Dev Pile: Applying AES to Moonshiners
Hey, Iâve been head down on more of the Moonshiners case study. Itâs a lot of words. Here, have a look at a draft of how I use this âAbstraction/Enrolment/Stuffnessâ model to things.
The Moonshiners case study demonstrates the AES (Abstraction/Enrolment/Stuffness) frameworkâs analytical utility and its operational interdependencies. This continues to build on the previous case study demonstrating that it is not a tool for providing discrete analysis but for demonstrating the interactions between the three dimensions. Engaging this framework in the development stage enables a thorough, thoughtful development of the game and access to reflection that satisfies the designerâs preferences while surfacing their choices.Â
In Moonshiners, each of these elements is significant in, and relates to the others in different ways:
AspectSignificanceAbstractionMoonshiners was made a fiction-first, lore-rich game to engage audiences with a narrative they could enjoy and see. I wanted the game to express an idea that was both exciting and had latitude for gameplay experiences that were novel to most of the audience. EnrolmentMoonshinersâ earliest forms were conceptual game prototypes about auction systems. This case study demonstrates the development of that auction system and the ways in which the auction system interacts with the card design and the fiction.StuffnessMoonshiners is a game made to be played and distributed as a professionally produced, visually pleasant product and in order to do that, I need to have stuffness that presents surfaces for the fiction of the game to be presented, and to enable the interaction of the enrolment.
The Abstraction of the game is the way that the game tells the player âwhat it is about;â itâs presented on the box cover, in the names of mechanics and cards, it informs the way that the characters are named and the aesthetics of all the presented pieces to the player. The abstraction of Moonshiners indicates to the player, engaging with the pieces, that they are the leader of a gang of werewolf bootleggers, amongst a family of other similar gangs, who meet up regularly to negotiate (with money) for control of the city and businesses in that city; as werewolves, they are inclined towards bursts of violence, but also, as werewolves, they are very tough and can survive.Â
The Enrolment of the game is a series of auctions over increasingly large lots, with limited, unpredictable cards, where players are striving to obtain resources that have relationships that give the player victory points (VP). These auctions are complicated by each player having an opportunity to abandon the rest of the round of bidding, take whatâs in the current lot and some of the bids, and therefore, tension builds around players identifying what cards to value.Â
The Stuffness of the game is a constructed card game delivered on two decks of cards; one, a set of poker cards representing the bidding currency (âbid cardsâ), and one a set of square cards representing the items in the lot for players to bid on (âlot cardsâ). This stuff in this case relieves stress on player memory, showing who does and does not control various different assets of different form, and what rules are altered for the player. This stuff also integrates together the enrolment by treating cards as characters, places, art objects, and businesses.
The abstraction of Moonshiners served to crystallise the elements that became the first prototype, beginning with an uncertain desire for a game with some meaningful fiction, into a specific set of fictional identities whose defined relationships to the gameâs mechanical systems create demands of the gameâs material stuff. This trajectory runs from vague inspiration by webcomics mentioning the Worgen of 2010âs Cataclysm expansion in World of Warcraft through to the crew art and art brief included. The abstraction is now in five layers; first, the city, then in, the districts, then the people of the werewolf gangs, then the items those werewolf gangs value as prizes.Â
Within the normal language I use to describe games, Moonshiners is an âart monsterâ; it demands a large number of unique pieces of artwork that cannot be easily or cheaply done by me; either art that works well in my representative style, or art that can be managed with available bulk assets. Where the abstraction is used to represent the lore, that lore is necessary as part of the operation of the game (Cavotta, 2004), and means that I have to be mindful of using the elements in the game that can be treated as surfaces on which to âputâ the fiction. The surfaces of the game that âneedâ to be used to represent the game material are the game rules text, the cards, the box, and the rules explainer in the box.Â
This notion of an âart monsterâ is an example of an abstraction-stuffness interaction; the fiction demands visual specificity to entrench players in the world, with features like:
A map of New Jork, to position the districts and the businesses within those districts.
The characters available for recruiting to the gangs.Â
The art objects that these gangs are likely to care about.
These features require some instancing to function. Players identifying with the lore of the game in PT1 and PT3 was something that my reflection drove me to want to replicate and enhance, resulting in a pivot towards those features in the rules design. In order to maximise the return this fiction offers to the game, I strive to take advantage of âpiggybackingâ (Rosewater, cited in Sapieha 2014), as a way to ensure that each fictional idea creates a useful meaningful link to another element.
Consider these needs for the fictional representation of the characters. I want art that:
Communicates the characters are werewolves.
Communicates that they are criminals.
Communicates that they are cool and interesting.
Communicates their game rules clearly.Â
Communicates their scale.Â
In order to accommodate all these needs, in the art brief, these characters are depicted as smiling cockily while holding up a booking card in front of themselves in a âmugshotâ style image, in front of a height chart. This is anachronistic to real prohibition-era photos, but that is less important than serving the other needs, such that this design communicates:Â
The characters holding their hands and teeth visible in the shot allows them to show claws and fangs, which communicates that they are werewolves.
The characters are being booked, which communicates that they are criminals.
The characters are unbothered by being booked, and uninjured, which is cool and interesting.
The charactersâ booking card presents a stable, consistent place to show the text of the game rules.
The height chart demonstrates the scale of the characters.
This shared visual template reduced the unique production load, communicated unifying details, and enables a recursive pattern of werewolves performing at being humans performing being arrested. This also serves as a visually distinct card face that does not resemble any of the other card faces.Â
âArt Monsters,â games whose fiction demands a large volume of unique visual assets create potential production bottlenecks that need to be addressed in some way by the designer. While I served this in Moonshiners with a deliberate set of templates that minimised difficult design elements (like the background art and standard template of the character art) there are other tools for doing this for character-driven games. For example, a game design that relies on standardised iconography can use that iconography to signify material with fictional specificity, and that can then in turn, reinforce the visual specificity. Abstraction can benefit from the repeated use of symbols to communicate meaning.
Enrolment in Moonshiners operates at three levels: the auction itself (the bidding round), the game across rounds (the four-season structure with shifting incentives), and the social frame (mobster identity sustained across the table). Each level produces distinct enrolment work and distinct opportunities for failure.
The smallest unit of enrolment is the decision for each player to place their bid. These bidding rounds are simultaneous, hidden actions, in which a player has to weight the demands of the lot before them and the card in their hand, knowing that the card in their hand can potentially be taken from them, or that they can Wolf Out and take the lot, if they do it properly. Players reveal their bids at the same moment, which for each player has only these four outcomes:
They drop out of the lot.
Someone else Wolfs Out, winning the lot.
All the complexities of how much to bid, how to achieve that end of winning the lot, are decisions made with known information, in anticipation of unknowable information. This least enrolment then becomes part of the greater sequence of a set of auctions. The auction is the part of the game where Schellâs (2008) account of design-as-sequence-of-choices is most cleanly visible. The player chooses what to bid, when to pass, and when to fight, and each choice is structurally distinct from the others.
The four-season structure is the larger unit of enrolment. Across four seasons, the lots grow in size, the auction deck thins, and the playersâ positions diverge. The four-season structure means a player who falls behind in Season 1 has Seasons 2, 3, and 4 to recover. The structure embeds that the underdog must always retain a path to victory within the gameâs macro pacing. The catch-up mechanic (âNonnaâs Shareâ), identified in PT2 and tested in PT3 and PT4, is the most explicit expression of the principle.
The social frame is the largest unit of enrolment, and the most resistant to designer control. Players in PT1 and PT3 adopted mobster voices unprompted. The voicing was not in the rules. The voicing was in what Caillois (2001) calls mimicry: players took on the part of werewolves performing as criminals, and the fiction of the table came to mediate the play. The social frame produced a finding that connects to the catch-up mechanic episode. Players who had identified with their leading position experienced the catch-up as a violation of the gang fiction: the leading gang ought not to be âpunishedâ for being on top, even if mathematically the punishment is small. The fiction creates the affective ground on which the mechanics land. Even a player who doesnât necessarily win the game based on their score may still enjoy the experience or âconsoleâ themselves with a victory if they got âtheir crewâ in a way that satisfies them.
Enrolment in Moonshiners interacts with abstraction at every scale, and the interaction is mostly productive. The thematic coherence overlap zone is broadly active. The auctionâs hidden bidding maps to the criminal enterprise fiction (deals are private). The four-season structure maps to the temporal fiction (seasons representing a year). The crew composition rewards mimicry (Caillois 2001) by giving the player a gang to identify with. Even what resembles a failure point, the catch-up mechanic, where the fiction (gang dominance) and the mechanic (redistributive support for the trailing player) generate contradictory affect, builds into the fiction that these gangs are fundamentally friends competing in a shared environment, by naming the catch-up mechanic after a narrative entity everyone loves and respects.
Game mechanics that operate against the established fiction will produce affective resistance disproportionate to their mathematical effect. Where Abstraction, Enrolment and Stuffness are in conflict, any factor can be adjusted in order to address the needs of the other, and any game with seemingly unsatisfying choices between them is probably a result of some other, more important competing demand (usually, costs, under Stuffness). The principle applies to games where the fiction has been established sufficiently for players to identify with positions within it. The obstacle is the assumption that mechanics and fiction are separable design domains. Resistance to the mechanic is often resistance to the absence of the fiction that would justify it, not to the mechanic itself.
Stuffness in Moonshiners is informed by the need for clear surfaces for the abstraction, all of which extrapolates from the demands of abstraction and enrolment, in roughly this sequence:
In order to keep the âWolf Outâ choice hidden during the bidding phrase, player currency had to be uniform in a way that a player couldnât accidentally give away.Â
If the currency is uniform and easily hidden, poker cards are the most useful standard piece.
If the poker cards are things players handle for bidding, and the game needs to be stored in a box, then the bidding cards and the lot cards being the same creates a problem for players sorting the game to start.
Launch Tabletop offers square cards in the same rough size as the poker cards, making them an optimal and easy choice.
The lot cards being square introduced a common shuffling problem, where cards could be shuffled out of orientation with one another.
If the game required that deck to hold hidden information, misoriented cards (âboxedâ cards) potentially gave up information to players.Â
Therefore the back of the card should be radially symmetrical in some way to ensure the shuffling didnât divulge extra information.
The top-down radially symmetrical view on the square card face presented a game surface that failed to clearly express the fiction of the game.
A whole card back thatâs visible the whole game failing to express the game fiction is a wasted element of stuffness.
In order to use this stuffness, the card back was made into the game map (figure).
The game map then served as the basis for the District and Business card faces.Â
This created a choice: To use the âmapâ back or the âradialâ back. The radial back allows for mechanics that manipulate the deck without risk of information leakage and a mastery gap, but the map back further enhances the fiction. Presented with this choice, I opted for the map back, furthering the importance of the fiction that helps players manage the game rules (Cavotta, 2004) rather than a more complex game that had harder material physical upkeep.
The square deck introduced an enrolment problem. A deck of square cards is harder to handle and shuffle than a poker deck of the same number of cards, a difficulty that was experienced in PT3. A reduction from the planned one hundred and twenty cards to approximately eighty cards mitigated that, and as did an adjustment of adding or subtracting cards from the deck in the rules design. The original 120-card deck was chosen to ensure variety in play, which necessarily means less variety in the small deck. By removing mechanics that returned/hid cards in the Lots deck, and by making the deck smaller, the rules could adjust with the new stuffness demands. Art object sets were more likely to be filled, but not guaranteed. The game became more understandable and easier to play, with the material elements of the game now introducing fewer potential complications.
Stuffness in Moonshiners operates as a constraint cascade that spans all three AES axes. Rogerson (2016) describes physical components as mediators of game state. The square cards mediate three game states (the auction lot, the player tableau, the deck) and the format decision affects the mediation in each state differently. Millerâs (1956) account of cognitive limits applies obliquely. The square format places additional cognitive load on the shuffler, who must orient cards consciously rather than relying on the corner-alignment heuristic that rectangular cards permit. The activated overlap zone is material significance, but in an unusual configuration. The decision was made for fictional reasons (the radial symmetry better suits the top-down compositions the abstraction wants) but produced effects in stuffness (shuffling friction) that propagated back into abstraction (the constrained visual vocabulary). The cascade demonstrates that the stuffness axis is not a passive recipient of decisions made elsewhere. Stuffness can drive abstraction as well as carry it.
Non-standard component dimensions introduce material constraints that propagate through every level of the design. A single material decision (card shape, board size, token form) can cascade into restrictions on the gameâs entire visual vocabulary, its production logistics, and its play experience. Designers working with non-standard components should map the constraint cascade before committing to production. The principle applies to any game using components that depart from industry-standard dimensions. The obstacle is the temptation to treat material decisions as cosmetic when they are structural. The cascade can take the visual identity of the game in directions the designer had not anticipated, and the directions can be productive or limiting depending on the depth of mapping done in advance.
Yeah, some days this is what takes all the writing effort, I hope this is human-language understandable for non-experts!
Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!
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