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Playability Podcast

Episode 5: Lauren Woolsey with Daniel Solis

Run time: 15 minutes, 41 seconds

Episode recorded by Lauren Woolsey

Playability is produced by Mike Risley

Transcript written by Lauren Woolsey

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00:07 Lauren Woolsey (LW)
Hello and welcome back to Playability, where we hold conversations at the crossroads of gameplay and accessibility.  I'm your host Lauren Woolsey and I’m here with Daniel Solis to talk about his game, Junk Orbit. Okay, so what is this game’s back story, Daniel?

00:21 Daniel Solis (DS)
So, the game’s back story: I originally self-published this as a small, little card game under a different name, and a different theme, and some significantly different mechanics [Lauren laughs] many years ago, but eventually it evolved and and eventually I signed it with Renegade Games, and they have been primarily in charge of the art direction and graphic design on their end. And so that experience was very unusual for me because I am a graphic designer for board games, but because of some contractual obligations with my employer, I couldn’t actually do any graphic design or anything, any of that work, on the game itself. Which, I’m actually okay with, because it ended up looking fantastic, but the process -- the process of being a graphic designer, giving graphic design direction or input to another graphic designer was an interesting experience.

01:06 LW
That’s pretty neat. So, alright, you should talk me through the game’s development path, because it sounds like it went through a lot of changes. 

01:13 DS
[Laughs] It did. So, how do I keep this brief? Initially I had this idea, I was inspired by this game called Gravwell, which is a racing game where you’re trying to escape a black hole. And so a lot of the game play involves manipulation of gravitational forces using relative mass between different objects, essentially that means, the bigger and object is, the more things are going to be pulled towards it, and the tighter things are clumped together, the more they’ll pull things towards them as well. There’s a fun kind of ride, and I wanted to explore those same sort of Newtonian physics in gameplay, which was really fun. But at the time, I didn’t think that space themes would be big sellers, or anything -- I don’t know why I got that into my head, but for some reason I avoided space themes, so instead I came up with this story of Victorian aristocrats, who are so wealthy and competitive, that they just literally launch their wealth at each other, from catapults [Lauren laughs], that are thus push backwards by the force of that volley. [Lauren: excellent physics] So, yeah, so so yeah -- I spent as much time explaining this premise as I did the actual game, which is not the thing you want to do. And thankfully, I finally got over that, and decided, okay, this is basically, it’s just throwing a wrench while you’re in space, so equal and opposite reactions, very simple, people get it. And thankfully, this is after I think both Gravity and The Martian had come out in theaters, so I think people were kind of ready for a game that was loosely themed around gravitational orbits and doing this sort of astrodynamic plotting.

02:56 LW
I love that there’s a game where astrodynamic is part of the description. Being a physics and astronomy professor, that’s very near and dear to my heart. 

03:04 DS
Yeah, you know I was thinking, so initially when I first started drifting into the -- ha, drifting [Lauren chuckles] -- drifting into the space and sci-fi theme, I didn’t know if I should just go right out and call the junctions between two orbits Lagrange points, because I didn’t know how many people were familiar with that term. [Lauren: not many.] Well, a surprising number [Lauren: really?] of board game people in my playtest circles anyway, they were already familiar with it [Lauren: well sure!] and so they immediately internalized that.

03:33 LW
Well that’s good, and then, you know, people playing the game will learn those terms and go from there.

03:39 DS
Yeah, I didn’t include them in the actual game mechanics, in the game rules, but if you know what you’re looking at, you know what you’re looking at. 

03:44 LW
[Laughs] So what are the primary goals of the players who are trying to win this game?

03:49 DS
So, it is a pick up and deliver game. So the primary goal is to pick up junk from the orbit of one planet or celestial body and deliver it to the cities that are in other celestial bodies. And in the base game, it is Earth, Moon, and Mars that you are traveling in these figure eight patterns around. With four and five players, you add the moons of Mars: Phobos and Deimos. So all of these are linked into these figure eight orbits between them. And the way you move, because your ship is so low budget and poorly made, you just jettison cargo -- because it’s just junk anyway [Lauren: well, sure!] -- from the back of your ship, it moves whatever distance is noted on the tile and then your ship moves the opposite direction, following the figure eight orbit around the celestial bodies. And they both move the same distance but the opposite directions. If, as a result of this jettisoning, the cargo that you launched lands on its destination that it had to go to anyway, that counts as a delivery. It may be a little bit scorched on reentry, but it counts. And also if you move your ship to a place where the city matches some cargo you still have in your ship, you can deliver it directly as well. So the optimal thing that players are doing, is plotting out their orbits so that they can make deliveries on both ends of that transition. They want to deliver things as they jettison it, and they want to deliver things as they move there. And then you also pick up whatever junk on the city that you’re orbiting around -- the city you’ve landed on. So, the efficient path is one that delivers on both ends and also refuels as you pick up. 

05:14 DS
And it’s very interesting seeing how quickly people understand that, and you start seeing them like plotting out these courses, and “oh, I should move here and pick that up,” and it’s funny actually seeing the light turn on when they realize that big giant, massive piece of cargo that would be very valuable to deliver is going to be so difficult to deliver that it’s actually better off used as fuel! [Lauren laughs] To just launch and go careening across the solar system [laughs].

05:40 LW
That does [laughs] that does sound like pretty fun choices to make. [laughs] Um, yeah I’ve seen this set up, I haven’t had a chance to play it yet, but it’s got great table presence. It looks like a lot of fun, I’m looking forward to it. Okay, so we should transition into our big focus that we have at playability on accessibility and inclusion. So what does accessibility mean to you?

06:00 DS
For me, I think it’s because of my line of work, being a graphic designer, I spend a lot of time working on legibility and readability, and visible access. And by that I mean, typically, most commonly, color blindness, and double coding to compensate for any low vision players or low vision contexts where the game might be played. One of the things I frequently come up against is, in most games, I’m not sure why, but publishers still, some publishers still release games where the same type of component is grouped into different colors, and those colors are red and green, which is the most common kind of colorblindness. Or, they’ll go blue and a particular shade of purple or black or something, that, even if you’re not low vision, if you’re in a low vision context, like at a restaurant or a bar, or what have you, those colors can be very difficult to discern from each other. You have to kind of squint and hold it up and kind of angle to the light or something. So what I’ve found is that the curb cut effect, the architecture thing where, once curbs on sidewalks are cut to allow wheelchair access, it actually benefits everybody, because you can move strollers, you can help people just more easily access crosswalks, there’s a similar [curb-cut] effect here in board games, where the more accessible you make components, the more it benefits all players, even beyond the ones that you may more quickly think of, when you think of making things more accessible. 

07:21 LW
What input were you able to have in the graphic design side of Junk Orbit, because I know it wasn’t your hands, but were you able to help push decisions to be able to make the game more accessible along the way?

07:35 DS
Yeah, so I think part of what my influence was, because I couldn’t do any graphic design, part of my influence came from how I set up my prototypes initially. They have a big number on them to represent the point value and also the relative mass of the object that you’re launching, and they have the name of a city that that junk is trying to be delivered to, and then there’s a little place for art. And the priorities of real estate on that tile are kind of difficult to balance. Because you want something that looks good, and everybody wants that, but at the same time, if it can’t be read, then it’s not playable. And no matter how good it looks, it’s not an art object, it is a product, and needs to be used. So I take a very pragmatic view of these sorts of things.

08:18 LW
I wish, I wish that more game designers and graphic designers did, [Daniel laughs] yeah.

08:23 DS
Yeah, so that’s just kind of the perspective I have on it. But as far as my influence on it, on the final production copy, so I got initial versions of it from the graphic designer that had relatively low contrast between the name and the backdrop that the name is placed on. And even now, the moon tiles are a little low contrast. They’re white text on a grey background and so I had to ask the designer to make that contrast a little bit more stark. So, putting a darker background behind that name. Also making the numbers bigger, and using a font that made the numerals easier to distinguish from one another, so that the three looked very distinct from a five or a six, and thankfully we don’t have any nines, so we didn’t have to worry about going that high, but choosing the right font so that it’s big and stark and bold and you can see it across the table. 

09:08 DS
And then we doubled up on that by color coding, as a supplementary source of visual information, not the primary source of visual information. So the way we did that, every tile that is ranked one has the same color backdrop. And every tile that is ranked two has the same color backdrop and so on. And some of these color distinctions are pretty distinct from each other, so like when you get to eight ranks there are only so many colors you can kind of fit within a range of eight, but we made sure that, if there was any chance of any numerals that would be confused with each other, we made sure that they had contrasting colors, so that it would be that subtle bit of extra information to tell you that that is distinctly this thing, and it allowed us a little bit of freedom to have more variety of art, so that we could have for example every instance of a two tile, for example, had different art depending on where it was sourced from. So the two from Earth has different art than the two from Mars or the Moon. But they’re the same relative type of object. So I think they’re all like handheld objects, like a sonic screwdriver and a tricorder, and a phaser, or something [Lauren: of course] but generally all handheld objects, all relatively small in mass. And so that’s an even more subtle hint of the unifying thing about them, but it’s something we had to think about, all of this stuff, even if it isn’t immediately conscious to the player what they’re seeing, we wanted to make sure that we thought about it, at least. 

10:30 LW
Yeah, and if I remember, the game when I saw it at Gen Con correctly, all of the player pieces are different shapes, right?

10:38 DS
Yes, that was from Renegade, uh straight from the top. They wanted to have distinct meeples for each ship, and then we also used those as iconography on the player cards, so that you always remember which ship you are, by shape and by color. 

10:51 LW
Yeah, that certainly helps. Alright so taking into consideration Junk Orbit’s theme, and mechanics, and these accessibility ideas, who would you say is the target audience?

10:58 DS
Well, that’s always the hard part to decide, um --

11:03 LW
Right, game designers are like, “everybody! Obviously!”

11:05 DS
Yeah, I want to sell it to everybody, I need to pay the bills! [Both laugh] Uh, okay, I would say that the target market for this, if, this is a completely new buyer of board games, when they see that big giant cylindrical tube on the shelf [Lauren: it is unique] it is an unusual package, my hope is that the ideal consumer there is someone who has in interest in science, in particular space science, and would be relatively new to board games, so that this can be their -- I hate to say gateway, because that implies, it has a lot of baggage around it -- but I would certainly be delighted to hear that this was someone’s first game and that it led them to play other games. That would be a high honor for me.

11:55 LW
That would be a fantastic feeling for sure. Alright, what is your favorite part of the game, either as you’re playing it or as you’re watching people play?

12:01 DS
What I, I think my favorite part is watching people get their big spotlight moment. It happens, I think the success, the most successful part of the development, was when I had completely new players start playing, and even if they didn’t win, at least once they had a really huge turn, where all the stars aligned and they managed to get the big delivery, or they positioned themselves just right, or they used their special ability in a very clever way, and they felt great about it. And that, even if they didn’t win, that’s the part they remember out of that experience. I think that that’s my favorite part.

12:36 LW
Excellent. Well, while I still have you here, you’ve mentioned a couple of graphic design ideas, that you always have in mind to make things more accessible and to make things better for the community as a whole. What advice would you give to other game designers or other art directors, just in general for making our community better?

12:55 DS
So practical things, I would say that, uh, to, well I guess the best way to phrase it would be to “gamma test” your prototypes, so this is something that is after alpha, and after beta, it is -- it’s essentially taking the prototype that you have, the rulebooks, the components, and the graphic design you have set up there, bring it to the table and have people play it, and assume the game itself is finished, the design of it, the rules and all that stuff, so this is very late in the development process. But allow for that, and then you can narrow down whether there are questions that result from text being too small or uh even wording being ambiguous, but primarily you’re focused on making sure that the components themselves are not getting in the way of playing the game. And sometimes you may have to make compromises to the game design, or you make compromises or accept compromises to the visuals of your product, because ultimately you realize they are necessary to some other aspects of the product. These are all balancing acts, but I’d say that gamma testing is important part of this process, and also an easier way to do this is to run this through some color blindness testing on your games. There are several online resources and mobile apps that will allow you to simulate color blindness and I think that is useful, not just for people who have low vision, but generally you can simulate what it would be like to play this game in a bar or in a restaurant or something. See if that contrast is high enough, see if that text is big enough, double check if that icon is as clear to discern from another icon from a distance as you think it is. I think frequently when we’re working on production, we spend so much time looking at a bright backlit huge monitor, that it’s easy to forget that this thing is going to be very small, very far, and typically very dark. 

14:41 LW
Yeah, yeah there’s a couple of games that I’ve brought to my parents-in-law and their kitchen lights are fairly yellow in color, and there are some games that are just unplayable because the components are indistinguishable for my mother-in-law from far enough away, so yeah that testing is important, and I think not enough people do that. So that’s great advice. Okay, so for our listeners -- yeah, for our listeners interested in getting a copy of Junk Orbit, where can they get that? 

15:07 DS
Junk Orbit is available at every friendly local game story as far as I know, it’s also available online, and I think it’s also in some major retailers, big box stores. I’m not quite sure about that. And it’s also going to be at Essen this year.

15:21 LW
Perfect! Well, thank you so much Daniel for being on, this was fantastic.

15:25 DS
Thank you very much, happy to be here!

15:27 LW
Yeah, excellent, have a good day! [Outro music] For more information on the topics discussed in this episode and the links that we just mentioned, see the “About This Episode” section on our website at Playabilitypod dot com. And if our listeners have any questions or comments that you would like to share with us, please email us at playabilitypod at gmail dot com and find us on major social media platforms as @playabilitypod. Thanks for listening, and remember to play with a new perspective.