This is the second part of the Design Diaries series. You can find Part I here.
What about the living? The visitors were the unfortunate human characters trapped in the spirits’ domain, unable to find a way out. The visitors needed ways to interact with the spirit player but their goal needed to be something else, something that they could aim to accomplish regardless of what the spirit wanted. The premise was clear. What gives ghosts power over others are often the horrors that
formed them. The mystery of their past.
2019 – First visitor design!
Mystery with replayability
The visitors’ objective would be to figure out these past events to free the spirit of its power over them, releasing it from its tragic existence. In line with the thinking above, I did not want the game to be a pre-scripted narrative that could only played once, where all the surprises would be spent and the game only exciting once. The mystery needed to be based on mechanisms, not walls of text.
Initially the visitors ran around looking for a set of four tokens, which were supposed to be arranged in a certain order that only the spirit knew, forming the events and story of its past. Thematically it worked, the spirit knew ‘the past’ and could help (or hinder) the visitors’ progress by giving them real or false information. It was very simple and clean, but not especially exciting or thematic. It served its purpose, but never really allowed the kind of risk taking and excitement that it should have.
2021 – Playtesting second prototype. Tokens to the left.
After many iterations we arrived at the current system, the tokens became four cards that form the ‘Secrets’ of the spirit, horrible events that happened during its lifetime. The visitors not only needed to deduce in which order they were placed, they also needed to collect and assign clues to them (representing knowledge) before choosing when to reveal them. Making a wrong move here is very dangerous, and can be used against them by an evil spirit, pretending to help. The visitors will eventually be forced to start revealing these Secrets, only then finding out if what they think they knew may mean their undoing.
This also means that the evil spirit has an incentive to pretend to play nice, it becomes a viable way towards winning through subterfuge. It also means that as soon as it reveals its true nature the visitors can use its past actions to help deduce the locations of these Secrets.
2022 – Playtesting fourth (?) prototype. Secrets to the upper left.
Visitor actions
While the spirit systems coalesced and formed early, what eventually became the visitor-side of the game grew slowly into its current shape. The visitors did not have much to think about at the start of the design, their moves were too scripted, too mathematical and too simple. The cooperative side of the game lacked strategic depth and significant choices.
The main issue with this was the visitor action-system. Initially it was very simple and clean, an action-selection system where each player could choose to move and search around the house, opening doors and exploring along the way. This was easy to use but not that exciting, and some actions were hard to balance without making them feel costly and boring.
Cue the ‘personal deck of cards’! It worked in other games, so why not here? All visitors got their own deck of action-cards, and drew up to hand-size at the end of each turn. This distributed the actions, and the powerful actions could be made more rare in that deck. This made the game more fun and exciting, the puzzle more interesting and incentives to communicate increased. However, some players felt it was too random as they could not always perform meaningful actions on their turn.
2021 – Early cards, among them visitor action cards.
Okay, what to do. The third attempt was based on the Concordia-system of either playing one of several cards or picking them all up again. This fixed the randomness, and playtesters liked it, but the game lost something. It became very strategic and thinky, and the excitement and unknown-ness of the action cards took away suspense. It also induced analysis-paralysis that took away from the shared experience. Players always love agency, but I knew I had given them too much.
The final iteration came after a long period of not knowing how to fix what I perceived then to be the last major issue with the game. It meant going back to the personal deck of cards, in a slimmed down format of only 10. However, instead of drawing cards at the end of a visitors’ turn they were forced to take a special ‘Rest’ action to draw cards. This meant we could make cards more powerful, but also allowed the players to dig for what they wanted. It meant that each card was worth something. It meant randomness that broke up the analysis but allowed players control, for a price. This is the final version now in the game.
Spring 2023 – First public prototype cards printed!
Communication Rules
Let’s talk about a classic coop problem. The fact that if all the information is known a single bossy player can start telling the others what to do. It’s called the ‘Alpha Player’ issue, and I happen to think it’s not a game-problem at all but a player-problem. Nevertheless it is wise to design around it. Early iterations of The Presence had a lot of communication going on between the visitors. Partly, this was fine as people liked being able to discuss and optimize.
I watched these games and, although our group lack the infamous alpha player, I felt that something was not coming together. With the game focused on deduction and strategy there was a lot of talking, which seemed to engage the players but not in the way I was looking for. It also left the ghost player out of all the fun, seeing as they were not allowed to chip in and it made the visitor players spend way too much time discussing optimal moves. Good game, bad horror.
To see if it would help I added a rule that said that visitor players could only speak to each other if they were in the same room. Suddenly the game was very different. It created an entirely new dynamic that fit with the horror theme, and the fact that players could no longer help each other and share information meant that they had to make choices on their own. Mostly this was accepted by the players, and some really liked it. Players started actively walking to each other simply to speak, then walking back again.
However, some games became too silent, and for players that were alone they felt left out of the experience. In the end I tuned this rule to allow speaking across a single doorway, making it kind of a compromise and much more forgiving. As a side effect this is a new way of solving the issue of alpha gaming, and people who try it usually come away thinking it was one of the most novel parts of the experience.
Remember to take good notes, you’ll need them.
Conclusions
Developing a large game is a long and winding road. Doing for the first time especially you learn to pay attention to much more than the imagined game in your head. It needs to flow well from your mind into others, and if the game creates frustration when being played something has to change. You also learn that even if players are having fun, it is not necessarily the type of fun you were aiming for. Something again has to change.
Oh, and get a printer and good pair of scissors. You’ll need it.