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.