Flowers and Butterfly

Tatsumi Designer Diary

The Initial Inspiration (Late 2019)

The story of Tatsumi’s design began like many board game designs – I, as a designer, was inspired by some of the beloved video games I played as a child, and wanted to see if I could create a board game centered around a specific mechanism in those games. In this case, I wanted to capture a slice of the magic I found in specific levels of games like Pilotwings and Spyro the Dragon, where you would find yourself flying through these floating rings, trying to take just the right flight path to hit them all in as short a time as possible.

I knew I couldn’t capture the exact feeling you get from playing this video game, because for that, well, you need to just play the video game! But I kept thinking “wouldn’t it be cool if there was a board game where you were flying around a dragon or a plane or something, collecting these floating rings?”

So that’s where it started. I wasn’t trying to emulate an experience, but I had a few possible themes to work with, and a simple mechanism I knew I wanted – moving around a board collecting rings. That’s the one core aspect of the game that never changed.

This is basically the image I had stuck in my mind, from the Ocean Speedway level of Spyro 2.

From Idea to Table (Early 2020)

First Prototype, built after meditation session.

Fun fact, and here’s where this story departs a bit from the common story of turning a video game into a board game. This idea’s inception and all the initial conceptual work for what would eventually become Tatsumi, it all happened somewhat on its own… while I was on a 10-day meditation course and quite honestly trying not to think about or get distracted by it. The core concept, and how I would go about making it work, just kept coming back to me over and over again. By the time I left that meditation center I had a full picture in my head of how the game would play, basically from start to finish.

Now don’t get me wrong – I’m not trying to encourage other designers to go take a meditation course if they want to come up with new ideas. On the contrary, I would say if you’re going to go meditate, you should probably try to avoid wasting that valuable time daydreaming instead of being mindful. But that’s just, in fact, how this whole thing got started for me.

This worked very simply. You had a hand of those sky-colored cards, each of which had a little diagram on them of how the card would allow you to move. Each turn, you would pick a card to play, pick a direction to start moving in, and then just follow the diagram, flying around the grid, and picking up all the colored tokens that you passed over (I didn’t have any ring pieces to work with back then).

To keep things fair, each player had the same 10 movement cards, and would draw through them all eventually and shuffle them back up, similar to how the action cards work in Jamaica. Once you had enough colored tokens, you could claim one of the available scoring cards at the bottom. These were worth varying amounts of points, and some of them had one-off bonuses on them.

You could also choose to forgo one of your colored rings once per turn, to take a bonus action that corresponded to that specific ring color. This version of the game went over pretty well with some local playtest groups, so I knew that I at least had something to go off of here, and wanted to keep working on it. Just then… DUHM DUHM DUUUUUHM. Enter the covid-19 pandemic.

Rapid Iteration Begins (Late 2020)

The pandemic was not a good time for me by any measure, and I certainly wouldn’t try to make light of it, but if there was one good thing that came out of it, for me personally, it was that it forced me to start designing and developing games digitally. I was SUPER hesitant about using digital platforms like Tabletop Simulator (TTS) before that, and finally being given no choice but to learn and start using TTS… well, that has definitely yielded a net benefit for me. In many ways using TTS is much, MUCH more efficient than iterating on physical prototypes.

I built my first digital prototype for “Wild Wings” (which is what I was calling it back then) in the summer of 2020, and by early fall I had worked my way through a number of iterations of it, even when I was still just getting used to the platform. I recognized TTS’s value immediately.

Then came the Unpub digital speed pitching event, where I had the unique opportunity to share my prototype with about a dozen or so different publishers, all in one day, from the comfort of my own room. I had only worked on this title for a short while at this point, and I wasn’t 100% confident it was ready for pitching… but to my pleasant surprise two publishers were interested in the game, one of them being Adam’s Apple Games, creator of Planet Unknown! I was unbelievably stoked.

This version of the game was certainly not without its problems. The movement cards were restrictive and yet somehow too open ended – like you would have to spend all this time thinking about what path you were going to take using what card, and could still end up not being able to get what you wanted on that turn. The addition of “ring power slots,” which would allow you to spend a set number of rings during the game to activate various ring powers, further complicated player turns as well, but at this time that aspect of the game had become pretty core to it, so it stuck around for a good long while.

Anyhow, from this point in late 2020 until fairly late into 2021, basically during the period when we were all stuck at home all the time, I was just playtesting the hell out of this thing. Many weeks I had 3 online designer meetups I would attend, and would make changes to the game between each of them. About once a week I would schedule a chat with Adam to go over my findings, the changes I made, etc., and to get feedback and more direction from him on where he, as the publisher, wanted me to take the design.

We experimented with every aspect of the game a whole lot, both agreeing that while we probably had a publishable game at any point, we wanted to try and make the best game we possibly could. We went through something like 5 or 6 different card-driven systems for dragon movement, eventually switching to a simpler “move X spaces per turn” type system, which combined much better with the ring powers that could help you collect more rings. We also changed the ring powers again, and again, and again, balancing them, and making them all equally interesting and desirable. The thing I probably worked on the hardest during this time though, was the scoring system.

With Adam’s help, I probably created something like 12-15 distinct scoring systems, some going through more rounds of testing than others, but all pretty thoroughly explored. We messed around with private objectives, public objectives, instant bonus actions, scoring cards that would help you build an engine, separate scoring components that you’d get from the cards you scored, and a whole wackton of personal scoring boards that all worked in different ways.

Again, these eggs were something that we had in the game for quite some time, and experimented a lot with. The idea was to add an extra layer of puzzle that both variated the scoring rewards, and gave players something to do with what they scored – rather than taking a simple card with points on it, you were always trying to go after specific eggs, and in most cases simultaneously trying to figure out how you wanted to place them on your board.

We felt like we were struggling with some of the subtleties of the game though. Having to move these eggs around and pull new ones from a bag was cool, but it felt fiddly, and so did the need to refresh the rings on the main board every so often. We must have tried at least 10 different systems for triggering a ring refresh and how to go about it… but all that stuff always felt a tad too administrative. We were wondering how we could make the eggs and the rings both be “worth their upkeep,” so to speak, and my answer was just to have a really cool scoring puzzle on a personal board. I toiled over this for months, and thought I was just about there. Things had slowed down a bit during 2022, but I continued to iterate, and was 95% satisfied with the design by Q3 of that year.

But then, we went another direction entirely…

This is a screenshot of the TTS prototype I had used to pitch the game to Adam and others (or at least, it was somewhere around this iteration):

Here are just a few examples of different scoring boards we tried giving to players:

All of these examples were designed alongside a score scoring mechanism where you would fly around a board, visiting specific locations, and cashing in rings there to take a scoring card that gave you some physical dragon eggs you could put on your scoring board. That looked something like this:

To Make an Omelet (Late 2022)

It was then that we had to break the egg scoring system… or at least, to me it felt like we were really stripping it down, favoring simplicity at the cost of a robust and well tested set of mechanisms. There were actually a number of changes that were made to the game all at once in late 2022, all of which were necessary in its journey to becoming Tatsumi. For starters, the physical eggs went out the door, and instead we decided to try eggs that were printed in batches on the scoring cards, which looked like this:

The eggs depicted on these “Nest” cards were sort of like the great grandfather of the batches of ring icons you now see on Shrines in Tatsumi. They were the start of us trying to get away from having secondary game pieces (that is, pieces in addition to the rings) that you needed to collect in order to gain points. Eventually, these egg icons sort of merged with the ring requirement icons seen at the bottom of these cards, resulting in one group of icons that told you what rings you needed in order to score and what you would be scoring. 

Anyhow, at first I had some pretty strong opinions about this more static egg scoring system – namely about how it limited the variety of scoring rewards. You no longer had varying batches of eggs showing up on the scoring cards, but instead just the same printed batches on the same cards, in every game. And of course, there was also no scoring board to put the eggs on either. The eggs were simply worth points per color at the end of the game, and their value could be increased in various ways (via a number of different mechanics that we experimented with).

There was undeniable value in not having to manage the miniature eggs throughout the game though, so I let my darlings die and we pressed on. My attention quickly shifted from the old scoring systems to the new, and before long I was regularly building new decks of Nest cards, each with its own spreadsheet that I used to try and balance the distribution of eggs between all the cards, which looked like this:

By this point one of the few things we hadn’t changed or taken out of the game was the use of ring powers, i.e. giving players the ability to spend X number of rings during their turn to use special powers like fireballing, which would net them more rings than they spent. The set of powers that stuck around longest were pretty similar to the 4 asymmetrical Gather Action powers you now see in Tatsumi:

For a long time, you also had to have a thing called a “binding” to place rings on and use the power of a given ring color. You can see one in the bottom right corner of the above player board. The Nest cards you scored had more of these bindings on them, allowing you to use more ring powers as the game progressed – Did you want to score more Nests with fewer ring requirements to build up your ring power engine, or save up and claim the big ticket Nests that would be worth more points?

In early 2023 however, we departed from that system of matching rings with bindings entirely, and we would never come back to it. Instead, now you would just have some basic movement each turn, and the ability to spend one ring on a ring power, returning it to the supply. The Nest cards you would score could still give you a bonus to whichever power you selected, so there was still some level of engine building going on, though now it was so slight that we eventually decided it wasn’t worth having. 

Instead of spending rings on ring powers, and using the scoring cards to boost those powers, we then began finding ways of using the rings to boost the points you could get from the eggs printed on the Nest scoring cards. Basically, we had a bunch of different iterations of the game where you could use a special action to transfer rings onto specific eggs on your Nests, which was a point multiplier for all eggs of a given color. That eventually became the “orbs and auras” system, which looked like this:

Each colored “orb” on these cards was worth 0 points at base, but every ring you transferred to an orb you had of the same color became an “aura,” and increased the value of all orbs of that color. This system was pretty cool, and well liked by a lot of people. I don’t think either Adam or I had a strong inclination to walk away from it, as it seemed pretty smooth and problem free. =

But then one day I had an idea… which I didn’t think much of at first, but I did decide it would be worth talking about.

Final Changes (Late 2023)

During one of mine and Adam’s still fairly regular meetings, I posed the question, “what if we just used the rings themselves for scoring somehow? Instead of pitching them when you score, they would all just get transferred somewhere, and become your primary source of points. Then the rings would always be in play, right?” 

Thinking about it now, I recall that this idea struck me around the time Adam had come up with the 3D game board that holds all the rings. You’d have this supply of about 100 rings sitting on the table when you started playing, and then as you played they would all get removed and spent, after which they didn’t really have anywhere to go but back in the box. That was definitely something that felt a little weird.

So then we started down this one final scoring system exploration, where we knew we wanted the Nests (which shortly became Shrines) to be a means for players to take rings from their holding area and put them in a scoring area. Eggs, orbs, coins, etc., would not be needed. We could just make further use of our core component. How would that work though? Would the rings just be stacked and built into a structure of some kind on the table? Would they go to a scoring board like the eggs used to? Or maybe just on the back sides of the shrine cards? We tried all of these things.

Here’s one of the ideas I had for a scoring board where you would score a large token that had a specific shape requirement on it. You would then try to build that shape out of rings as many times as possible on your board. Not sure if you’ll be able to make sense of this, but I literally sent this exact diagram to Adam:

We were still working on the ring collection powers a bit at this point as well, trying to streamline their functionality and make the game a bit easier to learn. I have to give Adam a ton of credit on that front, because he pushed quite a bit more than me on ring collection in the final stages of development. This was in part due to my burning out a bit (no, not all designers are made of steel!), and in part due to the fact that around that time I had built a slightly more complex ring collection system I was very happy with. I wanted to give it a fair trial even though we were already talking about moving on to simpler ring collection systems, and well, since it didn’t make it into the game I’ll just tell you a bit about it.

The Birth of “Tatsumi” (Early 2024)

From this point on, we were basically not making any changes to the core systems, we started getting art done for the game, and really all we were still working on were small changes to the “Island Boards,” which were our chosen means of turning rings into points. Here’s a slightly earlier version of the board you now find in Tatsumi:

And that’s basically it! The only other thing that might be interesting enough to talk about is what the naming process was like for us. And man, that was a real slog. It’s kind of funny for Adam and I to talk about now, but there was a long while where we were really struggling to stick the right name for this game. That’s something I’ve found some designers can relate to, and others really can’t. I guess it depends on how important a good name is to you or your publisher… it was important enough to both Adam and I that we had many, mostly short but still separate discussions about it, talked with friends and family about it, and even did a couple of small scale surveys.

A bonus if you're still reading! Naming the game.

At first the name was Wild Wings, which obviously couldn’t stay because of the Wild Wings restaurant that’s popular in the US. Then it was Dragonfest for a long time, which didn’t quite accurately convey the theme of the game, even though it had a nice ring to it. Then when we decided to go with Eastern rather than Western dragons, I started experimenting with more abstract names like Orakku and Ryoko, but none of those really stuck. Finally Adam landed on Long Soul, which both of us liked and thought resonated with the game’s lore, so we were done!… except then the name Tatsumi came along (a combination of “Tatsu” for dragon and “Umi” for sea) and it just seemed like that much better a fit.

 

So yea, it was quite a process, as many things about this game have been, really. Tatsumi has gotten so much love from both Adam and I, and each little aspect of the game is the result of lengthy experimentation, thought, care, and attention to detail. From the graphic design, to each of the game mechanics, to the math and balancing work – everything. Who would have thought such a simple game would require so much work! But it turns out, it is in so many ways challenging to make something like this and get it just right. I hope we’ve done a good job of that, and I hope that people can feel the effort that went into it when they play the game. Mostly, I hope that if you’re reading this you get a chance to play and have fun doing so! As much work as it’s been for us, it’s certainly been a lot of fun as well.

Make it to the end?

Tatsumi is coming to life and available on Gamefound!

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.