Like a lot of dates, the Dating Game fizzled out.
In some ways it’s not surprising that it lost momentum. The Dating Game was my first sincere attempt at building a game, certainly my first attempt which I brought to a playable prototype. As we approach season 2 of the show, I've spent some time recently looking over my various drafts, notes, changelog, and PlayingCards.io rooms to see what I can learn from this experience.
Have you ever seen Dating, No Filter? A camera crew follows couples on a first date and the camera cuts away to a pair of comedians on a couch commenting and joking about how the date is unfolding. It quickly cycles between funny, sincere, and cringy. I wanted to make a game that replicated that feeling of being on a couch, sometimes laughing at and sometimes rooting for a couple fumbling their way through getting to know each other and occasionally finding chemistry along the way. My pitch was that a deckbuilder with a hidden market would create a feeling of uncertainty about what is going to happen next which could rhyme with those feelings of uncertainty and anticipation that make dates exciting and terrifying. It’s a tall order.
The first playtest was far worse than I could have imagined. Mark was even more patient, stoic, and polite than usual, which often means he hates something. I described the playtest on the podcast as a romance themed Magic: the Gathering, but I didn’t mean that in a good way. Turns were ponderous and slow. Every card was full of “ifs ands and buts” clauses which made it difficult to discern what impacts of cards would actually be, even for me, the creator of the cards. It was the first version of a game that would appeal to exactly zero people. This was nothing like the pitch I had made to Mark which made him excited to let me join his and Jason’s passion project in the first place.
And yet, I was ecstatic. We had taken something from concept to prototype, and were now actually playing with that prototype.
I suspect if Dr. Frankenstein had made a second monster, it would have turned out better than the first. Our first prototype was a true monster, hideous to behold. It was immediately obvious that the biggest problem with the prototype was the lack of interaction between players. A game simulating a date with minimal interaction just doesn’t make any sense.
Mark suggested cribbage would be a good inspiration for how to model that interaction. A few hands later we came up with the idea of The Chain. This was our attempt to model back and forth interaction as I play a card, you play a card, I play another card, etc., the idea was that instead of players taking turns playing all the cards in their hand and then buying from the market, each card triggered an opportunity for a response.
We were trying to represent a conversation like
Tell me about your family? →
I have two older sisters, what about you? →
I have one older sister → Oh neat! Are you ready to order?
As the three-card Chain:
Provoke (Ask about family)
Provoke (Discuss family)
Response (Order Dinner).
The Chain went through multiple iterations. We changed Provoke (because Jason reasonably pointed out that Provoke just wasn’t the right vibe) to Opener, Banter, and Closer. We repeatedly playtested and tweaked the Chain, because we knew that getting the feeling of quick back and forth was critical to creating the feeling we wanted players to experience. We changed the ratios of cards types, added a faction-equivalent system, switched around the ways players access the market and add new cards to their decks. Mark created a version which drew more inspiration from Dominion than from Star Realms. I reworked the cards so each card had a Left Swipe or a Right Swipe function that players had to choose between.
I don’t know if we were getting there, but we were getting somewhere. Could we have been just circling a drain? Possibly.
Wait a second... you’re telling that you were playtesting, iterating, making big changes, and yet you let it drop?
The biggest problem with the Dating Game was the development cycle was brutal. I was such an inexperienced designer that I created versions of the game that couldn’t start. Frankenstein’s monster wouldn’t even get off the table. When Jason played it with Mark for the first time, he ran into multiple turns where he just couldn’t do anything. The game would soft-lock.
See, I thought that because so much of the “feel” of the game relied on hidden-information mechanisms, I wouldn’t be able to effectively playtest against myself. This meant playtests, which were precious given the challenge of coordinating schedules across timezones, often gave us very little information because a bad ratio of card types stopped us from testing the game elements that we wanted to test.
Here’s an example. In the first version where every card was a Provoke card (which starts or continues a chain) or a Response (which finishes a chain), I put an equal number of Provokes and Responses. I had imagined gameplay unfolding as Provoke-Provoke-Provoke-Response sequences, but instead I had condemned it to averaging out to two card Provoke-Response sequences over and over again. The ratio was wrong. This was an easy fix. All I had to do was triple the number of Provoke cards. Then schedule a whole another playtest, and see the impact of that minor tweak, and find out what other big oversight I had made. In short, our playtest and feedback cycle was incredibly inefficient. It felt like we weren’t getting into the meat of the game. We kept on getting stuck on problems stopping the game in the first three to four turns. We were never once able to play a game all the way to the end to see how the victory conditions hashed out.
So you can see on a granular level why the design and development side of production left a lot to be desired. But more importantly, there was a lot about the process that we hadn’t really figured out. Jason and I mostly communicated through Mark or Discord messages. We didn’t have effective means of showing the changes made or sharing feedback. He never even saw the victory conditions I based on his idea! Perhaps most importantly, not only was our cycle not very effective or efficient, it just wasn’t fun. And if we weren’t having fun with the process, if it wasn’t efficient or effective, it became hard to imagine we would end up with an end product we were happy with.
Then we decided to develop and pitch alternative versions of a game that only shared the name, Nightmare Smashers. I originally floated the idea because it was clear at this point we had different approaches and priorities in development, and I thought it would be a good and fun creative exercise if we dipped our toes into starting from the beginning, having been mired in a very “unfun” part of the process for a while.
And honestly, the outcome was fantastic. The biggest leap forward came when we expanded our team and implemented weekly meetings. We were looking at fresh ideas with fresh eyes. We returned to the drawing board and are now approaching the end of season one, where we will pick a completely different game than Word Warpers or Supermarket Game or Dating Game, largely because we added a wide range of perspectives and insight we had. The larger team required us to approach projects in a more streamlined and professional manner. We have systems and processes now. I don’t know if we could have gotten there without the problematic development cycle we experienced with the Dating Game.
All that being said, I still want to make the Dating Game. Not right now, but someday. I still think the concept is solid. I still think the market for a casual, lighthearted game about a date exists. I do think I need to wait until I'm the designer who can effectively match the mechanics to the theme to create the version of the Dating Game that exists in my head.
— Peter