People Behind The Meeples - Episode 232: Steven Vesci

Welcome to People Behind the Meeples, a series of interviews with indie game designers.  Here you'll find out more than you ever wanted to know about the people who make the best games that you may or may not have heard of before.  If you'd like to be featured, head over to http://gjjgames.blogspot.com/p/game-designer-interview-questionnaire.html and fill out the questionnaire! You can find all the interviews here: People Behind the Meeples. Support me on Patreon!

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Name:	Steven Vesci
Email:	vescis@gmail.com
Location:	Cleveland, OH
Day Job:	IT - software testing
Designing:	Two to five years.
Webpage:	Vesci Designs
BGG:	vescis
Facebook:	Steven Vesci
Twitter:	@vescis
YouTube:	Steven Vesci

Today's Interview is with:

Steven Vesci
Interviewed on: 3/7/2020

I first met Steven Vesci at Protospiel Chicago last year. Since then we've crossed paths quite a few times online. He's an active member of a bunch of game design Facebook groups and The Game Crafter community and we both entered games in The Game Crafter's Staff Roll and Write Design Contest (which is still in limbo waiting for the results due to the pandemic). Read on to learn more about Steven and his numerous game design projects!

Some Basics
Tell me a bit about yourself.

How long have you been designing tabletop games?
Two to five years.

Why did you start designing tabletop games?
I needed an outlet to devote energy to that was a little more productive than constant social media scrolling! Had always been into tabletop games and spreadsheets, so it seemed like a natural fit.

What game or games are you currently working on?
Petri - an card-driven area control game where players are Biology lab tech using CRISPR to cheat at their Fantasy Cell Culture League
Cthulhu Snacks - a blind bidding game where players are billionaires trying to attract weakened Lovecraftian Gods to their zoo by feeding them employees, but the Gods awaken if overfed
Spellbook - a puzzly solitaire legacy game that I'm currently trying to adapt to a 1-4 player coop legacy game

Have you designed any games that have been published?
Days to Harvest by Glass Shoe Games will hit Kickstarter as soon as in-person conventions start back up (was previously scheduled for July)

What is your day job?
IT - software testing

Your Gaming Tastes
My readers would like to know more about you as a gamer.

Where do you prefer to play games?
Play a lot on my gaming table at home, also enjoy a local meetup in a large community center space

Who do you normally game with?
Playtesting with Cleveland's Ultimate Team-Up group, regular playing with the Board Gamers of Greater Akron, and local cons at Ravenwood Castle

If you were to invite a few friends together for game night tonight, what games would you play?
Terraforming Mars, Scythe, or Spirit Island. Still hoping to trick someone into

And what snacks would you eat?
Chocolate Chip Cookies

Do you like to have music playing while you play games? If so, what kind?
Generally not

What's your favorite FLGS?
Critical Hit Games, especially for their annual flea market sale. Recently I did a playtest session at Rogue's Den which I'd like to visit more. Shoutout to local game cafe Tabletop for hosting too many playtest sessions

What is your current favorite game? Least favorite that you still enjoy? Worst game you ever played?
Scythe is probably #1 - I love the uniqueness of the map and the upgrade system. Terraforming Mars is high for its ambition, Spirit Island for its complexity. The worst game for me was something I believe was called 'the Logo Game' - which combined mass-market roll and move with crappy trivia about advertising.

What is your favorite game mechanic? How about your least favorite?
Engine Building has got to be the favorite, because there are so many flavors of it. Not sure I have a least favorite - I'm really bad at social deduction but I still enjoy it!

What's your favorite game that you just can't ever seem to get to the table?
Spirit Island! Seafall is conceptually a favorite, but haven't actually been able to play it yet

What styles of games do you play?
I like to play Board Games, Card Games, Video Games

Do you design different styles of games than what you play?
I like to design Board Games, Card Games

OK, here's a pretty polarizing game. Do you like and play Cards Against Humanity?
No

You as a Designer
OK, now the bit that sets you apart from the typical gamer. Let's find out about you as a game designer.

Have you ever entered or won a game design competition?
I've entered several Game Crafter competitions, and one ButtonShy. No wins yet!

Do you have a current favorite game designer or idol?
Rob Daviau - I am totally in love with Legacy games and Pandemic Legacy in particular. Also a huge fan of his efforts to rehabilitate old classics!

Where or when or how do you get your inspiration or come up with your best ideas?
I like to try to capture the essence of iconic scenes from books or movies - not specifically about the particular IP, but the thematic content. I have games based off the Council of Elrond, the shapeshifters duel in Sword in the Stone, and Spellbook has some Neverending Story reading a magic book vibes. I've also been inspired by iconic quotes, like "God does not play dice with the Universe" and cool technology like CRISPR.

How do you go about playtesting your games?
Ultimate Team-up hosts weekly meetups around the Cleveland/Akron area so there's lots of opportunity for great feedback. I will occasionally lean on family, and in real early stages I'll load things into Tabletop Simulator and mock a few turns myself. I try to have specific questions I want to answer from each session, though in early tests those questions are usually just 'is this fun?' and 'does this work?' Also love to attend Protospiels! I frequent PS Chicago, Cleveland, and starting to frequent Proto ATL. Hope to hit Indy, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Toronto someday!

Do you like to work alone or as part of a team? Co-designers, artists, etc.?
The Ultimate Team-up crew provides fantastic insights and suggestions, and a lot of our games contain a lot of ideas from team mates, though we don't tend to officially co-design.

What do you feel is your biggest challenge as a game designer?
The cold pitch. Haven't mastered the art of getting publishers excited about my games from a quick introductory pitch, and I'm not notable enough to get warm ones!

If you could design a game within any IP, what would it be?
Veronica Mars, Consulting Detective

What do you wish someone had told you a long time ago about designing games?
It took me too long to grasp the idea of Minimum Viable Prototype, and my early designs definitely tried too much too fast. Also needed to know not to start with your most ambitious ideas, I've had much more success with smaller swings and those efforts have helped shape bigger efforts.

What advice would you like to share about designing games?
Enter contests! Not necessarily to win, but to give yourself artificial constraints and a deadline. Game design is so open ended, and you can easily get lost in all of the options and never finish anything. It feels good to finish an entry, and the constraints will force you to try things and learn things you wouldn't naturally do.

Would you like to tell my readers what games you're working on and how far along they are?
Games that will soon be published are: Days to Harvest, by Glass Shoe Games, is a light drafting and push your luck game, where players select garden gnomes to add to a community garden. Placing lazy gnomes gives more points, but you'll be kicked out of the round if the garden fails and you've been the laziest!
Currently looking for a publisher I have: For the Greater Good is a Negotiation/Take That game where the players are ambassadors to a great council planning the defeat of an encroaching evil while plotting and scheming amongst themselves to have the most influence after the dust settles. Think of the 'Council of Elrond' scene from Lord of the Rings where everyone behaves like Boromir.

Spellbook is a Solitaire Legacy game where the player is a would-be magician huddled in a library basement, attempting to learn magic from a mysterious book. It's a grid manipulation and pattern matching puzzle with legacy mechanics giving the player more options as they learn spells, allowing them to match more complicated patterns

Petri is a low-medium weight area control game where the players are Biology lab technicians using CRISPR to cheat at their Fantasy Cell Culture League. Players play 'splice' cards to add, move, and remove cells from petri dishes trying to establish majorities, and playing multiple cards of a given type lead to splashy combination effects.

Mintilization is a civ-building game in a Mint Tin! Players use simultaneous hidden worker allocation to try and grab land, technology, and buildings before their opponents do, trying to grow the mightiest mint empire!

Dice with the Universe is a kid-friendly Roll and Draw where players get to draw their own personal Universe! Dice rolls determine which astronomical objects players can choose to draw, with different objects scoring in different ways.

Are you a member of any Facebook or other design groups? (Game Maker's Lab, Card and Board Game Developers Guild, etc.)
Board Game Design Lab, Card and Board Game Designer's Guild, UTU Creators' Space, Meeple Syrup Shop Talk, Protospiel

And the oddly personal, but harmless stuff…
OK, enough of the game stuff, let's find out what really makes you tick! These are the questions that I'm sure are on everyone's minds!

Star Trek or Star Wars? Coke or Pepsi? VHS or Betamax?
I like both Trek and Wars, but currently prefer The Expanse! Dr. Pepper. Streaming.

What hobbies do you have besides tabletop games?
Raising a tabletop gaming daughter (yay My Little Scythe!), and a little bit of video games when I should be designing.

What is something you learned in the last week?
My six year old trash talks other six year olds in Mario Kart

Favorite type of music? Books? Movies?
I listen to way more podcasts than music - favorites being NPR Politics, Wait Wait Don't Tell Me, 99% invisible, Board Game Design Lab, The Dice Tower. For books, I recommend the Expanse series and the Broken Earth Trilogy. I don't get to non-kids movies very often at all!

What was the last book you read?
Uncrowned by Wil Wight (The Cradle series)

Do you play any musical instruments?
I do not, but enjoying listening to my daughter starting piano lessons

Tell us something about yourself that you think might surprise people.
My shortest attempt at a game design lasted 5 minutes - I had an idea for a kids worker placement that I tried on a whim with my daughter that had her in tears on her first turn. Turns out when you tell a child they can't do something because the other player did it, they don't like that at all.

Tell us about something crazy that you once did.
If I've ever done something crazy, I've probably suppressed the memory

Biggest accident that turned out awesome?
My laptop was being repaired after a drop. Couldn't design my usual way using spreadsheets and Nandeck, so I sat down with dice and paper and ended up with a roll and write

Who is your idol?
N.K. Jemisin - she turned her writing side hustle into repeat award dominance of the field

What would you do if you had a time machine?
Answer a lot of theological questions definitively. I'm sure that would clear everything up and people would gladly accept the findings without complaint....

Are you an extrovert or introvert?
Exceedingly introverted!

If you could be any superhero, which one would you be?
Captain Planet would be super useful right now

Have any pets?
Currently one cat, but at Peak Pet had 6 cats and a dog

When the next asteroid hits Earth, causing the Yellowstone caldera to explode, California to fall into the ocean, the sea levels to rise, and the next ice age to set in, what current games or other pastimes do you think (or hope) will survive into the next era of human civilization? What do you hope is underneath that asteroid to be wiped out of the human consciousness forever?
I don't think any specific entertainment is vital enough to worry about in such circumstances, I think a whole new culture of entertainment would result. But there would be some interesting archaeological discussions around digging up meeples and cubes - it's too bad the rules documents wouldn't survive!

If you'd like to send a shout out to anyone, anyone at all, here's your chance (I can't guarantee they'll read this though):
Thanks so much to my wife Sara for the understanding around playtesting outings and conventions!

Just a Bit More
Thanks for answering all my crazy questions! Is there anything else you'd like to tell my readers?

Vote!

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Thank you for reading this People Behind the Meeples indie game designer interview! You can find all the interviews here: People Behind the Meeples and if you'd like to be featured yourself, you can fill out the questionnaire here: http://gjjgames.blogspot.com/p/game-designer-interview-questionnaire.html

Did you like this interview?  Please show your support: Support me on Patreon! Or click the heart at Board Game Links , like GJJ Games on Facebook , or follow on Twitter .  And be sure to check out my games on  Tabletop Generation.

Exploring Monster Taming Mechanics In Final Fantasy XIII-2

Let's just get this out of the way. I'm a huge Final Fantasy fan. I adore the original game even today, Final Fantasy VI is definitely the best of the franchise, and I've found things to enjoy in every one that I've played, which is nearly all of the main-line games. (I still haven't managed to crack open FFIII, but I plan to soon.) Even each of the games in the Final Fantasy XIII trilogy had something that drew me in and kept me going through the game, wanting to learn more. These games get a lot of flack for being sub-par installments in the Final Fantasy franchise, and some of the criticism is warranted. The story is convoluted, and the plot is as confusing as quantum mechanics.

That debate, however, is not why we're here now. We're here to look at one of the great aspects of FFXIII-2: the monster taming and infusion system.

This system is deep and complex, but not in the off-putting way that the plot is. The amount of variety and configurability in the monsters that you can recruit to fight alongside Serah and Noel is astonishing, which is nice because those two are somewhat lacking in that department. Their development paths are fairly linear. There are a few choices about what strengths to give them as they level up in the "crystarium," but it's mostly a matter of ordering the abilities they learn and doesn't make much difference in the end. The monsters, on the other hand, allow for huge variations in development that results in a system with fascinating choices for optimization and prioritization. Figuring out how to capture and develop powerful monsters early in the game is great fun, and its this characteristic of Final Fantasy games—of finding ways to build a strong party early in the game without tedious grinding—that I really enjoy.

On a totally different note, I've been considering different ways to practice using databases and building simple websites, and the monster taming system is complex enough and interesting enough that it would make for a good collection of content to use for that practice while having some fun in the process. So, the other goal of this series, other than exploring the monster taming system in FFXIII-2, is to explore how to get a data set into a database, put it up on a website with Ruby on Rails, and experiment with that data set in some novel ways. Before we get into all of that, however, we need to understand what the heck we're putting in the database in the first place, and to do that we need to understand this monster taming system in detail.

Monster Taming

Okay, what is this monster taming, and why is it so complicated? We'll have to start at the beginning and work our way through the system. At the start of the game there's just Serah, trying to stay alive. (Actually, the very start of the game is a flashy battle sequence and confusing plot points with Lightning, but let's ignore that.) Pretty soon Noel shows up and decides to help Serah out, so now it's a party of two. This setup goes on for a couple levels, but it's pretty weird for a Final Fantasy game. Normally there's three or four characters in a party. Then we come to a pitched battle with a Cait Sith and a Zwerg Scandroid. There will be a lot of weird monster names throughout this series. You're just going to have to roll with it. Anyway, after creaming the cat and the droid, they turn into monster crystals, which are basically the essence of monsters. These crystals are stored in your monster inventory, and you can assign three of them to coveted spots in your "Paradigm Pack" (not the name I would have picked). These three monster spirits will fight with you in battle, and so begins your long and precarious journey as the monster whisperer.

Monsters come in six basic varieties, conveniently matching the six roles that Serah and Noel can assume. These six role are briefly explained as follows:

• Commando - The Arnold Schwarzenegger role, plenty of strength, short on finesse.
• Ravager - The mage role, uses attack magic.
• Sentinel - This is a tank role, not many attacking options, but it absorbs damage like it's nothing.
• Saboteur - Weakens the enemy by removing protections and inflicting ailments like poison and slow.
• Synergist - Strengthens the party with offensive and defensive enhancements. Also moonlights as a business executive.
• Medic - Heals the party, and possibly the only obvious role name of the bunch.

While Serah and Noel can switch between these roles, the tamed monsters have fixed roles. Switching the monster's role switches the monster, and there are three role possibilities for any given battle corresponding to the three monsters that are on deck. The monster's type is only the beginning of what a monster is, though. There is so much more.

Monster Training

Monsters can gain experience just like Serah and Noel. Both the humans and the monsters have crystariums where they advance along a path to gain abilities and increase their stats. While the humans have a crystarium for each of their six roles, the monsters each have one crystarium, possibly with multiple levels, where they gain their abilities and stats. Because the crystariums of the monsters are more unique to the monster itself, each monster type will learn a unique set of abilities and end up with different stats. Additionally, while the humans can move through their crystariums by spending crystarium points gained from winning battles, monsters can only advance on their crystariums by using various types of monster materials that are dropped by defeating monsters in battle. This seems to be some form of cannibalism, but it's pretty mild because the materials are bolts and orbs and other things like that. Monsters require different materials for their crystariums depending on what level they're on their crystarium, and if they're biological or mechanical monsters. Different materials will also give different bonuses to the monster's health, strength, magic, or all three stats.

Following so far? Because we're just getting started. This monster whispering is intricate stuff. On top of the unique upgrade paths, abilities, and materials, each monster spirit has a set of characteristics that relate to how they will develop as they level up. A monster can be a "late bloomer," meaning it may be weak to start with, but it can reach the upper levels 70-99 of its crystarium. Maybe the monster is "brainy," meaning that it will learn lots of abilities, or it's "flameproof," which is pretty self-explanatory. There are 29 characteristics in all, and any given monster can have up to four of them. Monsters will also come with some initial abilities, whether that be actions like casting certain spells and attacking or passive abilities like "armor breaker" that allows it to penetrate an enemy's physical defense. Taming and training monsters are not the only ways to get monsters with certain abilities, however. This is where things get real, as in real complicated.

Monster Infusion

The third way to give a particular monster new and wonderful abilities is to take another monster that has the desired ability(ies) and fuse them into the desired monster through a magical monster infusion process. How does this work exactly? Who knows! How did materia work in FFVII, or guardian force cards in FFVIII? It's a Final Fantasy game; some things you just have to accept without question and move on. The source monster spirit is lost in this process of infusing the target monster with new abilities. It's a destructive process.

Losing the source monster is not the only cost, though. There are restrictions as well. The first restriction is that a monster can only have 10 passive abilities. If a monster accumulates more than 10 passive abilities, some of them are going to have to go. These abilities all have a rank, and higher ranked abilities will stick to a monster better than lower ranked abilities. Also, newer abilities are stickier than older abilities, according to when the monster learned them. The lowest ranked abilities will get the boot first, with order of acquisition being the tie-breaker—first in, first out.

The next restriction is red-locked abilities. These are abilities that cannot be transferred to or removed from a monster, ever. This restriction is pretty simple, unlike the next one.

Monsters can also have yellow-locked abilities, although these locks never exist by default. Yellow locks can be created, propagated, and destroyed by infusing abilities of the same type in various ways. Two abilities are the same type if they modify the same attribute. For example, HP +10% and HP +25% would be of the same type. Also, HP +10% is a lower rank than HP +25%. That's important for yellow locks because if you infuse a monster that already has a lower rank ability with an equal or higher rank ability of the same type, the infused ability comes with a yellow lock and will stay put when the monster's abilities overflow. Generally, if an ability of higher rank is added to a yellow-locked ability of lower rank, the yellow lock is kept. If an ability of equal or lower rank is added to a yellow-locked ability, the yellow lock is destroyed. It's a bit more complicated than that because there are about a dozen different combinations, but this summary should be sufficient for the purpose of setting the requirements of the database. Basically, we want to make sure we know the rank of each ability so that we can figure out the best way to develop monsters' abilities.

All of the red lock and yellow lock stuff has to do with passive abilities, but there are two other types of abilities that come into play with monster infusion: role abilities and hidden abilities. Role abilities are the actions that the monster will take in battle, and there is no limit to the number of these abilities that a monster can have. When a source monster is infused, you can choose from its role abilities up to the number that its crystarium stage is at, which will be 1-5 depending on how much you can level up the monster and how much you actually leveled it up. The disadvantage of infusing too many role abilities on a monster is that you don't have control over what it does in battle, and if it has too many options, it probably won't be doing what you want it to do when you need it most. Decide what you're going to use a monster for, and then don't give it choices. You can't remove role abilities once they're infused.

Lastly, hidden abilities are learned by a monster when it is infused with 99 levels worth of monsters of the opposite role. Commando and Ravager are opposites (makes sense), Saboteur and Synergist are opposites (makes even more sense), and Sentinel and Medic are opposites (the leftovers, I guess). For example, you could infuse nine level 17 Zwerg Scandroids onto your Red Chocobo, and it'll learn Jeopardize, which boosts the bonus the chocobo gets when attacking a staggered enemy. Each role has it's own hidden ability that it gets when those 99 levels of monsters of the opposite role are infused into it.

Acquiring the Data for the Database

Okay, that was a bunch of intricate, complicated stuff, but it gives us a good idea of what kind of data we want to put in our database so we can link it up and ask interesting questions about monster infusion. 

First, we want to know all about monsters:

• What's its name?
• Is it tamable? We might have a separate tamable monster table since most of the following properties wouldn't apply to non-tamable monsters.
• What materials does it drop in battle?
• What's its role?
• Where in the game can we find it?
• What are its characteristics?
• What's its max level?
• What are its starting and ending stats (HP, strength, and magic)?
• What are its starting abilities?
• What abilities does it learn and at which crystarium levels?
• How many crystarium stages does it have?
• What is its feral link? (We didn't talk about this. It's a special action that can be triggered when the monster gets hit too much.)
• What does the feral link do?
• We could also include pictures if we want to get fancy.

We also want to know about abilities. This will be a separate table:

• What's its name?
• What's its rank?
• What does it do?
• Is it passive, role, or hidden? These may be separate tables, since they're different enough to warrant it.
• Which role is it associated with?

We'll be interested in at least one aspect of the areas in the game:

• What's its name?
• How early can we reach this area? I.e. which area unlocks this area?

Since there's a fair number of monster materials, we'll want to keep track of those:

• What's its name?
• Is it biological or mechanical?
• What stage of the crystarium is it for?
• Does it boost HP, strength, magic, or all three? (The name does give this away, but let's be thorough.)

We'll also want to know a little about the monster characteristics because the names are not self-explanatory:

• What's its name?
• What does it mean?

This is shaping up to be a reasonably complex database with 5-8 tables interlinked by these different items' names. The relations in the database will happen through IDs, but everything does have a name as well. The names will be what appears in the tables presented as views of the database, likely with hyperlinks to their information in their own tables. So how should we get all of this data into a database? I certainly don't want to enter it by hand. There's over 150 monsters, dozens of abilities, and dozens of properties for each monster. 

Luckily, some ambitious people have already done the hard work of writing out all of these things in an FAQ, and it's available on gamefaqs.com. The Monster Infusion FAQ by sakurayule, BMSirius, and Taly932 contains almost everything we want to put in the database. It also contains example builds for post-game super monsters, but we're going to look at something a bit different with this series. We want to figure out the best monster builds we can do during the game in order to have monsters that can help us through the game without the need to do any grinding. All of the necessary information is in that FAQ. We just have to write a script to parse it and put it in a form that's easy to import into the database. That parsing script is what we'll figure out how to write in the next episode.

Final Fantasy XV- THE Catholic FF?

I recently came across a Youtube Channel by Ikkin which has some awesome videos on the how FFXV can be seen as supporting the Catholic Faith.

I really love her videos because she offers a sophisticated analysis of the game in the same way that I attempt to do through the reviews in this blog.

If you have played FFXV or if you don't mind massive spoilers, check out her videos, she has a 3 part series on FFXV.

I hadn't even touched FFXV prior to Ikkin's reviews, but now I am getting engrossed in it so hope do to some more posts on this game once I have completed it.

I love how in her first video on FFXV she makes a general analysis on how so many FFs are anti Catholic in story pointing out the 2 worst culprits FFX and Tactics, she does it in a really amusing style that is brutally true. As I said, watch the whole thing if you don't mind spoilers:

WHITE & PINK APARTMENT + DOWNLOAD + TOUR + CC CREATORS | The Sims

 

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Kingdom Of Jerusalem Foot Knights

The last of the Foot are done now for my Kingdom of Jerusalem force, this little lot are Foot Knights and are once again from Fireforge Games, this time their Templar Infantry plastic set.

Colours are the same as I have used for my other units in this force, aided greatly by decals from Battle Flag. Basing is 6 figs on a 60 x 50 base and it was a bit of a challenge getting the figs on the bases with the large cloaks that some of the figures in the front rank are wearing.

I've used some of the decals on the rear of the cloaks as well.

I've got a couple of mounted units which will have the same theme and I will start on those soon.

I think the poses in this set are a lot better than the Sergeants set and I quite like the variety I have managed to get in arm positions which gives the unit a more realistic feel. I quite like the faces on the figures, they have really grown on me and my style of painting cam make them quite expressive.

I've got some Irregular Miniatures WW1 Cavalry as a test on the paint table at the moment so will be reporting on those next.