Broken Hourglass producer Jason Compton gave a presentation on game design, player motivation, and the crowded media market at the July meeting of IGDA Wisconsin, hosted by Raven Software.

Click here for video from that session.  Click here for the slides which accompanied the session. And finally, click here for more information on the IGDA.

The situation here is no better than last week. Over my objection, the bazaar merchants have been openly recruiting for thugs to watch their stalls. They reply that since we cannot put enough feet on the street to keep them safe, they are forced to look elsewhere. I can't argue. But they're just as likely to be shaken down as saved by the seedy lot I see hanging around the shops these days. Besides, our peddlers here have had it surprisingly good. Even with the city gone crazy, people are surprisingly content to buy and sell as though nothing has happened. Sure, we have had a few tense moments—a couple of women nearly ripped each other's head off over a second-hand fez yesterday—but things are still quiet, for the most part.

Even the rationing center has been more peaceful than I expected. Maybe more folks had food stashed away than I realized, or maybe the campaign to keep the public kitchens and bakeries stocked has helped keep the ration lines short. (My wife says it keeps things feeling more normal.) Or maybe folks just aren't desperate enough to come for their handouts yet.

No, the real problem is still the street war brewing right under my nose. As though anyone could give a ratty llama hide about having a "noble house." Here! In Mal Nassrin! I swear, they must think we're living 400 years ago.

A little background: The Broken Hourglass uses a point-buy system for character creation and enhancement. Traits and skills in our system each have their own cost value--so a point of Strength can have a different price than a point of Agility. Because (by and large) the biggest, heaviest weapons inflict the most damage, and the biggest, heaviest armors absorb the most damage, the ability to equip heavy items was a prized characteristic. So it was not terribly surprising when the Carrying skill, which directly determines how much weight a character may have on his or her person without penalty, was deemed by our simulations to be among the most valuable (costly to buy) in the game. Carrying is a secondary skill, which means you can choose to buy points in the skill itself, or invest heavily in its parent skills (Strength and Toughness) which spread their benefits out over multiple secondary skills.

Much like a movie or TV show, games are not necessarily implemented in a straight line from beginning to end, and by definition most of the content represents the middle power levels in the game. So as we equipped various challenges in the game and played through combats with suitably equipped and experienced player characters, it took time for suspicions over the high cost of Carrying to develop.

We have discussed the magic system of The Broken Hourglass in previous articles: see here and here, for example. Recently, we were asked to explain how a caster might choose to manage mana in a step-by-step example. We have devised a simple hypothetical combat encounter to show how two opponents might choose to use their magical abilities in a fight to the death...