It’s really tough having a game that is “pretty good”. It plays pretty good. The rules are pretty good. People have a pretty good amount of fun when playing it. It even looks pretty good. Ultimately you feel pretty good about it in general. That makes it good right? If it’s not bad it must be good? Game on! Pitch this game like it’s game 1 of the World Series, right?
Wrong! (I bet you didn’t see that coming!)
The problem with a game that is only pretty good, is that it is also pretty forgettable. Players will play the game, go through the motions, and then immediately forget the experience. It will live in their head like their drive to work last Tuesday. They know they made the drive. They obviously made it to work that day but they don’t remember a single notable thing about the journey. Without a lasting impression the player is unlikely to play your game ever again. If they won’t play your game again it’s likely they will never introduce the game to another player. Your game will functionally be forgotten, collecting dust on some gamer’s shelf until it gets added to the thrift pile.
So what do you do with a “pretty good” game? Well what Durdle Games did, was shelve it. In 2022 we decided to put our curious little positional abstract game Aimbots on the bench. It wasn’t that it was bad, it was only “pretty good”. The positional play style= good. The bot powers meta-game= very good. The damage carrying bot miniatures= excellent. The combat=weak. It all added up to just being good, but not good enough to pursue any further at the time. We tossed the bits in a box and moved on to our next game.
“Please don’t leave us on the shelf”- Aimbots probably
But we knew they wouldn’t stay on the shelf forever. There was more good in the kit than bad. The game was full of interesting little bits and a thinky strategy game like Aimbots does still have an audience in the world. We put the game in the back of our minds and moved on to make new titles like Rowdy Partners, ChampionChip, & Afoot. We even added “Aimbots Reprogrammed” to our 2023 kick-off meeting so it would stay top of mind. Then we promptly forgot about it again for 3 months until…
We needed another game. And that game needed to fit on a single card. Sparing the details, Durdle Games needed a single card game and we needed it soon. Since dice were an available component for us to utilize, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to grab Aimbots by it’s proverbial guts and transplant it into a teeny tiny shell of a new game. We have been doing just that for the past several weeks. We have taken everything learned with Aimbots and tried to implement the core of the game in a new way that works in the smallest possible package. We are calling the tiny game DiceBots.
Critique all you want, this version was out of date the day this blog was posted. GOTCHA!
To be clear we are not looking to create Dicebots in order to scrap Aimbots. We’re creating DiceBots to fix Aimbots. We are birthing a new game child so we can transplant it’s heart back into our favorite Aimbot’s child. (this post just got real heavy, enjoy your ethical quandry) And you know what, the process is working. Eliminating the overhead of the original game has helped us look at the system holistically and experiment with new directions for the game design. All of the baggage of Aimbots 1.0 is gone. DiceBots doesn’t have any design baggage because it is essentially a new creation. But once we’re done with DiceBots, we have a long, long list of ideas to try in Aimbots 2.0. And the next version of Aimbots, it’s not going to be pretty good. It’s going to be great.
If you are interested in a Durdle design send us a message through our Contact Page.