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A game development log where I share the hardest game design problems, and share thoughts on the games I'm playing. My name is John Rudolph Drexler and you can find my games at catacombian.com
John (00:06.082)
the main thing behind my game, Mudlarks, this game where you are trying to build the best collection of stuff on the Tennessee River with a gang of kids. You're part of this gang of of crazy, rambunctious kids, sort of little rascals or stand lines style. and I wanna get to that and explain what the hook of it is 'cause I'm really excited and I actually think this is probably gonna be the next thing that I publish. but before that I've gotta back up and kind of talk about how I got there, from a game game theory standpoint. So I
I was testing games with this guy, David Gordon. he is a game designer here in New York. He's very good. he's very accomplished. he made he is the game designer on FinSpan and a whole bunch of other ones. I'll link to his to his website. But he's awesome and he's always got like thirty games in development. It's amazing. and he shows up to this game divine d game design event when he always brings a couple of like really simple games he plays that are like that work for like kind of a wider age group. They work for little kids, they're really simple. And there's always some
little just like mechanical game design nugget at the center of it that just works so well and I haven't quite seen it before and I'm like, that's so interesting. I don't know how you just do this over and over. I'm very impressed by it. And I was telling him about how hard it has been for me to try to design something that's a little bit simpler in the form of mudlarks. And he made this point that I can't stop thinking about which was that he's like yeah of course it's harder. Everything in a simple game is kind of laid bare, right? It's all just
right there on the table. there's no sort of like thematic stuff that you can hide behind. There's no like complexity you can hide behind. The player can learn the game really quickly. They can see exactly how it works. Everything is laid completely bare. It's almost this kind of like brutalist form of game design. And either the form works or the form doesn't work. You're just looking right at it. And people can tell almost instantly like is this a little gem of game design or is it a flop? There's just
No hiding. It's almost terrifying, right? he didn't say it that way, but that's how I think about it for myself. and I I've been working on mudlarks for months and this has been swirling around in my head. it almost feels like
John (02:18.878)
Making a simple game is like trying to write a perfect pop song or something, where you're like, Yes, you could like dress it up with production and a great recording studio and a great singer and all this different stuff. But at the end of the day, it's like this has gotta be a thing that just works with like simple chords on a piano and a singer. And if you happen to have Paul McCartney singing Hey Jude, well that could be something that's just transcendently good. but it looks much easier from the outside than it actually is. Like it's simple enough to say like, okay, plunk out a simple chord progression and
sing over to the piano, it's like, yes, but we've all seen about a million examples of that that are really not that exciting or invigorating. Finding that gem and delivering it to the player in a special way is really rare and hard to do, which is part of why it's so crazy that David is able to just do this over and over. I don't really understand it. Okay, so returning to mudlarks, why do I bring all this up?
Where I've landed with Mudlarks is that I've tested many, many, many form factors. I keep on tinkering with the rules, I keep on trying all these different versions of it and seeing like, how how does this motivate players? How does this change what they do? and I've seen lots and lots of versions, some of which I like, some of which I hated, some of which were boring, some which were good. And where it has landed me is this. The spine of this game is it's an incredibly simple game that if you strip it down to piano chords and singing, I actually still really like it.
But
You are in this crazy gang of kids, right? And what a kids do, they're always making up new rules. This is like me with my sister. She used to get so frustrated with me when we'd play 'cause we'd like playing some sort of simple like, you know, keep the balloon off the ground type game and I'd like, you know what would be like make this more interesting is if like you could only step on the carpet and not the wood or if you had to touch it with your toe first before whatever. And I kept on introducing more rules because I was a terrible little game designer and she would get very frustrated.
John (04:16.759)
And leave. This is what kids do. This is how kids play. And so these crazy kids are always introducing new rules. So the very basics of the game are you have all of these items that are in the Tennessee River, and you're trying to build the best hand. And so you like start gathering stuff together, and you're like, I got the four-leaf clover and the arrowhead and the yo-yo, right? And you start building this set. but the question of like how are these actually scored, like what are you trying to do, is variable, and so you
get a set of these cards that tell you basically how you're gonna score. it might be like one point for each contraband, you know, three points for having the most whatever. and there's a wide, wide variety of these. And you don't play them randomly, you play them in sets, sets that the rule book prescribed, right? And so the kids, I think these might even have illustrations of kids, are like dictating like, okay, here's how collections work today. You gotta have this in your cache or else you don't win. And then also, by the way
we may introduce some special rules like hey when you add a doodad, here's a special action that you get to take. this one says that actually players can openly trade between their hands, something that's not usually true and dramatically changes gameplay, right? So the thought is the rule book starts with this like very simple stripped-down game, which I'm actually very happy with. The rules are like 150 words, you could teach it to us, eight-year-old. Very simple, very straightforward, but it's really fun.
fun and replayable. But then the rule book is like, hey, have you kind of like mastered these like simple introductory sets? Here's some intermediate sets. Here's where things get weird. Here's where we start introducing negotiation. Or we say, what happens if instead of discarding a card at the end of your turn, you have to pass it to the right and so your neighbor might get it instead. what if instead of discarding cards altogether you had to tuck them behind one of these rules things and
John (06:43.521)
really cool ideas like this. And so the thought is, it is a simple game that works really well, but if you play it for a long time and you start digging into these deeper sets and these crazy kids start manipulating the rules and make you think differently about things, it might turn into a negotiation game. It might turn into a really mind-bending, kind of difficult optimization problem. It might turn into a highly interactive game where you're trading and attacking each other, but it's the same basic gameplay over and over.
This is what I love to do in game design is like build the scaffolding and then say, How much crazy stuff can we do in here? So for one, I'm so thrilled because this is finally like a simple game that I'm really excited about and I think I can actually finish. But two, it feels like it's like my game. This feels like it relates to how I played with my sister when I was a kid. It feels like it fits into kind of like how I like to do game design, which is like, hey, here's a simple thing, not too scary, right? What if you did this?
Well, what if you did this? And what it ends up doing is it actually ends up pulling the player into the way that I have designed this, into my design process, where you start to see these different sets, these different special rules, really affect gameplay and really tinker with the scaffolding in important ways. And it kind of draws your attention to that, I think, in a really fun and satisfying way. and I think ultimately what I may do at the end of the rule book is
say like, hey, by the way, if you've played all of these, you should design your own. Like there's a whole bunch of cards in here. There's a whole bunch of special rules, special bounties, different ways of doing this. Come up with your own. See if you can make something work. And if you want to add in new rules, great. Like that's the spirit of this game. And let me know. I'd love to hear about it and like give you credit for it on the website or something, you know, because I think this is the spirit of mudlarks is this kind of effusive
fun, quick, crazy kids changing the rules on you. And I think what that ends up doing is drawing your attention in a kind of high-minded way back to like how game design works. and that's got me pretty darn excited. So I can't wait to test it with you soon.