Mechanics do not Maketh the Game

The game Dragon Master Spell Caster was described by IGN as “one of the worst new WiiWare games to come to the Wii Shop in the entirety of 2009”. About a year before the game was released I met some of the game's developers from Stickmen Studios. We played some pool, had a few drinks, and they told me about a project they were working on for the Nintendo DS (at the time this was the platform they were aiming for). What they told me was that in this game you would be a wizard on a dragon and when your spells collided with another wizards spell something random would happen. I aked a few more questions but ultimately they kept coming back to ask what I thought about the magic mechanic?

It seemed odd to me that you would pitch a game by its mechanic, I mean would you describe Starcraft as a game where you click your men and then click other peoples men to make them fight? I think the problem here is someone had the good idea of 'why don't we redo the way magic is handled in video games' and then tried to work a game around it. The problem is that just like in movies where “no scene is worth a line; no movie is worth a scene”, no game is worth a mechanic.

I believe that when such ideas are hatched you should explore them, balance/tweak them a little, and then put them in your folder of things that might be useful in the future. An example of this came up when I was discussing board game design with a friend of mine, he had devised an exchange system where the best exchange rate was only achieved through helping other players, but too much cooperation would make it difficult for someone to establish a lead. A basic rules set had been devised for testing purposes, and after a couple of hours playtesting it was agreed that it was a good mechanic and it was shelved to wait for the right setting to come along.

I feel sorry for Stickmen Studios as in the right setting their combining magic mechanic could have been quite praise worthy, but the IGN reviewer didn't even so much as mention it, instead focusing on criticism of the graphics and gameplay and then the gameplay again. IGN's final summary was that “Dragon Master Spell Caster is another of the many 'learning the ropes' releases for a small studio testing the waters of Wii development - the kind of game where lots of mistakes are made, and, hopefully, lots of lessons are learned. This one had an ambitious concept, but the execution just failed miserably. And I wonder if Stickmen Studios knew that, in the end, and just allowed it to go out the door and die.” And it would seem that lessons were indeed learnt as Stickmen Studios next game, Doc Clock, has received a much warmer critical reception.