T-Minus: 961 hours, 31 Minutes, 24 Seconds

At the time of writing, there are 41 more days left until Stonemaier Design Day (really 40 since its currently 10:15pm). There have been 13 days since I knew I was attending, and since then I have done 4 playtests of my game, 1 of which was after a complete overhaul. Deadlines are phenomenal.

What comes first: The Chicken or the Egg?

Though I’ve been designing this game on and off for the past 6 years, the game has seriously leveled up in the past 2 weeks because I chose to take a different approach which led to the complete overhaul: Try being a bottom-up designer instead of a top-down designer for this project.

What is a bottom-up and top-down designer you ask? A top-down designer looks at the theme first and builds the mechanics to help accentuate the them, whereas a bottom-up designer takes mechanics and makes them work together first with the theme coming later in the development. They are simply design philosophies about how one approaches game design – neither of which are wrong.

Favoring theme-centric games, I’ve always been a top-down designer. But in doing so, games I’ve designed in the past have a rich story, narrative, and theme, but fall flat in gameplay, either being too bland, complicated, or with mechanics that just don’t really work with what I want the end game to be.

I had a conversation with my good friend Paul, a published game designer and great disc golfer, about this recently where I asked if he was more of a top-down or bottom-up designer. He told me he was more top-down, and that he finds that seems to be pattern for other successful designers. Though he also stated that theme is still kept in mind in the early stages, as it can help inspire other mechanics or systems within the game which can make it better. We had this conversation after I solo playtested what was version 3 of my game. I didn’t like what I played, but I knew that it was made with a top down approach. So I decided to try again, but this time, thinking differently. Bottoms-up.

Putting the MECHA in Mechanic

The game that I will be showing at Design Day is called Monster Emergency and Crisis Handling Agency, or M.E.C.H.A., for short. The Kaiju has appeared early than expected, but the Mecha Prototype-1 isn’t ready yet! As Agents in M.E.C.H.A., your duty is to keep the citizens safe from the Kaiju while completing the MECHA’s construction before the Kaiju either terrorizes too much of the city or reaches the Mecha Hangar. At least, that what the game is today (Version 4).

Version 1 (2018) it was a card and dice game. Mech VS Mech. My good friend and future groomsman, Jacob, introduced me to Ashes and I was already a fan of Star Wars Destiny so I wanted a card and dice tcg game of building your own Mecha deck to fight another’s in a Gundam style battle.

Version 2 (2021) it was a full card game without dice and light-customization inspired by Sorcerer – pick a Frame, Core, and Operating System mini deck and mash them together to make your full Mecha Deck. But with Jacob and I thick in the Marvel Champions world, I wanted to have the option of PvE. This introduced the Kaiju.

Version 3 (February 2024) its was now a board game with pre-game deckbuilding elements. You still had the option of customizing your mech’s deck and you selected mini-decks of Pilot, Mecha Frame, and Weapons, but this time it had a board with minis for your Mecha and the Kaiju (if you so chose to play with one). Spacial awareness was always the element that felt lacking in the previous versions, so I felt a hexamap would help solve this. The Kaiju won if it destroyed all the buildings before 6 rounds, and the Mechs won it defeated the Kaiju before all the buildings were destroyed.

In my playtests of Version 3, I kept thinking “I wonder if the people got out in time” when a building fell, or “I just dashed 4 spaces – I wonder if I stepped on anyone.” This got me wondering about the uniqueness of the game. Wouldn’t it be crazy if the game had people that could get stepped on or saved? Plus, there are several skirmish games in the world, let alone hexamap skirmish games, but not many with regular people during a monstrous event like a Kaiju coming to town. In fact, I thoroughly enjoyed the show Monarch because it showed the people’s daily-life post Kaiju attack. Cue the overhaul and bottom-up design approach.

There was no way I was giving up on the theme, so I wasn’t going to change that – but I did want to pick some board game mechanics that I enjoy and build the game based on those. This isn’t completely bottom-up design, but its much more bottoms-up than how I’ve initially tackled game design in the past. I googled “top board game mechanics 2024” and found this phenomenal reddit post which brought me to this page that listed every board game mechanic and ranked them. From this list, what stood out to me: Bag Building, Dice Rolling, Worker Placement, and Cooperative.

This led to Version 4 (August 2024). A simultaneous worker-placement game where the goal is build the Mecha with resources while helping Citizens be safe from the Kaiju before it stomps on them or the Mecha Hangar. I have since playtested Version 4.1 and 4.2 in the past 2 days. Right now, this game has felt better than any of its previous version, but there is still a ton of work to do – especially in it’s Feeling of Disaster.

To be continued in Part II.