Another slow day, so my affinity trees example still isn't ready on the Hammercalled front, but I've been thinking about this during some downtime so I want to get it out today.

One of the things that is really important in determining the value of a leisure experience is ease, and as a relatively new owner of a Nintendo Switch I can say that a lot of the system's value comes from having simple experiences that just work out of the box.

Updating and setting up a Switch is a breeze, and it takes very little time to do so.

How can that be applied to the design of individual games?

Make the game really easy to get into.

For Hammercalled this means a variety of things. Shadowrun has a PACKS system for making really easy characters in an instant, and a similar thing might be worth doing for Hammercalled. We already have pre-made gear in the Rules Reference 1.0, but pre-making archetypal characters might be worth a shot too. Open Legend does this, and while it was added after I was particularly active with regards to the Open Legend system, I heard good things about this.

As far as the Switch goes, this is where being a gaming console that pretty much just does gaming (as opposed to all the different functions of its competitors) shines; a young child can operate a Switch on their own, and that's part of Nintendo's target audience.

Make the game easy to play in down-time.

One of the focuses of Hammercalled is that it's a game you could play in 30 minutes if you had to, just going through a few short scenes. Now, you wouldn't necessarily get a full value from it, but you could still nominally set everything up, even make a few rolls, then pack back up again. Scaling up is easy because the majority is storytelling.

The Switch is not only portable, but has a hibernation system. You can basically start and pause playing in fifteen seconds (though load times are brutal for people used to SSDs), and resume play at any later time.

Don't punish mistakes, avoid them in the first place.

Hammercalled is built around very simple math; we don't do anything other than addition and subtraction on the fly, and even then we minimize it (Margin calculations are just taking the tens-place number, which saves a step of math but allows increased precision).

I theorize that many people play games while impaired due to fatigue, intoxication, or other situational concerns. Some people just don't have the facility with numbers to do a lot of advanced stuff due to this or just due to personal predilections. Hammercalled is easy to calculate once and write down stuff for, and it's also built to require more or less the least amount of math.

The Switch is pretty rugged, but it's also very intuitive with its UX design. This means that you're basically never going to have issues. The Joycon controllers sync by physically attaching to the device, which is so incredibly easy that it makes memories of fighting to connect old-school wireless controllers seem even more aggravating.

Wrapping Up

When you make a game, make it easy to play. That way nobody feels stress by encountering the game itself.