, we opted not to make the map a single straight line, instead offering the players an enormous, wide-open map with many possible routes, then blocking off their paths with barriers that the investigators could bypass in different ways. This proved to be a lot of fun and easily sets this scenario apart from its predecessors!

Once we know the basic act structure of our scenario, we have a general feeling for what the core gameplay loop for that scenario is going to be, and therefore have a better idea of what encounter cards would be ideal to challenge investigators trying to accomplish that goal. For example, if an investigator's goal is to race to a certain location, throwing enemies or treacheries at them that slow them down or prevent them from moving—such as adding more barriers in In Too Deep—might do the trick. If we're designing a scenario with a non-binary win condition, having cultists or treacheries that quickly advance the doom track is a great way to add difficulty and instill uncertainty without actively getting in the investigators' way. If the goal is to collect a certain trinket, maybe we'll add cards that scale based on how many of that trinket you've collected, that way the scenario gets naturally more difficult as the investigators succeed.

Encounter Sets Fill The Gaps

From there, it's time to think about encounter sets. If the above framework provides the skeleton of a scenario, then the encounter sets are the...umm...meaty muscley bits. Hm. This metaphor might be a bit gross.

Essentially, encounter sets provide us with a way of saving card space by repeating effects that we want the players to have to confront multiple times over the course of a campaign. They also become staple threats that players eventually learn how to overcome. If you're a veteran player, the moment you know Chilling Cold is going to be in a scenario, you know your assets will be at risk of being discarded. We also want each encounter set, generally, to play with some kind of common theme. For example, the Deep Ones in Innsmouth are all about doing something bad when they engage you (complete with a treachery that forces them to engage you). This makes it easy for us to look at the list of available encounter sets we've designed for a given campaign and choose the 3–6 sets that are most appropriate for whatever scenario we're working on.

Of course, there are many other things that must be considered, such as:

Are these sets thematically appropriate for the story? This is especially important for enemies.
What's the ratio of enemies to treacheries? Typically we like a ratio of 1:3, though this ratio may change depending on the nature and theme of the scenario.
How big is the encounter deck? A deck under 25 cards may be too small for 3–4 player games, whereas a deck of 45+ cards might be too large for 1–2 player games.
What's the ratio of horror to damage? If the encounter cards heavily favor one over the other, this might be fine for a given scenario, but's definitely something to keep in mind and ensure is balanced across an entire campaign, for example.
Do the effects, generally, combo well with one another? Are any of them anti-synergistic? It's a bad sign if, for example, one treachery refers to a trait and there are very few of that trait in the scenario. (Unless that's the whole point, such as the Witchcraft set in The Secret Name, which refers to the Witch trait and Keziah is the only Witch in the set.)

One of my personal favorite things about encounter sets is that it lets us revisit effects players already are familiar with, but in a new light that makes them seem completely different—for example, how the aforementioned Witchcraft set changes drastically from The Witching Hour to The Secret Name.

Closing Thoughts

Obviously, there is a lot more that goes into scenario creation than the above. Believe it or not, everything you see here is usually just the first few days of scenario development, as we like to plan out entire campaigns pretty far ahead of time so we can do things like order artwork, plan out the story, etc. It's also important to stay flexible when designing scenarios—sometimes a gameplay mechanic doesn't work out and we have to move things around, swap out encounter sets, or even change entire story beats to accommodate the change. Other times, the opposite occurs, and we may have to change the gameplay to suit an addition or an alteration to the narrative. Almost no scenario ends up the way we originally envisioned or outlined. Flexibility and adaptability is key to scenario design—and game design in general.

Anyway, as always, I hope this has given you some insight into just a little bit of what goes on behind the scenes when we're working on campaigns for Arkham Horror: The Card Game. Thank you for reading!

Each investigator earns 1 bonus experience, as they have gained insight into the machinations of The Keepers.

Behind the Curtain – Enemies

Last month, I posted that if I reached 1000 followers on Twitter, I'd do something special, and offered a poll with a few different options. Unsurprisingly, "post Arkham design insights" won out, and honestly, I'm pretty excited to reveal some behind-the-scenes details regarding the design and development process for Arkham Horror: The Card Game. So, without further ado, here is the first in an ongoing series of Arkham LCG related blog posts.

These posts will focus a little more on design/development insights and less on production, but I might occasionally reveal some production-related details from time to time. For today, I'd like to focus on enemies. Enemy cards a crucial part of Arkham LCG's design. As a horror game, it is imperative that enemies in Arkham generally feel scary, threatening, lethal. While doom is perhaps the primary driving force for tension in the game, enemies, more than any other cardtype, are the primary driving source for fear.

Enemies must be scary.

When Nate and I first started working on Arkham, we built its foundation on The Lord of the Rings: The Card Game, and while enemies in that game can most certainly be quite lethal, one of the pillars of that game is its epic and grandiose tone. You aren't just one character; you control a fellowship, with each of your characters likely to be able to handle different elements of gameplay, including defending against and dispatching enemies. Enemies in LOTR are also quite common, generally comprising roughly 30–50% of the encounter deck in most quests.

Arkham is a bit of a different beast. You generally control only a single character, so it was important to us that if you weren't equipped to deal with enemies, you really felt it. As a result, enemies have a few defining traits that were crucial to their design:

While an enemy is engaged with you, your forward progress is slowed/halted. This is very different from LOTR—in fact, in LOTR having an enemy engaged with you helps you quest. Okay, technically you can still move and investigate while an enemy is engaged with you, but attacks of opportunity make this a difficult proposition at best, and deadly at worst. Generally speaking, when you draw an enemy, you have to drop what you're doing and deal with it. This draws immediate attention to the enemy and makes them seem scary, even when they are sometimes not.
Enemies are deadly. Enemies do not have to "test" to attack you, but you always get a full turn to deal with them before they do. This makes them seem deadlier than you (since they always hit), but ensures that it usually feels fair when they do hit you.
Enemies do not have to be handled through combat. Obviously, removing them from the board is going to be the best option nine times out of ten, but it's not the only option. Many enemies can be evaded or even parleyed with to avoid having to actually fight them. This improves the RPG feeling of the game by granting players several different paths to pursue, and is necessary given the fact that you only control one investigator.
Dealing with more than one enemy is hard. Arkham's action system makes it difficult, or at the very least time-consuming, to deal with multiple engaged enemies; this helps make each enemy encounter even more tense, because you know if you draw one or two more, you'll be in a heap of trouble.
Being well-equipped is crucial to defeating enemies. For most investigators, even investigators with above-average combat, fighting an enemy barehanded is difficult, and success means only dealing 1 damage to an enemy. With an average health value of 2–3, this could mean an entire turn spent defeating one enemy, even for a high combat investigator.
Finally, and most importantly, a strong enough enemy engaged with the wrong investigator has the potential to lock them down. All of this leads to one ultimate and crucial conclusion—if you do not have the right skills or items, an enemy with high enough stats can become impossible to deal with. If its Fight is 4 and its Evade is 4, and you are by yourself with 1 Combat and 1 Agility, and you have no tricks up your sleeve, you are as good as dead. Internally, the dev team calls this becoming "pinned."

"But, MJ!" you might say. "That doesn't seem fair!" And you would be right. Getting pinned is totally unfair. But it's intentionally unfair, and that inherent unfairness is part of what sets enemies in Arkham apart from, say, minions in Marvel Champions. If you are Daisy Walker and you become engaged with a 4/5/4 enemy (that is, an enemy with 4 Fight, 5 Health and 4 Evade), you best have a card that helps you deal with that enemy (or a pocket Roland to help you out) because otherwise, it's game over. And that's scary.

Enemies are a ludonarrative device.

One of my favorite things about enemies in Arkham LCG is how an enemy's stat lineup and keywords completely alter an investigator's approach to dealing with that enemy, which in turn affects the emergent story being told through gameplay, otherwise known as the ludonarrative (a compound of ludology and narrative). Ludonarrative is absolutely essential to what makes Arkham LCG sing—many games have great gameplay, some games have a fantastic story, but a rare few games have narrative moments that are told entirely through gameplay. In other words, when Lita Chantler tells you to burn your house down and you refuse, that's just narrative, but when you run away from a ghoul and barricade yourself in another room, leaving behind your friend whose .45 Automatic is out of ammunition—that, my friend, is ludonarrative.

Enemies are crucial to the success of Arkham's ludonarrative, and I'll show you why through just a handful of different enemy stats. First, let's assume that the average Arkham enemy has the following stats: 2/3/2, 1/1 (that is, 2 Fight, 3 Health, 2 Evade, 1 Damage, and 1 Horror). Just by adjusting these values and adding various keywords, even without adding any other abilities, we can encourage different kinds of stories to be told through gameplay.

4/4/1, 2/–, Retaliate: This is an enemy that is hard to hit, has above average health, hits fairly hard, and most importantly, hits you when you miss an attack against it. However, it is very easy to evade and doesn't possess the hunter keyword, meaning it won't pursue you around the map. Tangling with this enemy while you are not equipped to deal with it can be straight-up lethal, but it will almost never pin an investigator because evading it is so easy. Even if you're not a high-agility character, the game encourages you to evade this enemy and leave it behind, because trying to fight it might get you killed, especially if there is no reason to come back to its location. A high combat character with a powerful enough weapon might go for the kill, but even Roland Banks with a .45 Automatic might decide to try to evade it instead, depending on the circumstances.
4/4/1, 2/–, Hunter: Now check this out. All I've done here is swap retaliate out for hunter, and all of a sudden, it changes everything. It's still equally tough to hit, but it no longer hits you back when you miss, meaning any investigator can at least attempt to defeat it without being punished to death for failure. It's still rarely going to pin an investigator, but now you're less encouraged to evade it because it will eventually get back up and hunt you down. It might take a while, but it's worth it to take this enemy out, because if you don't, it'll just keep harassing you over and over again—unless, of course, you can outrun it. This is doubly true if I add "Victory" to this enemy because now you're actively rewarded for killing this easy-to-avoid enemy.
1/1/1, 1/–, Aloof: Okay, I'm cheating a little bit. You'll almost never see an enemy with these stats without also having some other kind of ability. Most of the time, an enemy like this comes with some other text that makes you want to hunt it down and defeat it. It might enter play with doom on it, or lower each investigator's skills, or force investigators to discard cards from their hand. Whatever it is, it forces you to make a decision: spend precious actions hunting it down and defeating it (albeit quite easily), or stomach whatever horrible effect it has. "But this enemy isn't scary!" You're right, and that's intentional! This kind of enemy is usually a cultist or human enemy, which only helps to sell the tone when a real monster shows up with very different stats.
1/6/3, 1/1, Alert: Here's a fun one. This enemy is very easy to hit, but has very high health. If you don't have a weapon, it's going to take a very long time to deal that much damage. It can be evaded, but its above-average evade value and its alert keyword makes evading it a deadlier proposition than normal. If you have a weapon out, you'll likely just try to defeat it, and if you have high enough agility, you'll probably try to evade it instead, and hope you never have to re-enter that location ever again. If you're not good at combat or evasion, it'll probably pin you, even with only 1 fight.
4/5/4, 2/2, Retaliate, Hunter: You might recognize these stats. That's right, it's the Ghoul Priest, otherwise known as the "first wall of Arkham," because it's the first enemy you run into that can really stop you completely dead in your tracks. These are what I would consider "boss" stats. This enemy can very easily pin any investigator, even a guardian with a firearm. It takes a combination of teamwork, skill, and luck to take out (or even flee from) such a foe.
3/10/3, 3/3, Massive, Hunter: This is what I would consider to be "final boss" stats—an enemy that can kill you in almost two hits and has a ludicrously high health total. However, there are a few things that change this enemy from the one above. First, the lack of the retaliate keyword means you can predict precisely when it will attack you. Second, the existence of the massive keyword actually makes it harder for this enemy to pin you, because you can simply walk away from it, and it won't stay engaged with you (of course, you'll have to take an enormous attack of opportunity, and it'll still follow you during the enemy phase, but that's better than a game over). The massive keyword also makes it easier for a team of investigators to dogpile the enemy, since they're all considered to be engaged with it, making for a fight that feels epic and climactic.

This is all just with a few stat tweaks. You can see from just these examples that enemies in Arkham are more than just a bunch of numbers; they help to tell a story. Often we spend a lot of time getting the stats of enemies just right in order to evoke the right emotion or encourage a particular kind of story to be told. So, next time you draw an enemy, take a look at its stats, its keyword, and its ability, and try to envision the kind of ludonarrative device we are attempting to create. (Or better yet, just play and find out firsthand!)

I'll leave you with two final examples, this time from real cards. You might be familiar with the Deep One Bull from the recent Innsmouth Conspiracy:

Otherwise known by the dev team as the Deep One Linebacker. You'll notice that this enemy is somewhat close to the second one listed above. It has high fight, very high health, low evade, decent damage, and no victory. As a result, you are encouraged through gameplay to simply evade it and run away rather than spend 2–5 actions attacking it. But now let's take a look at its game text. It might not have hunter, but it has a Forced ability that allows it to pursue you across the map—specifically, whenever you defeat another Deep One. If it had hunter, you might just drop everything you are doing to kill it, but this is a much weaker version of hunter, so you're still heavily encouraged to evade it and work around its ability, making sure you are always far enough away that it won't catch you when you defeat another Deep One in play. Or, if you are a highly evasive character like Trish Scarborough, you might just leave all of the Deep Ones you encounter in play and never defeat them, ensuring the Deep One Bull stays put (but watch out for those engage abilities)!

This enemy makes for a great ludonarrative device because it aids you in telling your own story through gameplay. Did you slip past it, unnoticed? And sneak your way around the rest of its buddies, so as to not anger it? Or did it come crashing into your chamber and attack you viciously after you slayed one of its brethren?

But what about the reverse effect? Introducing the Deep One Hatchling, from the upcoming A Light in the Fog scenario:

Aww, isn't it just precious? I mean, really. Just look at that little guy. uwu (nevermind the fact that it's very clearly eating a human ear.)

This enemy is about as weak as one can get. However, its forced effect makes it somewhat of a nuisance, and is that surge on an enemy? How dare I do this. But what really sells this enemy as a ludonarrative device is its second ability. See, with only 1 fight and 1 health, just about any investigator can send the hatchling to the discard pile, but doing so summons the righteous anger of the nearest Deep One (because *gasps* you are the real monster). And if that enemy is a Deep One Bull, the two abilities will combo off one another, causing it to move twice toward you. (Oh lawd it's comin'.) There may even be other enemies in this particular scenario you really don't want to be nearby if you have the absolute gall to attack this adorable lil' monstrosity. So you're definitely encouraged to instead evade the hatchling and slowly back away...but since it doesn't have aloof, this could prove problematic if you have other things to do in its chamber. And this is especially true if you draw more than one in a row, which could happen quite often seeing as there are four of them in the deck. Yikes!

Well, that's all I have for you today. Stay tuned for more, and have a great Thanksgiving!

End of an (arduous) Era

To say that these last few weeks have been busy—ludicrously so—is a hell of an understatement.

First off, I moved at the end of October, from a tiny house I shared with a friend to a much larger townhouse by myself. The difference in space feels enormous and somewhat lonely. And I hate moving with a burning passion. So I've been unpacking little by little, like a squirrel tucking away nuts it's never going to eat.

But just as I was in the middle of unpacking, what should arrive at my doorstep but roughly 20 or so huge boxes worth of books—that is, copies of The Key and the Crescent and A Drift Apart to be sent out to backers.

Organizing all of this was a bit of a task, as you can probably imagine, especially in mid-move. I'd been hoping to do all of this before moving, but fate had different plans in store, and everything happened all at once. (All while continuing full-time development on Arkham LCG as well, of course.) It took longer than I would have liked, but eventually, I had everything sorted out and ready for the most arduous part—signing and individually packaging each backer's copy.

I had hoped that I could invite a whole crew of friends over to help me with this in assembly-line fashion, but of course, we're in the middle of a pandemic, so...yeah. I did have some helping hands, but it still took several days!

And then I was left with 150 or so individual packages that needed to be shipped out by 11/12. I requested a USPS pickup, but they never arrived, so I activated "screw it, I'll do it myself" mode, loaded them into my Jeep, and drove them down to the post office myself (in poor weather/driving conditions, no less). But the feeling of having them all carried off into the post office—and the subsequent emotion when I saw backers posting pictures of their copies as they started to arrive—is one I'll never forget.

This whole endeavor has been incredible, from start to finish. Writing the book seems to have been the easiest part, all told. From there, editing the book (twice!), creating and organizing the Kickstarter, working with other freelancers to create the artwork, the trailer, the graphic design for the cover, finding a service to print the book, uploading the files (many many many many different times, to get it to look just right), creating the posters, creating the bookmarks, figuring out how to ship everything, ordering shipping supplies, and creating this very website—all of it, combined, feels kind of monumental when I look back on it, even if each individual task wasn't that difficult in the end.

I want to thank everyone who helped me in every step of the way—from the backers who supported the project financially to my friends and family who gave me moral support and a shoulder to cry on when it felt overwhelming.

The good news is that now that it's all done, I can really get started on what's next. First, promoting The Key and the Crescent so it can reach an even wider audience, and second...

Thank you for joining me on this journey.

P.S. In other news, The Key and the Crescent is now available for purchase in digital, softcover, and deluxe hardcover editions on the main page of my website, and in physical form on Lulu, Amazon, and Barnes & Noble. And if you haven't already, please rate and review The Key and the Crescent on Goodreads—every single one helps! (Heck, copy/paste your review on Amazon and Barnes and Noble too, if you like!) Here are some handy links:

Goodreads

Lulu (softcover)

Lulu (hardcover)

Amazon (softcover)

Amazon (hardcover) (coming soon!)

Barnes & Noble (softcover)

Barnes & Noble (hardcover) (coming soon!)

Discord server

So I have a website now.

The last time I built a website, I was about 13 or so years old. It was a Pokémon website my Dad helped me create using basic HTML code, hosted on some ancient website hosting service (Geocities? Angel Fire? Something like that, I don't remember. It was the 90s.) I honestly don't remember what I put on that website. I think it was just a list of my favorite Pokémon. I remember putting a click counter at the bottom and constantly refreshing the page to see if it had gone up since the last time I checked.

It's been Quite A While since then. After eight years with Fantasy Flight Games and running a successful Kickstarter for my novel, The Key and the Crescent, I think this is about overdue. I'll be posting on here from time to time with announcements about new projects and whatever insights about writing and game design I feel qualified enough to give. There's also links where you can find and purchase any of the projects I've worked on (either personally or with Fantasy Flight Games).

Enjoy!