Games are Hard Work

by Griffin Ware

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Sorry it’s not long, or fabulous or anything, but I figured making you a story like you asked for after all these years would be a perfect Christmas gift, and being able to read it might make it possible to take your mind off that hip of yours.

I didn’t get a chance to do an aloud proofread, which may... hamper the quality, but nevertheless, here we go:

Making a game is hard. I can’t tell you how hard because I haven’t done it. The Finest of Perseus still isn’t done, but I’ll tell you now, besides my education, it’s the thing I’ve worked the hardest on in my life.

Three years ago now, six or seven people in my grade and I started meeting regularly to play Dungeons and Dragons. Two years ago, my friend Kurtis made a set of rules to add on to the game. He spent eight hours on it. It was impressive. I decided that I would outdo him. I’ve spent close to 300 hours on mine.

The inspiration first came not only from that, but from two other sources. I had just started regularly watching the television series Star Trek: Voyager over dinner with my family, and at the same time Wil Wheaton (a once upon a time actor in star trek turned “internet celebrity”) started a tabletop roleplaying game series with rules he made himself called “The Ashes of Valkana”. I saw Wil Wheaton do that, and I thought to myself, “how hard could it be?”

Skip to a month later. July 2015. I had finally finished it. I thought. I could show it to people. I had spent ten hours crafting it to perfection. The original Finest of Perseus was very simple, but the concept was there. It was a co-operative game where players would come together to fly a starship, just like on Star Trek, with someone to pilot and someone to shoot and someone to bark orders. But I had very few rules to dictate these things, I had very little framework for a story, and when I showed it to my friends, it showed… It showed a lot. The game only had four species you could play as as opposed to today’s ten, and the “role” system of telling who was supposed to do what was barely there. We didn’t have “character sheets” as a way to keep track of characters as much as google docs filled with numbers, and the story tapered off after just three meetings, and never got picked up again.

In another month, I came back again with a second set of rules, although the rules weren’t changed as much as the aesthetic. This time, I came even less prepared, even though I felt more. I came with a crushed drive to succeed. I thought I could make it first time, and I didn’t come close. My failure to hold enthusiasm translated to my players. This second version didn’t even get more than one meeting. And this failure deterred me still.

It wasn’t until Christmas break that I finally got my ideas back. It was time for my third attempt. This time, I took things much, much more seriously. I got organised. I made a folder in my google drive for it, with subfolders in subfolders in subfolders. Right now at their most intense there’s up to six layers of them. Next, I made a plan. I made a checklist of things to do, and a schedule to do them. All told, there were seventy-two items on the board, each of which would take me at least an hour, probably more. I cranked it out in under a month, on top of my schoolwork. As my work increased, my love for the project returned in full. To this day I’m making drawing after drawing of the different races and empires in this universe I’ve made. By the end, when I printed it all out, double-sided, it was a true rulebook. Over 100 sheets of paper, all told. I can still remember the date of what happened next.

The game, which I had been talking about for weeks, for months, began on the 16th of April, 2016. In it, eight characters, one ship which had been designed for realism from the ground up, and a story planned a year outward. It’s still going. Of course, when I say it’s still going, it’s not like that’s a massive success. We’ve only had five or six meetings so far, but the passion for the game that I possess has crossed to my players just as much as my disappointment did the first time.

I love it. I love my world, I love my species, I love my rules, and above all, I love that I’ve grown and learned enough to not be afraid to change them, and to learn from my mistakes. No, more than that, to be able to tell what my mistakes are!

So making a game is hard, but if there’s one thing that I’ve learned from making one, it’s that sometimes the greatest challenges are the ones most worth taking.

-Griffin