Inspiration
This is the second post in a dev log about Spilled Mushrooms, a turn-based card solitaire puzzle game available exclusively for Playdate.
Story
When I started developing the prototype, the theme I had was that you were controlling an army of ants to conquer various regions by building anthills. However, this presented more of a score chasing play style than I wanted, and not even a very good one at that. Because it was only 7 turns, perfect scores were compressed - almost always right around a 30. It also wasn't ever immediately obvious that you could have done better at a particular deal, so you never felt the need to retry for a higher score, and consequently never felt the sense of accomplishment for playing the deal better. By swapping the theme to destroying anthills instead, every deal became a proper challenge: can you destroy all of these anthills in just 7 turns?
However, as I didn't have a great amount of expertise in ants, but I had just
recently played Inscryption, I gravitated towards the creature cards found in
that game instead of ants. This made it a lot easier to come up with unique
traits for each of the cards that felt a bit more appropriate for the animal,
although they aren't all perfect matches. I'm still not sure why Weasel gets
stronger each time you discard it.
The real story concept came about a week later after I showed the first Playdate prototype to my brother and said I wasn't sure about keeping the animal / region theming. After some back and forth, he convinced me to keep it, suggesting the name Crittermancer instead. After browsing My Famicase Exhibition 23 for some loose concept ideas, I found mushrooming and was immediately inspired. The story had to be about mushrooms. It became so painfully obvious that the whole time I thought I was destroying anthills I was actually collecting mushrooms. Mushrooms that I had spilled. Spilled Mushrooms.
Keeping with my design principle for a minimal story, I tried to fit the entire thing into a single sentence: You've been tasked with delivering a basket of mushrooms, but you've spilled them along the way and now you need to recover them with the help of some critters. This is the entire narrative.
Who are you? Who tasked you to deliver the mushrooms? Where are you delivering them to? Why can you befriend local critters? Why would a frog go into the desert? These answers just aren't part of the game. They don't need to be. Beyond freeing the game of important story that could be missed in a busy environment, it also frees me up from having to write it!
Gameplay
Using the core design principles already mentioned in the previous post, games like Donsol and Shape of Mind immediately jumped at me. Both of them are fairly abstract with extremely quick play sessions and a random deal every time. These were probably the two most influential games for me, but they weren't the only ones. To look at how various other games inspired Spilled Mushrooms, I think it's best to look at more design principles that I've come to appreciate:
Timeboxing. Pikmin does this phenomenally: every day has a very finite length and there's nothing you can do to change that. It puts a healthy amount of pressure on the player to play efficiently without wasting time, while also providing a reliable and predictable release of tension. You always know when the day will end, so you always know when your next progression checkpoint is. Much to my displeasure, the caves in the sequels stop or slow time, which can greatly extend the length of a day and significantly increase tension buildup because you don't know what's ahead of you and when your next checkpoint will be.
Loopwood and Root Bear for Playdate both exemplify great timeboxed design as well. Loopwood consists of 5 turns with a short timer, and Root Bear is just a single 60 second round. In both cases, you know exactly how long you're in for, but it can still be saddening to be interrupted at just the wrong time and ruin a great run.
In contrast, a lot of games are designed around the opposite - particularly a lot of arcade-style score chasers are designed to build tension constantly until you die. This is a perfectly acceptable design choice, but it inevitably means the better you get at the game, the longer it takes you to play it, and the sadder it is if you're interrupted at an untimely moment.
Memorable. I love the feeling of socializing about a game. Handcrafted games often capture this quite well by being virtue of being handcrafted: the designers can emphasize and curate various narrative events, mechanics, aesthetics, etc. to enhance memorability. Randomized games can have a difficult time with this because every session can blur into an "average". To counteract that, they often use the randomness to their advantage with rare but potent combos that make the player feel clever and powerful for discovering them. The list of games that show this design well is innumerable, but some of the core games that inspired me were the Hearthstone PvE adventures, Warcraft Rumble, Inscryption, and Slay the Spire. The former games make every challenge feel memorable with a unique handcrafted mechanic that you need to strategize to overcome, while the latter games provide you with hugely synergistic combos that make you feel tremendously powerful. In both cases, something sticks in your brain that makes you excited to talk to another player about it.
Unfortunately, a lot of puzzle and solitaire games aren't able to capture this. Games like Stream for Playdate, Shape of Mind, sudoku, and most playing card solitaire games tend to lack these types of memorable experiences. The puzzle solving is there, and the mental exercise is still very enjoyable, but they just don't have puzzles that tend to yield exciting moments you want to chat about.
Always solvable. Handcrafted games are almost always solvable, excluding some uncommon design choices and occasional gamebreaking bugs. On the other hand, randomized games often force you into situations that are unwinnable, either because of a mistake you made or because of the nature of the game. Notably, the solitaire game Klondike (available on Playdate in Smolitaire) has an extremely low solvable rate, with some suggesting that the odds of winning are roughly 1 in 30, while the solitaire game Freecell has close to a 100% solvable rate. Games like mahjong solitaire (available on Playdate in Sparrow Solitaire) have a solvable rate that changes based on how the tiles are dealt. I personally find unsolvability to be unpleasant, especially if I don't know whether it was solvable by playing better or not. Even when I do know it's solvable with better play, such as in mahjong solitaire, there are so many turns in each round that I can't recognize where I made a mistake. While Donsol isn't solvable in every deal, it does make its unsolvability substantially more tolerable because of how quick each deal is played and how obvious an unwinnable situation is, usually to the point that it's obvious the entire deal was unwinnable.
Retryable. Something I often find frustrating in roguelike games is the inability to attempt the same seed a second time with more information. I enjoy the sense of progression and refined understanding that comes from multiple attempts of the same challenge. Again, this is generally a core difference between handcrafted and randomized games. Handcrafted games very often include challenges that expect you to fail again and again until you git gud, whereas roguelike games love to tout "permadeath" as a feature.
However, in some cases, you can bend the rules a bit. The Crew: Mission Deep Sea is a real-world multiplayer cooperative card game. Each round, you deal the deck and then randomly select a series of challenges that players need to complete together. Because it's a tabletop game, it lends itself well to ignoring the real rules and making up your own. To that end, whenever we lose a round, we keep the same challenges, shuffle the deck, and try again. When we finally beat the challenges, everyone is rewarded with a tremendous feeling of achievement. This is something I really sought to capture in Mushrooms.
Unfortunately, this principle is quite hard to use when a challenge's solvability isn't known. As I mentioned earlier, if you don't know that you can do better, there's usually not much incentive to try again. Hearthstone PvE adventures and Warcraft Rumble have great retryable designs, and due to handcrafted nature of the challenges, it's safe to assume that you're meant to win and it's worth it to retry. In the early days of development, this was a major sore spot for me. It was really unpleasant to start a puzzle that you could get within one point of solving but had no idea if it was actually possible or not.
All killer, no filler. As I mentioned in the previous post, a few key influences led to the idea of an 8 card deck, the most prominent being Gloomhaven: Jaws of the Lion. Each player only has a deck of ~10 cards, which means that each card needs to have high impact with no fluff. After playing all of their cards, one card is randomly removed from their deck and the deck is reshuffled, giving you a quick cycle time. It's obvious to see the influence this had on the deck mechanics in Spilled Mushrooms, although as I noted in the previous post, I quickly abandoned shuffling the discard pile in favor of just redrawing it; the net effect is that you're just discarding to the bottom of your deck.
This philosophy is also regularly employed while playing deckbuilding games like Slay the Spire and Inscryption. It's generally in the player's best interests to keep their decks lean and impactful by removing filler cards whenever possible so it can be cycled more quickly. Because Mushrooms doesn't have the same deckbuilding mechanics that allow you to remove cards from a deck, I tried to ensure that every card feels like it has value. Cards tend to be balanced around collecting 4-6 mushrooms in isolation, but almost every card has some combo that can turn it into a mushroom master.
Complexity from simplicity. I very much admire games that build an incredible amount of complexity and depth from a series of very small and simple choices. There's no shortage of games that fill this role, but a significant influence for me was Everdell (and it has similar theming, too!). Each turn, the player either places a worker or plays a card, with the immediate consequences of their choice being remarkably simple to resolve. However, the longer term consequences can be extremely rich with synergies that demand careful thought and planning. While Spilled Mushrooms intentionally has quite a bit less complexity than Everdell, I tried to mimic the simplicity of decision making and understanding the immediate consequences while compressing the long-term to fit my desired puzzle size. Each turn, the player only has 6 available plays: one of two cards to play at one of three areas. By breaking the options into two orthogonal choices and keeping the consequences simple, it helps to reduce analysis paralysis and makes decisions even easier and quicker.
Real, but not too real. I very much enjoy the physical nature of tabletop games, but I find that most of the joy for me comes from having all my friends around a table playing the same thing. When it comes to solo games though, I think I'd almost always play a video game, even if it's a digital representation of a tabletop game. The tedium of bookkeeping and constantly shuffling becomes so much worse when it's just one person. Despite Donsol being designed for a standard deck of cards, I'm afraid of anyone willing to play that game non-digitally. To that end, I aimed to make a game that very much felt like a real card game, but just wouldn't be the same if it was. Hearthstone is a great example of a card game that behaves in a very real way, but often has mechanics that are a bit too extreme for reality. I set my sights a little lower and settled on trying to design a system that was simple enough to understand that you could reason about all the mechanics, but with enough complexity that the bookkeeping would be annoying in real life. This was originally taken care of by the diversity of traits, but as the puzzle generator came into existence, the possibility of physically making this game effectively dropped to nil.
An exhaustive list of influences probably can't be written, but I think this is a sufficient to highlight the critical role that existing works can have on new ones. No ideas are made in a vacuum.