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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 (00:17.272)
write some songs but not for anyone in particular. I used to make music to release music and I was recording one time with my good friend Michael and our old band in college. We were recording with this great producer Lewis Wall in St. Louis and he was talking about a bass line in one of our songs and he was like, How do you feel about this baseline? Do you think it really still belongs in here? and I was kind of going on and on about like, well, you know, I had it in there from the beginning of the game or game. The song
When we first started writing the song, because the song needs a bass line. so I put this one in there and it's kind of just like been in there because it's in there, because the song has to have one, and this one is like doing its job. Maybe it's not doing its job particularly well. And Lewis stopped me and was like, No, no, no, no. Let me reframe this. it's either heck yes or no. He didn't say heck, he said another word. But you know, this is a family-friendly podcast. So he was like, Everything in this song has to be either heck yes or no. The vocals have to like, heck.
yes or else it's not in there. the baseline, the the bridge that you wrote in there. You need to be thrilled about all of the pieces or else it's not in there, right? and I was like, yeah, but the song needs a baseline. He's like, rip it out. If maybe the song doesn't need a baseline, but if in fact it does, we'll then realize that it does and then we'll replace it with something really good that we feel heck yes about, right?
think that that's a really helpful and simple heuristic when making something like this. Okay, so how does this tie in with Canticle? So from the jump in this game Canticle, there has been this golem who's in the game who prowls around the board and it evolves over time as you play more locations and add more things to its deck. It's really cool, it's dangerous. It's kind of the central tension in the game. And from the jump, I scribbled this out but you can see out here, it had
There's a gi a giant health bar on it, right? And so players would see this giant health bar and would understandably immediately jump to, I'm supposed to kill the golem, right? It's like, yeah, of course. And the reason that this was in here originally was because I was like, there needs to be this antagonist in the game, and players need to I wanted to build this game around like you know, searching and exploring and finding relics. And I didn't yet know in the early days like what exactly are players.
John (02:40.208)
players doing out there. Like what is the end game? how do you how do you win? what are you trying to do? What will you go around and pick up relics like for what, right? I hadn't developed that yet. And so sort of like the first most obvious low hanging fruit was like, you gotta kill the Goblin, right? You gotta kill the you gotta kill the big boss. Well if you're gonna kill the big boss you gotta have a health bar, right? and then I I gradually developed all these other things in the game that were really a lot more interesting. The things that I actually really
John (03:20.31)
a whole system of like religious artifacts and defending yourself and having greater mobility and greater defense from the thing. And I started developing all of these like kind of cool literary time travel weird ideas, right? And it got to the point where by far the least interesting thing, the least fun thing in the game was like go pick up a sword and beat the golem to death, right? And and not just that, not only was it not fun, I think it also created some sort of like thematic
dissonance where I played it with a few different people who were like
Well you kind of like you know, gave me this like big literary pitch about how this is like a game that takes place in the past and the present. and then you immediately gave me like a rusty sword and I'm like beating the scalem death, that which feels like it has basically nothing to do with the game that you just pitched me, right? so the problem was then I started kind of veering players away from combat more and more. And when I'm teaching the game, I'm like, This is gonna be this crazy game with all these like cool literary concepts in it. and also there's a giant health
bar and swords and people were like, Well I'm gonna go pick up the sword and beat the golem to death and they would just play the game in the least interesting way because I had left this very sort of like obvious and understandable path to victory in the game. So this became a real problem and I became to really resent the combat. But the
John (05:12.826)
game and all these other systems touch it, right? Like even in something like law or music, it's like there's music cards that allow you to damage the golem as odd as that sounds. It's like everything touches this like combat system, even though the combat system itself is not very good. And at the end of Gen Con after I tested this a bunch, I was like, I gotta I have to do this. I have to rip the band aid now or I'm never going to rip it and it's gonna be bad. I do not feel heck yes about the combat in this game.
about this giant health bar that causes people to go, I don't know, am I supposed just go kill it? I have to get rid of it. And by getting rid of it, it kind of unleashed this like wave of creative ideas that was so exciting. So I got rid of it and first off I will say it was less scary than I expected. I did have to delete tons of old relics from the game. I had to delete a bunch of old locations. it did allow me to delete a whole bunch of rules from the
rule book, which is also really exciting, like getting to delete a whole bunch of that like cruft is always great. That's a really nice thing. but it left this big hole in the game and I started playing around with it and I started feeling like, okay, so if you're not chipping away at a gigantic health bar, what are you doing? and what I eventually landed on was that your kind of fundamental goal is actually to like hamper the golem.
And I introduced this new concept on the Gollum map where instead of this giant health bar, you have these like spaces for what I call glyphs. and part of why I get really excited about this is that it also fits thematically with like what the old golem of like Jewish lore actually was. It was this this creature that you would inscribe with Hebrew letters to to to to kind of give it meaning, to give it behavior, and and ultimately how you could also end its life.
Life and so it fits even more richly with this like this idea of like canticle. It's like a thing that is a thing that is written, it is a prophecy that is written that the emperor has written, and you affect the behavior and actions of this golem by like inscribing it with glyphs. I was like, okay, this is cool. I like this. It feels very thematically rich. and it allows you to do a bunch of really cool stuff. So for example, like a really simple example is like a thing that you find on one space is like the plowshare's glyph.
John (07:40.001)
Well, which allows you to limit and reduce how much damage the golem does when it hits you. you can't kill the golem, but you can protect yourself from it.
There's a a really this one is called like the Peace Glyph, which is like every time that the golem plays a card, it the wanderers get to heal one. there's other kind of like deeper things like things that are like you don't just have to be in the golem space to play it, you have to like set up this whole situation for yourself. But if you do it, the golem no longer moves. You've like imprisoned it and incarcerated it. and so it now it's like a whole bunch of cards that interact, it's these glyphs that
that you're able to inscribe the golem with that limit its behavior, that change its behavior permanently, and you lay these out there. And there's ways for the golem to get rid of some of them. You, if the thing gets full, you have to decide which ones you want to keep. And it's almost like you're building like the golem is getting like extremely powerful, extremely fast, and can't be killed. And so you're a big part of your survival job is to like hamper it with all of these different things. It's almost like you're building a kit, but it's like an anti-kit on the golem. this
Played really well and it is going great, and I like feel really, really strongly about it, and it's been very, very cool so far. it just was a good reminder to me that like for for months now I've been avoiding this thing that I have to do because I was scared to do it. but by removing it, by just kind of like ripping the band-aid and saying, I don't feel passionately about this part of it. I know I'm not shipping the game with a giant combat system that I don't feel passionately about.
About just rip it out. Just rip it out now. And now I have a game that's a third smaller, but in that kind of like vacuum, there's all this design space now. There's all this creative space. And immediately this idea came up that was like more fun, more interesting, way richer thematically, ties in better with like the theme of what this game is actually about. And shout out to you, Lewis. Heck yes or no.