Author Archives: Ryan Shelmertime

Boss Fight

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[ "There is a dragon... and the dragon goes Rah!" ]

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Once upon a game day recent…

This past weekend, we were enjoying the hospitality of friends (exploring the intriguing world of marshmallow smores – unrelated to the story, but delicious), when something extra cool happened.  We scored ourselves an interview for Shelmertime.com.

Now, “game industry journalism” is by no means part of my regular schtick here at Shelmertime, and with good cause. You’re welcome. However, it’s no secret that I do love me some gaming goodness, the creating even more than the playing.

As such, when we found ourselves with the chance to catch up with Brisbane-based game designer Brendan Evans, we couldn’t resist interrogating him about his upcoming card game: Boss Fight. (Brendan was actually very obliging, making our bare room and spotlight approach feel slighty uneasy in retrospect).

Anna and I first encountered Boss Fight over a year ago.  At the time, we were hosting weekly Magic (MTG) evenings in Paddington, attracting a respectable crowd of folks with an obvious interest in card games.  On one such evening, a couple of our regulars brought along a friend – who happened to be dressed as a pirate – who happened to be a jolly nice fellow – who happened to be Mr Evans, and not a pirate at all by any legal definition. Before long we had been introduced to a collection of (lovingly) scrawled notes and hand-made game cards.  Playtesting was underway.

Needless to say, we were delighted to cross paths with Brendan again and were very excited to see what progress had been made on Boss Fight.  We certainly weren’t disappointed.  The game has recently graduated to a fully arted-up (albeit testing) edition. We played it. We had a great time. We’re pretty sure the two facts were related!

… now let’s see what it’s creator has to say for himself.

Could you tell us a little about your background in game design?     As a child, I devoured any game with a map editor and played a great deal of Magic: the Gathering.  As an adult I drifted, and was becalmed in a world of rental agreements and retail employment.  In 2007, my Nana told me she had heard from her wireless radio that ‘game design’ was an actual degree in an actual university in Brisbane.  I packed my bags.  In 2011, I completed my studies and my final year group project.  This was “Awien Ambush”, which received an award from Halfbrick for ‘Most Commercially Viable Game’. [The folks behind Fruit Ninja and other fun]. For those interested, Awien Ambush is available for free download.  Now, I make card games.

Which brings us to your current project, Boss Fight. Now we’ve just finished a game so I’m pretty up to date, but for the folks reading along, give us the elevator pitch.
     Boss Fight is a one-versus-many card game.  One player plays a dragon, with a fiery breath and huge teeth.  The other players play heroic fantasy characters – a fighter, a thief, a wizard, a healer.  They are less individually powerful, but they win through teamwork and co-ordination.

I think that really comes through in the gameplay too. Having played the dragon role, it’s a fun twist to watch the heroes juggle ‘protecting each other’ with ‘punching the bad guy on the jaw’.  Do you recall the initial spark behind the game idea?
     In 2010, I saw an ad for a Magic expansion called “Archenemy”.  It was six months away, and I was super impatient to find out what it was about.  I tried to brainstorm ways that it might work as a magic format.  All of my rules were clunky, and eventually I had the bright idea to scrap the Magic cards part and try to do something that wasn’t essentially fanfic for a game.

And Boss Fight has been in steady development pretty much since then?
     Since early 2010, yeah. So a little over two years now.

What influences has the game been subject to in that time?
It draws on my experiences playing: Magic the Gathering, Yu-Gi-Oh, World of Warcraft the TCG, D&D, World of Warcraft the MMO, and I’ve probably forgotten a few.  In terms of people, I read a lot of writing by Mark Rosewater and I read some of David Sirlin.

Personally, I had nothing against the prototype cards,
but I’ll admit, the new ones are even prettier.

A lot of the creative types I know tend to have a mental rummage box of half-formed designs and toyed-with projects. I certainly know I do.  Do you work on several game ideas at once?
     I have at most two ideas at any one time, but so far they’ve tended to hit when I had huge assignments or I was very busy at work.  The initial designs for most cards were done at 1am in the morning when I was continually alt+tabbing between a card file and my ‘Communication in 3D Modelling’ assignment.

…at which point you started to think of Boss Fight as something worth dedicating a lot of time and energy to?
     I decided I really wanted to play the game, and prototyped it.  I played it with some friends, they kept the Dragon stunned for 12 rounds and proved that every number on the dragon’s cards were wrong.  I took it home, reworked the numbers, and tried it again.  This time, someone offered to pay me real money in exchange for a copy of the play test cards.  I thought he was crazy and I negotiated downwards.  Since then, I’ve been meaning to make this a real game so I can give them a real copy in exchange for their belief in the game.

The newly minted box art.  Shiny.

Have you worked any specific mechanic or system into Boss Fight, that you’re especially proud/fond of?
     I’m proud of the game’s simplicity, and I love the feeling of co-ordination and camaraderie that conversations give you, and I love the feeling of the boss jealously eavesdropping to work out their plans.

In general, are there any specific principles of games design you always try to follow?
     I believe that games need to be as simple as humanly possible, and that they should be open-ended and quick so that good-looking and clever people can play them more than once.

Would you go so far as to say playing games makes you better looking and cleverer?
     Absolutely! At the very least, I don’t see how it could hurt.

That actually goes a fair way towards answering my next question: Who’ll like it?
     Anyone with prior experience in fantasy, or competitive gaming, or people with friends, or people who secretly believe they’re better at card games than other people.

Who won’t?
     If you strenuously dislike people and you’re allergic to cardboard, I humbly suggest that Boss Fight might not be your favorite game in the world. But you could channel that misanthropy into playing as the boss, and you would do really well!

We’re loving the new look and feel of the game. What should we expect as a release date?
     By the end of the year. I’m trying to work out the process of moving multiple copies from Wisconsin to Australia.

Sounds great. Keep us posted!
Will do!

Want to Help?  Want to Play?

As good as Boss Fight is, there’s still time for refinements before they hit it with the big rubber DONE stamp.  In light of this, team Shelmertime have put up our hands to co-ordinate some blind playtesting sessions (non-digital beta events, so to speak).  This was a spur o’ the moment offer on our part, so we don’t have any details confirmed yet.  Hopefully (I daresay ‘probably’), we’ll be able to conduct some of these session via the League of Extraordinary Gamers. (Who we’re quite fond of mentioning, it seems).

If you’re interested in participating, or would like to offer up another suitable venue, drop me an email ( Ryan at shelmertime.com ) or contact Brendan Evans via the official Boss Fight blog.

Thanks for tuning in!

A mini update.. of an updated miniature!

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[ Sto Lat! Sto Lat! ]

Okay, a nice quick post to say “Happy Birthday” to my sister-in-law, Natalia.

Mini Victorian Fellow[ Gah, it may not be the best paint job, but at least it's better in full size. ]

The fellow above first featured on Shelmertime.com some time ago, when I posted this.  For reasons unknown to me, Natalia seems to have taken a shine to this little guy – as evidenced by numerous requests for an update on his progress.

Well, let’s see:
1) Lick of paint -check
2) Mini wooden floorboards – check.
(I’m deciding whether to paint / stain them)
3) Tiny lantern – check.
4) Stone wall – check.
5) Mechanical background contraption – mostly done.
6) Putting it all together – uh, tune in next time…

Anyhow, Natalia, I’m happy to dedicate this particular project to you, as thanks for your support.  All I ask in exchange is that you to pick a suitable name for him.

Update: I’m informed that we’ll be going with Cornelius or Dimitry.  We’ll see which he prefers…

Damnation! I'm trapped under a giant thumb again!

Welcome to The Edge – Part II

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[ Ryan Says... ]
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I’ll open with a pretty picture.  (And a disclaimer that the creation of the photos in today’s post was very much a collaborative effort.)

High Speed: Egg vs MousetrapLooks like fun, no?  Keep reading, a larger selection of these photos can be found via a link later in the post.

Now then, from the beginning…

Previously, Anna mentioned the difficulty she’s had in defining The Edge, the State Library of Queensland’s Digital Culture Centre.  In support of this, I’d like to point out that I actually visited the place some months ago, checked out the facilities and had a chat to one of the staff on duty – only to come away excited, intrigued, and without any clear idea of what actually went on there.  This was all the more frustrating, as what little I had seen led me to believe that here was something right for me.  This place had the potential to be a big deal.  Of course, if I was seriously going to pitch that idea to the more controlling voices in my head, I’d have to come up with something a little more eloquent than ‘gut feeling’.  [cue ye olde back-burner]

And so it was, some months later and Anna informs me that The Edge is having a second birthday celebration.  Specifically, an open-day featuring a veritable smorgasboard of hands-on workshops held throughout the building – more than enough to rekindle my dormant interest.

Despite sign-up sheets filling quickly, we each managed to attend two workshops.  In my case, a largely freeform session on Stop-motion Animation, and a slightly more technical workshop on some High-speed Photography techniques.  (If you missed it, Anna’s workshop experiences can be found here).

The stop-motion class amounted to a brief run-down of the principles, followed by an hour or so of “Here’s a laptop and a table full of modelling clay and doo-dads… have fun!”.  As I write this, The Edge appears to have already dropped the finished animations from its website.  Shame really, as I met some rather creative-types in the group and I think we turned out a rather spiffy piece of work.

Personally though, the photography session was the highlight of my day.  The general idea behind the techniques used is that the mechanical limitations of a camera’s shutter speed – even at a high setting – can make it difficult to capture certain high-speed events clearly.  A camera flash unit, however, is active for a mere fraction of the exposure time.  By leaving the camera’s shutter open (in an almost completely dark environment), we played with using an adjustable flash, to dramatically reduce the duration of the shot – ie. the time for which the camera’s sensor was exposed to the scene.

I’ll leave it to Mark, the workshop’s host, to cover the details in his great writeup (includes plenty of pictures!).

High Speed: Egg vs Table

Notice the pinkish-red streak to the left of the eggshell?  This is where things get fancy.  Once we had the basic technique down, Mark introduced a new element: lasers and an arduino microprocessor. (I know!)  By connecting a light sensor to the arduino he had set up a simple laser gate just above the table surface.  Once the flash unit was connected to the same system, it wasn’t that hard to tell the arduino to trigger the flash whenever the laser beam was interrupted. Which is to say: right at the moment of impact.  Once again, if you’ve read this far you might as well read the real deal at the link above.

Having successfully wet my feet at The Edge, I’ve recently dived in and started attending a weekly group session there called Hack The Evening.  I’m having a great time of it so far, I’ll tell you how it all unfolds sometime.