Crawford On Making Balance Of Power

Thanks to an anonymous reader for pointing to GameDev.net's excerpt from the new Chris Crawford On Game Design book, in which the famed strategy game creator and writer of The Art of Computer Game Design discusses the development of his classic '80s cold-war strategy game Balance Of Power, from initial concepts ("A game, like a story, must have a conflict") through execution ("Polish, polish, polish! Take a minimum of six months after alpha for polishing.")

Polish

[pbox]

I guess three years of polish will result in a great game then. OR NOT!

6 months of improvement?

[ObviousGuy]

And risk running out of funds? That's a bad way to go about it.

Here's the short, fun way:

1) Come up with great game idea
2) Draw ideas up in PowerPoint
3) Present ideas with any working demos or mockups to investors
4) Get money (PROFIT!)
5) Develop game to Alpha stage
6) Release and gauge market response
7) Continue improving game if market likes it, drop development like a hot potato if the market thinks your idea sucks
8) ???

Re:6 months of improvement?

[PaganRitual]

this is modded 'funny'? shit, there needs to be a 'THE TRUTH' mod ...

Re:6 months of improvement?

[AvitarX]

no no no no.

If it tests negativly you realease the alpha as a finished product, DUH.

Blood Sweat and Tears

[Big Sean O]

Great article.

Crawford did some great stuff back when b&w bitmaps were considered state-of-the-art graphics. I remember his games fondly.

I think some of Crawford's games would do well today. I'd love to get a version of Balance of Power that would run on Mac OS X.

His advice is pretty spot on as well. Of course, on Internet Time 6 months to polish is simply not realistic. The advice is clear: a good game is simple, but not trivial to create.

Re:Blood Sweat and Tears

[Anonymous Coward]

What else has he done, apart from Balance of Power? This is an honest question, not a troll.

Balance of Power didn't sell very well, but this guy writes so many articles. Why should we believe he knows what he's talking about?

Re:Blood Sweat and Tears

[BadDreamer]

Balance of Power apparently sold some 250,000 copies. Back in those days that wasn't too shabby, even if it wasn't record numbers.

This is his company site [erasmatazz.com]. Several of the games he has written are available for download for free, and he has essays and information about the ones that aren't there.

The site also has lots of information about his latest work, which seems very interesting but so far hasn't really taken off. Not because of lack of promise, but because it's simply breaking too new ground.

As for

How do u sell 6 months of polish?

[idries]

It's all very well saying that a game needs 6 months of polish. In my experience almost any game will benefit from that much polish. But how do u convince your publisher (or producer if it's an internal project) of that? How do you convince them that spending an extra £700,000 (just a guess) on the time between alpha and gm is worthwhile? It would be great if someone were able to compile a set of statistics regarding the relationship(s) between polish time and game profit. Anyone?

Wanted to love Balance of Power

[Some Wanker]

I got and played Balance of Power when it came out, and I love games of that genre. I got into learning all the rules and the map and thinking about what to do and was really into it. But when I had played a few times, I realized that you could not win. I always either had the world blow up or lost badly by points. I ended up trying hard to win for a while, and was never able to. (I am gnerally good at games.) I finally gave up. Later I read an article about how he wanted to educate people politically using

Re:Wanted to love Balance of Power

[MightyTribble]

I agree. BoP was a great idea with tonnes of potential, but hideously flawed in it's execution. Your opponent would always chose to escalate over the most trivial of things, and you'd either blow the world up or lose badly on points (by basically capitulating every time your opponent objected to some policy of yours).

I remember that, when I played as the US, I could blow up the world by objecting to the invasion of Afghanistan (fair enough). But when I was the USSR, the US would also object if I invaded Af

Re:Wanted to love Balance of Power

[BadDreamer]

My experience was rather the opposite. I got Balance of Power 1990 edition when it came out for the Amiga, and in the beginning I got beat up pretty bad. Then I started thinking deeper, looking at motivations and reading more into numbers, and I quickly improved. Soon I was routinely beating the game in multipolar with 1000+ points.

The game builds on very simple and fundamental aspects of international diplomacy and influence, and does a very good job of it. The main reason I don't play it now is that the

I'm sorry but...

[Torgo's Pizza]

Make sure a game has conflict? I love Chris Crawford, but Balance of Power lacked any and all conflict. I was expecting a game similar to that found in the movie War Games. Little did I know that Chris Crawford also used the philosophy that if a nuclear war started, the game was essentially over. I tried to enjoy the game, but it has so many design flaws to make it *not* fun.

Re:I'm sorry but...

[JimPooley]

Little did I know that Chris Crawford also used the philosophy that if a nuclear war started, the game was essentially over.

And quite right too. I think you missed the whole point of what Balance of Power was about. If there's a nuclear war, EVERYONE LOSES.

Re:I'm sorry but...

[BadDreamer]

Balance of power is all about conflict - on the biggest scale humanity has experienced to date.

And last time I watched it, War Games would also have been "essentially over" if a nuclear war had actually started ...