Bios: Megafauna 2

I've never designed a game and I don't consider myself a game designer. The closest term I'd agree to is game developer, but what I do to games isn't really developing them in the traditionally understood way as much as modding them.

So when Phil Eklund approached me about doing a design for an intermediate game between his Bios: Genesis and Bios: Megafauna series, called at various points during the design process Bios: Paleozoic, Bios: Pangaea, Bios: Fauna and Bios: XX, I was initially cautious. For a start, I had already designed a 'Bios: Paleozoic' which was a mod to Bios: Megafauna which allow you to start the game earlier in the Paleozoic era. And I didn't have the confidence to build a design from scratch.

However, I do have some previous experience with procedural map generation. So I decided to concentrate on my unique selling point as a game designer and begin by building a game which procedurally generates the map by using craton movement instead of a fixed map. Jon Manker also came on board the project with the offer of mentoring me and acting as a co-designer, but our actual contributions would evolve substantially throughout the course of the project so that Jon ended up in much more of a developer as well as designer role.

My initial proposal to Phil was as follows:

The reason for this is I've figured out a non-climax based tableau. Instead I'm going to attempt to model plate tectonics instead :)
The idea will be cards consisting of super continents (spanning two cards), mountains, landmasses (reverse side ice), archipelagos (reverse side is ocean). Each card will have a drift number and direction and represent a plate. Colliding plates will either subduct or form mountains or super continents. Rules to be determined.

My reasoning for eliminating climaxes was to cut down on the recognition factor of having to read climax numbers off the map. This is a significant part of the original Bios: Megafauna as creeples on the lowest climax location are significantly more vulnerable to elimination by a new biome being introduced. As it turns out, improving game state legibility became a central tenet of the new Bios: Megafauna game, and we eliminated DNA, acculturation, roadrunner genes and a separate size chart for very similar reasons.

Phil insisted very early on that we were going to model skeletal types rather than dentition (for the still intended sequel to this game, Megafauna), and also that there was six named cratons. This meant I was working with 2x2 cratons to keep to approximately the same playing area size as Megafauna. On top of this I built an event driven craton movement model that allowed for the formation and separation of a Pangaea supercontinent. The problem with the system I built was that it was incredibly prone to have the cratons fly off in any direction and never collide. To fix this required carefully stacking the event deck so that cratons would move in similar directions with a bias to collide and that any variation in movement order was tightly controlled. It was also too hard to explain the design approach I took to getting the events working in such a way that Jon and Phil understood it - knowledge transfer over the Internet is a hard thing to do. Phil recommended that we go with a horizontal collision model with some vertical movement and the craton movement has been much more robust and largely unchanged since that suggestion.

The need to go to a horizontal collision model was driven by requirement to use hex instead of square cratons. And that requirement was driven by something that had become more and more obvious as development for Bios: Genesis wound down and we began working on the new game in earnest: there wasn't enough design space for a Bios: Genesis which ended up with terrestrial creatures, Bios: Pangaea which did something with those creatures and a planned Bios: Megafauna 2 which allowed those creatures to grow to enormous sizes. Instead, we made the call in a meeting together to fold together Pangaea and Megafauna into a single game. This decision effectively meant that we would be redesigning Megafauna almost from the ground up. And hexes were adopted so that we could dynamically generate the hex-based Bios: Origins map by using craton movement in Bios: Megafauna 2.

Being a direct sequel to Bios: Genesis meant we could do a lot of the simplification by simply adopting the decisions that had been made in Bios: Genesis and extending them into the new game. This meant organs instead of DNA, with Phil deciding to introduce a fifth organ type to represent cold resistance, and promotable mutation cards, although we innovated by having the promoted side in one of two possible origins to represent specialisation of base organ types in various ways (with a large amount of latitude in how this occurs in practice).

One component that survived a long way into the game design process but which was ultimately cut was the intended replacement for acculturation abilities which were ecomorphs. These would have allowed for everything from the development of various tools (now subsumed into the emotion system) to acting as a keystone species such as a beaver or prairie dog as well as a variety of hunting methods. But a third row of cards in the market made ecomorphs problematic to begin with, and they were completely eliminated when we started to realise that putting special rule text on the cards ran counter to the improving the legibility of the game state.

Contrast the elimination of ecomorphs about midway through the design process, with the carbon cycle tracking. As a part of the craton movement, I had suggested that we eliminate event-based CO2 modelling and go with a counter based system with CO2 reservoirs being placed on the map by outcomes such as continents colliding to form mountains. Phil expressed cautious interest in the idea, and then ruled it out, preferring a more conservative event-based CO2 system that was recognisably similar to the first edition of Bios Megafauna. But in one of many redesigns of the event system (no other system had more changes to it) Phil adopted my initial suggestion, adding the tracking of O2 (which I had abstracted out) and water, which could fill up the atmosphere (representing greenhouse gases) or clouds (causing precipitation).

Given I am in the most junior of the designers involved in the creation of Bios Megafauna 2, tt is remarkable how many of the systems I initially proposed survived in the final game. However Phil has definitely owned the design in this instance, which he should do given he ultimately lives by the success of his games. And he would often pose me a challenge: such as coming up with a way of defining emotions or horror plants in the game and then take a seed of my initial suggestion (emotions should correspond to the four organ colours) and take the design in the direction he wanted to go. The tempo of development largely seems to have been I'll build version 1 of something, Phil will flesh out and build the final version and Jon will ensure that the fun has been put in the game.

I am quietly optimistic that we've been successful in ensuring that Bios Megafauna 2 is more fun and more of a game than its predecessors. The collision of species expanding on the map is incredibly enjoyable, and lends a knife fight in a phone booth feel to the whole proceedings. The climate and tectonic engine lends enough randomness and arbitrariness to the proceedings, and the personification of Medea as player controlled means that the microscopic world of Bios Genesis never feels too far away. There are beautiful simulationist elements in Bios Megafauna that are missing in the successor game: the climax and biome interactions are simplified and abstracted and that is the loss I feel most keenly, but the games of Bios Megafauna 1 I played during the development of Bios Megafauna 2 just highlighted how little direct control players had in the first version. The art by Johanna Pettersson is beautiful, and Phil's collaboration with Karim Chakroun continues to pay off in information design and display. I hope you will enjoy playing Bios Megafauna 2 as much as I have enjoyed making it.

All Systems Nominal

I’ve been remiss about posting what I’ve been up to recently. Update 7c for Sixty Years in Space is now out. I’ve also launched a sci-fi TTRPG podcast called All Systems Nominal. And there should be another Roguelike Radio episode coming shortly about one of my favourite games, along with a guest appearance on another podcast about one of my favourite game makers.

Cassette

they uploaded one of the military’s finest minds and didn’t do any more; why would you need to when that mind can be infinitely copied into new bodies (robots, vehicles, zombies, frankensteins, real live humans); but we’re just a cheap copy of a copy, hacked by an AI and given some random variance; cassettes are sometimes stupid, but AI is as dumb as all shit; now we work for quads, killing trils and doing wet work where ever they send us; we’ll never be a fully realised human but they endlessly fascinate us; there was this old lady, neat white shirt and dark apron, walking her greyhound with its brightly coloured woollen coat through the rubble; just saw her for a second as our APC drove by

the Earth is fine; a couple of quads got it in their head they were going to save it and now Australia’s covered in nuclear power plants built to suck CO2 out of the air; the oceans are getting filled up with genetically engineered monsters; you’ll see a GEM washed up on the beach now and again, a carcass crested by spikes and tentacles; another quad is going to Mars and tens thousands of cassettes are going to die building him a home there; and everywhere is constructing arcologies which tower over the mostly abandoned cities they’re replacing; nature is healing which mostly means a deer jumps in front of the APC and the driver curses and has to turn on the wipers to try to get the shower of blood off the windscreen; he’ll be picking deer parts off the fender later; yes, we get to do the fun stuff like shooting other versions of us hired by the person we’re contracted to kill, but also a lot of cleaning and cooking and engineering and burning the remains of the bodies we’ve been plugged into; sometimes one of us just sits on the shelf for a decade or so until someone needs a spare and can’t be bothered waiting for a copy to be made; no time passes for us which is how we make it to the stars

sorry, I should be telling you what a quad is, and a tril; well quads run the planet now, they’re short for quadrillionaire and there’s maybe a dozen of them, some so secretive that you’ll never find out what their name is and if you’ll do one of us will turn up to fix that mistake; and trils are want-to-be-quads which is a pretty dangerous ambition because the last thing a quad wants is to have to deal with another quad; and I’m currently instantiated in the back of an armoured personnel carrier (APC) with a half-dozen of us; a real mixed bag, a drone, two robots, a zombie aka Kenny — that’s a cassette whose running on a corpse they’ve patched together enough to keep operating —, a real life Frankenstein of tissue grown over a metal endoskeleton who I’ve been working with a couple of years now, and me. Me is a weird set up; I’m currently a side-load, which means I get loaded into a real live human who has been specially modded to allow me to take over when needed; and that’s usually because the real live human has skills that we don’t have; or sometimes because they’re a freak who likes to play soldier; but in this instance we’re going to be doing some flying because we’re going to steal a plane and override the automated controls to crash it into the side of an arcology; that’s the sort of thing that disposable cassettes are great at; but the pilot I’m attached to has either got in a whole lot of trouble or has got paid a lot up front because I don’t think they’re going to survive the crash; it’s just my job to make sure they get that far

we pull up next to the light plane in a catering van, slide open the side door (of the van) and open up with the 10mm rotary gattling gun; actually we didn’t, but we ran the simulation of what it’d take to silence airport communications and shooting up the control tower was a serious consideration at one point; instead chartering the plane turned out to be a whole lot easier; in retrospect the most obvious thing is often the best answer, but when you’re planning the impossible you keep wanting to make it hard for yourself; the important part was faking the IFF (identify friend or foe) so that the arcology would let us get close enough to crash into it, but again, filing a legitimate flight plan to land on one of the arcology airstrips was the obvious answer; we’d planted an incendiary device in one of the engines because again it’s easier to fake something by legitimately doing it, so when it starts trailing smoke then flames begin licking the engine I sit there and wait for arcology control to call and tell us our plane was on fire, and our pilot is smart enough to fake panicking on her own so that I didn’t even have to intervene; we must have paid her well, because she hit the window we wanted her to dead-on; green arc-glass shattering and piercing the body of the plane and the pilot

she’s not dead; just punctured in the gut; but she’ll slow us down and was never meant to survive anyway and the robots are already spreading out; assembling combat rifles out of their ribs and printing bullets; and the Frankenstein is just gone; its job is to infiltrate as far as it can; the drone’s up looking for control points to hack; and the zombie comes over with a pistol it’s pulled from it’s thigh and shoots me in the head; and that should be it because its supposed to take me out and crush me but I’m guessing based on the evidence after the fact that it didn’t after it removed me from the data socket (the real me).

I wake up; strapped to a gurney and struggling for breath; there’s a metallic taste in my mouth and lumps pressing into/out of my flesh all over my body; I’m dying and then two men in medical gowns start to surgically work me over really good; like I’ve never felt so much pain to the point where I’ve bitten as much of my tongue out as I can because that’s the only thing I can move; and that’s after there’s not much of my body left except the nerves; I’ve passed out probably a dozen times that I can remember; they let me bleed out; and then I wake up in a new dying body;

after the third (fourth?) body; that they torture to death; I figure out what’s going on; these are medical assistance in dying volunteers; they’ve all got something terminal that makes death look like sweet relief; except instead of getting the dying part — surprise!— they find themselves getting surgery to support side-loads; real sophisticated stuff; I’ve never felt more integrated into a host body before; and ending up being the meat used to tenderise me; my torturers haven’t asked me any questions yet because they want to impress on me just how fucked up they are and how many fully realised human lives they’re willing to waste to make a point; although its pretty clear that society has already decided anyone whose needs medical assistance in dying isn’t quite worth a whole human life and a lot of lives that people feel are worth less are given no alternative except to make the same choice;

but they never get to the questions; because one of them gets a call on their phone; and they’re both suddenly packing up and going where real doctors are needed; even real fucked up morally compromised doctors of the worst sort; and I know we’ve won; there’s now enough people infected with the pandemic we were hired to spread that it doesn’t matter what I know;

I go into low power mode; then switch off; and so I don’t know how long it is until I’m recovered; but I suspect a long time because there’s a lot of bodies;

more than millions; 10s of millions; and I’m sure to be in a secret chamber where messed up shit happens; in the middle of a kilometre high pyramid that has been thoroughly cleansed with a lethal pathogen;

anyway this was my first big time jump; but not my last; and it’s how I got so old; I guess some kind of record;

Oracles in the Main Frame

A Minimal Definition of Games

Games consists of two things: oracles, which determine "what happens next?", and one or more players, who determine "how do I feel about that?". If players act, they begin playing; some of these acts trigger or consist of negotiation of/with an oracle, others may not; some portion of playing is role-playing. The output of this system is work and feelings.

Collapsing the Diegetic Frame

Acts by the players can be framed as diegetic or non-diegetic, where diegetic is within the fictional world of the game. Using TTRPGs as an example, in-charactar speech by the players is diegetic if in the same language as spoken. Expansions of what is included in the fiction allows introduction of other acts: description of character actions if the fiction is a narrative about the fictional world instead of a representation; questions for the referee if the fiction includes access to character interiority where such doubts can be represented as internal dialogue; game mechanics if the fiction includes the acts of players playing a game about the world. This collapse of frames allows the same simple model to represent an audience watching a game, where the audience becomes the players of a new "audience game" and the original game becomes the oracle.

The Main Frame

No frame is preferred, but we want to examine frames which minimise the number of expansions and maximise the mapping of player acts to diegetic acts: we call the frame that balances these two quantities in an aesthetically appealing way the main frame. How close, how frequent and how sustained the mappings in the main frame are will vary from medium to medium and game sessions to game session. Examples of close mappings include VR games with motion controls, immersive LARPs and role-playing sessions where the oracles are in-character problem-solving, consensus-building and rhetorical effectiveness.

Oracles in the Main Frame

Many negotiations with oracles have the awkward property that they are not diegetic in the main frame. A game controller can only rarely represent a human body in motion. However through repeated play, the human brain is highly capable of internalising these acts so that negotiating of/with the oracle feels like the diegetic act it represents. While more research is needed, it seems likely that the easiest to internalise negotiations are interacted with tactilely, in clear and unambiguous ways to allow other players to recognise them and which don't require players ask for permission or clarifications before doing so; such as moving miniatures in an I-go/you-go grid-based environment.

Simulation and Oracles

Oracles which simulate the game world have the advantage that conversations about them can be diegetic. A map board with armies on it can be talked about as if the players talking were generals planning an attack. Likewise if the acts required to negotiate with an oracle are named after diegetic acts, even if the acts themselves are not diegetic.

Utility in Practise

Theory can be unhelpful to a practitioner if it lacks applications. In addition to highlighting important game design 101 concepts (the primacy of verbs and what you want players to feel in the design process), this theory provides 4 concrete approaches to improving the main frame beyond just "design things better": 

1. Give players verbs which map closely to diegetic acts.
2. Help players internalise non-diegetic acts.
3. Use simulation and naming to allow diegetic table talk.
4. Reframe the fiction. See e.g. DIE