Gaslight & Steam Dev Blog

I’ve decided to create a web-based game set in early Rome. It’s intended to be about the leaders of the time with an emphasis on politics rather than military strategy. I want the latter to happen “off-screen” as it were, but with the option for legions to show up at the gates of Rome when needed to influence political events.

The biggest difficulty was selecting a time period that provided the right amount of variety, particularly political in-fighting and manuevering without too much military action (such as the wars with Carthage). In that regard, the early and late periods of the Republic offered some interesting options, as did the time of the First Triumvirate and the period following the death of Caligula, to name but a few points in the turbulent history of the Romans.

I’m particularly fond of the political manueverings described in Imperium by Robert Harris and in the BBC production of I, CLaudius (for which I must confess that I haven’t read the book by Robert Graves). There’s an immediacy to the politics combined with a certain degree of brutality that keeps one from longing overmuch for the good old days. So the more I thought about it, the less Imperial Rome appealed to me and the more I wanted to go back a little further in time. At the same time, Lavinia by Ursula Leguin brings the events of Virgil’s Aeneid to life brilliantly with the interplay between the tribes of the area and the followers of Aeneas.

Out of all the time periods that I think would make for an worthwhile game, the period immediately following the Social War, a crisis point in Roman history, sounded extremely interesting. Sulla’s First Civil War with the struggle between the optimates and populares (and I’m simplifying matters greatly since it wasn’t that black and white) made for some turbulent times with lots of political and military manuevering. Throw in assassinations, exiles, plagues, riots and external threats like Mithridates of Pontus, and you have a good deal of elements to work with.

As they say, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. The politics of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire have much in common with the infighting during the War of the Roses and the gangland warfare of the Roaring Twenties. For that reason, I wanted to capture some of the feel of the Avalon Hill game Kingmaker, minus the board and tediousnous of moving armies around, with the fast-paced play of Family Business, but with a more historical feel and slightly more elaborate mechanics.

Before starting work, I did some research on already existing games that covered both the time period I was interested in with the politics in a card game or simple board game version. I was positive there’d be a plethora of games of all stripes, some very similar to what I had in mind. Surprisingly, the list wasn’t nearly as long as I expected, though I’m sure I missed more than a couple. My short list of games that aren’t strategy games and that otherwise capture some of the elements I was looking for are as follows:

• Caligula from Post Scriptum/Elfinwerks
• Republic of Rome from Valley Games Boardgame
• Roma from Queen Games
• Caesar & Cleopatra from Kosmos/Rio Grande
• Glory to Rome from Cambridge Games Factory
• Sword of Rome from GMT Games
• Quo Vadis from Mayfair Games
• Rome is Burning from Warp Spawn Games
• Sylla from Ystari Games
• Tribune: Primus Inter Pares from Fantasy Flight Games
• Triumvirate from Indie Boards and Cards

Certainly, some of these games are ones that I’d really like to play, particularly Triumvirate. But before I do that, I’d like to get my game up and running. First up, a paper prototype. Much like website usability testing with paper mockups and wireframes, I plan to make some cards and to try some mechanics so I can see how they play out. I’ll discuss that in my next on this subject.

When you’re in the trenches slinging code, it’s very easy to become disillusioned about your skills. Without a frame of reference, tasks you think should be easy become mind-bendingly difficult and there’s no light at the end of the tunnel. That’s certainly been my experience developing for the web and also in designing games. In the latter case, it’s even harder because you can easily convince yourself that no one in their right mind will ever enjoy the gameplay you’ve devoted yourself to for months. I read a post today John Nunemaker that he succinctly titled, “I Have No Talent“. He says:

I am sick of hearing people say, “Oh, I love your code, I wish I could do that.” You can. The only reason you can’t is because you don’t practice enough. I used to think that I wasn’t smart enough. I was jealous of those that did crazy code stuff that I couldn’t even comprehend. Then, one day, I ran into something I did not understand and instead of giving up, I pushed through.

His blog post reminds me of a discussion I had with one of the programmers on Forza Motorsport. At one point, I made an off-hand coment about the complexity and difficulty of what he did in working with the Cambridge Research Center. His response was much the same as Mr. Nunemaker’s, albeit a bit more curmudgeonly. In short, where I perceived this baffling artifice of dazzlingly complex code, he saw it as something that anyone could learn to do with enough time and effort. His insight helped me to keep slugging away at writing my first C# application and not becoming discourage at the intricacies of serializing and deserializing XML.

Working with senior developers has given me insight into how to do some pretty amazing things with computers. Seeing the frustrations of junior developers has taught me how aptitude is different from knowledge. In some cases, things never click, but in the vast majority of instances, it’s just a matter of experience and learning. When I taught basic computer classes through the King County Library System (for those in the Puget Sound region, the KCLS computer classes are a great introduction for novices and they’re free), I got see many people who had never used a computer before gradually come to the realization that surfing the web or using Microsft Word wasn’t nearly as difficult as they feared it would be.

So if you want a more objective appraisal of your development skills, try teaching someone else what you know. And if you want to know whether your game is actually any fun, let someone else play it. But that’s a post for another time.

Looking out the window where I work, my co-workers and I can see the steady progress on the construction of Amazon.com’s new buildings in the South Lake Union neighborhood. Today, safety-vested and hard-hatted troop of people came parading through in the rain, presumably on a tour to see the progress being made. Since we use Lean processes, it seemed analogous to a “gemba walk” that our managers are supposed to conduct regularly.

But why use a term like gemba walk when the Japanese word gemba has a literal meaning of “factory floor” and applies to an industrial process rather than the development of software? Further, for non-Japanese speakers, why use the specific Japanese word when there are plenty of English words that are more immediately understandable to outsiders (those not engaged in applying Lean methodology in the workplace)? It’s not even so much that using this word jars the ear of an English speaker, but that other words to refer to other parts of the process are not used or are, in fact, translated. In a workplace that also embraces kaizen (lit. “improvement”), why are terms like muda (waste) and seiketsu (standardization) not used? When Lean practitioners do recognize waste, they often fail to recognize the differentiation that would be captured by proper use of the Japanese terms (specifically, muda, muri, and mura, the latter two being distinct from more general waste that comes from an inexact translation of muda). To me, as an occasional speaker of Japanese, the reason to use the foreign word is so that the specific nuance of that word isn’t lost or because the translation is too inexact.

To my mind, using the term gemba smacks of putting a new coat of paint on the idea of management by walking around, albeit with a formally defined set of goals and methods. However, I think the formality of the process, typified by the use of ill-defined buzz words, becomes a waste all its own. The danger is that the process becomes a meaningless exercise: “It’s a ‘drive-by’ gemba. No matter how sincere, it is shallow.”

On a related note, the term kaizen rolls off the tongue easier than Kontinuierlicher Verbesserungspozess (such as that employed by Volkswagen), the latter being more in the nature of focussed improvement on a specific process and being more punctuated than the Japanese process.

Addendum: Regarding the use of Japanese terms, Mike Wroblewski has some excellent points and links to arguments both pro and con. In case it’s not clear, I agree with him and don’t think that the Japanese terms should be abolished, but rather that practitioners shouldn’t let the term obscure the intent. By all means use the appropriate terminology to effect the changes the organization wishes to see. If the changes aren’t occurring, then perhaps the managers performing their gemba walk has gotten bogged down in the terminology or process and need to spend more time listening to what is actually being said.