When designing a game revolving around film-making like ScreenPlay, we needed to tie the main goal of our players to movie-making in some fashion.
In early versions of the game, players represented actors playing the role of the protagonists of their respective movies. Each player started the game with a set number of life points, and in the very first iteration of the game’s rules the goal of the game was very straight-forward: bring your opponent’s life total to zero. Achieving this meant that you, as a lead character in your movie, have defeated the antagonist and got a happy ending in your film.
This, while functional, didn’t take advantage of the film-making flavor of the game, and felt more like a one-on-one battle to the death between two opposing forces. It made the movie-making theme feel secondary, almost incidental to the mechanics. We had to design something more fitting than this!
We quickly decided to move away from the life points idea in favor of what later became called “Narrative points”. Instead of bringing down your opponent’s HP, the point of the game would be to try and create a more compelling narrative than your opponent. Soon after figuring this out, we added the concept of “lead roles”, later to be called “lead characters” which had conditions that, when triggered, gained you narrative points. Each lead was required to reach a certain amount of narrative points for their narrative arc to be considered complete. The goal of the game became to complete two of your three leads’ arcs.
This already felt like a huge flavor win: for one thing, it refocused the attention of the players from trying to murder each other (figuratively, of course) to create an interesting story. Having different leads with different requirements allowed us to tie them to gameplay archetypes, pushing the players towards more interesting behaviors. It started to feel like you, as a player, were shaping the story of your movie and turning it in different directions, according to what your leads' needs in their story.
One of the repercussions of this design solution was that leads became way too important for the game, with everything revolving around them at all times. If you didn’t have a lead in the play, you had to get it into play as soon as possible, and if a lead of yours died it was a huge setback to your game-plan. We wanted to give players a generic way of gaining narrative to go along with the leads’ abilities, so that not everything in the game revolved around such a small number of cards.
We opted to keep the ability for characters to attack the opponent directly, which now gained you 1 narrative point instead of damaging the opponent. It worked mechanically, gave players a choice in how they wanted to gain narrative, and made other characters more useful again. As another measure to defocus attention from the leads, we added a “free narrative” counter which allowed you to gain and keep narrative points even when you don't have a lead in play.
The opponent is about to attack you as the actor Adventure Ash
While a large step in the right direction, there were still some things in the design that we didn’t like. For one thing, players still represented actors, but now with them playing all of the lead roles in their movie the flavor began to break down.
Luckily, we had a solution to this problem that worked perfectly. We just needed to change players from “actors” to “directors”. It made perfect sense with everything else going on in the game: when building your deck you cast your leads, characters, choose your tropes and crew to use in your movie – as a director would; when playing the game you choose what to frame, when, and how – like a director would – it all fit together perfectly.
One thing that did not fit, however, was the generic way of gaining narrative points. Now that players represented directors filming movies, attacking the opponent directly felt even more out-of-place. We needed a movie-making solution.
At this point in development, we were also working on the existing fighting game mechanics and their relationship with each other. We wanted an action that lost to attacks and beat dodges so that we had a functioning rock-paper-scissors relationship between all the combat mechanics. After much brainstorming, we came out with a mechanic that solved both issues – “performance”.
As a movie director, you could take up a few frames in your scene to film your characters perform, and if left undisturbed this performance would gain you narrative points. Attacking a performing character would disrupt the performance, and dodging against a performance would be a waste of frames.
It was a flavorful solution that fit nicely into the existing mechanics, and cemented the film-making flavor as an integral part of the game. As a result of all these design decisions we arrived at a player’s win-condition to be completely unrelated to killing your opponent, while still keeping the battle elements of the game intact.