RADIANT TACTICS

I’d like to see some of game design become more like home cooking. I’ll explain what that might look like.

If you’re like me, to stretch take-out leftovers, you’ve made a side dish or a sauce: you’ve baked bread from scratch for a special occasion, or grilled an entire meal for family or friends. There’s a joy to it, to creating for others, sharing something you’ve made yourself with people special to you. Such joy makes it fun and worthwhile to learn to cook. Even when cooking is not in service of becoming a professional chef or starting a food truck.

Success in home cooking can rely on skills and judgment different from professional cooking. The kitchen is smaller, the ingredients less bulky and exotic, and your menu items less constrained by matters of profit margins. There’s a wealth of good websites, books, and magazines written for the home cook as an audience.

In contrast, for game design, there currently seems a gap between good resources written for aspiring professionals, and good resources written for hobbyist game designers. Not all of game design need be written for the hobbyist, but it would be nice if some were.

The long term vision for Radiant Tactics would see some of game design become more like home cooking. Game design as a hobby; it could catch on. In fact, people already do it. You likely already have done it.

You in ‘home game design’ when you changed a game’s rules, perhaps handicapping yourself against a less experienced player, perhaps finding a way for an extra player to join midway, perhaps cutting rules that are unfair, or many like adjustments. Tailoring a game’s fun to your group’s taste is as sensible as adding a bit of salt, squeeze of lemon, or dash of hotsauce to a dish.

This makes you a hobbyist game designer. Our shared question then is ‘how to do this well; how to make our amateur made games better and more fun.’ Through blogging and game development, I’ll try to offer some insight on that question.

My aspiration is for Radiant Tactics to become a setting and game standard useful for hobbyist game design. It will be a success when even my 9-year old self could pick it up and easily create fun adventures for friends. An ideal system would be:

• Expressive. Many types of experiences and stories can be composed using the same ruleset. There’s variety.

• Foolproof. It’s very hard to create unfun experiences and very easy to create fun ones.

You can judge for yourself how much Radiant meets or falls short of these aspirations. I’m going to keep iterating towards making a more perfect system! If you’re interested in the endeavor, consider signing up for the newsletter, sharing the site, sending feedback, or materially supporting the project.

Happy gaming!

Michael Vossen, Radiant Tactics’ Creative Director