Lauren W.: 00:09 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 today with Jonathan Chaffer, the designer of several games and the one that we're going to focus on today is Filler by Green Couch Games. Hi! Jonathan C.: 00:24 Hi there. Lauren W.: 00:25 So for Filler, um, which is a beautiful filler game about filling pastries, walk me through the development process. Jonathan C.: 00:37 Yeah, sure. So Filler is an unusual kind of, uh, development for me. I normally, um, people ask if designers work theme-first or mechanism-first and it's never really one or the other, but I tend toward the theme-first side of that divide. Specifically I ended up with a title that tickles my fancy in some way and I tend to think, what would that theme feel like? What kinds of mechanisms would work well with that? And Filler was really the opposite in that I had a mechanism that I wanted to play with and distill. There is a game called Copycat from Friedmann Friese, which is a funny game to begin with because it's a game that is cobbled together from a bunch of other well known games [Lauren: laughs]. It takes elements from dominion and from Puerto Rico and from Agricola and mashes those all together to form a game that I quite enjoy. Jonathan C.: 01:41 But it has one element that as far as I know was not copied from anything else, which was this idea that turn order is very important and you have to sacrifice cards from your hand in order to decide which order to play in. So I was playing around with that idea and that settled in with the theme of, of being bakers at a bakery and where the time that you arrive at work, um, dictated how many options you had in front of you for what you were going to make. So, um, the core tension in the game is whether you can afford to sacrifice a very good card from your hand in order to have an early turn order. But in doing so, you lose ingredients that you're going to need in order to make recipes. Lauren W.: 02:32 Yeah. And that tension between those two always makes for a good design space is, this card can do really good things here or really good things here and you have to use it in one place or the other. Jonathan C.: 02:45 Yeah. I tend to think about that core conflict or what is the main decision players are going to have to make over and over in a game. Especially since most of the games I design are pretty small. They don't have huge number of mechanisms interacting. So the one or two that are there need to be really solid and easy to immediately see, you know, why is this an interesting decision to make? Lauren W.: 03:13 Yeah, absolutely. So players start with some ingredients in hand. And what are the primary goals of the players as they go through their days of baking? Jonathan C.: 03:26 Well, thematically, um, what you're trying to do is make a lot of money selling your pastries. You're trying to win awards and you're trying to get great customer reviews. Mechanically, that means you're collecting some points [Lauren: laughs]. So it's like a deck builder. You are collecting cards that have points on them and much like games that players are often familiar with like dominion, you're trying to end up with a deck with it has lots of points in it. But in so doing the cards that are worth a lot of points tend not to be the most useful cards in the game. So that's a, that is a trade off you're making. This is a hand building game, uh, which is distinguished from deck building games in that you never shuffle. So as you acquire cars, they go straight into your hand, you can use them right away and occasionally you're going to take turns to restock your pantry and collect all your cards again. Lauren W.: 04:18 Mm, right. And so in that turn where you don't get to do anything, you don't get to fill a pastry, you don't get to get a new card. What do players get is a kind of consolation for that? Jonathan C.: 04:30 Yeah. In some iterations of the game that was all there was. Uh, you occasionally had to take a turn to restock your pantry and it was a necessary evil. And the main point was minimizing the number of turns where you do that. And that worked fine, there was nothing broken with it, but it was a disappointing turn and it, it's supposed to be kind of disappointing, but it was a little too much. So for the feel of the game. And so to add a little bit of interest there, whenever you take that restock turn, you also are allowed to reserve a card. You get to take a card that's on display and put it back on top of the deck so you can have a little moment of, well if I can't have it, you can't have it either. Lauren W.: 05:11 [Laughs] At least players get some kind of positive um, effect from that or positive feeling I suppose. Jonathan C.: 05:18 Exactly. Or, or at least are sure that their next turn is going to be great. Lauren W.: 05:21 Right. Exactly. Now the goal of the game is to get the most points. And we've talked about most of the big picture mechanics. So before we get too far further, what does accessibility mean to you? Jonathan C.: 05:35 Well, this is a big question. I think the short answer that I'm going to, I'm going to try to give you some clickbait by doing something controversial here. I think my short answer is accessibility is impossible, by which I mean, I think that accessibility in games and otherwise is inherently a tradeoff. And my day job is web development. And so I am working with accessibility in that realm all the time. And we are often, um, we have decisions that are put in front of us in order to make something accessible to someone who is using a screen reader to interact with a website. You have to, you have to do some work to set that up correctly. And there's a platitude that has some truth to it that says that if you make things accessible, it helps everyone, not just the person who has the direct need for that win, but - Lauren W.: 06:36 Right, the curb cut effect. Jonathan C.: 06:36 - So not just the person who - right, exactly. And there's some truth to that, but that's not all of the truth. The whole truth is that you're always giving something up and it's not always clear what that is. But if you think about it, you can, you can find it. So let's take something like in a board game, you have something like, you have a physical pieces that could be cubes that are different colors, and in order to make this more accessible to a colorblind audience, you want to make those pieces all have different shapes. And that is, generally speaking, going to help or solve that problem for the colorblind audience. But there are tradeoffs. Jonathan C.: 07:24 So if, if the game requires you to pull those blindly out of a bag, you can't do that anymore because they have different shapes [Lauren: right]. That's an obvious thing. But even if you don't have that problem, there is a trade off in that that probably costs more money. And when a game costs more money to make, it's going to be sold for more money. And actually that's an accessibility problem, too, because all of a sudden there's financial accessibility [Lauren: oh, absolutely]. So usually whenever you make something more accessible to an audience, you are inherently making it less accessible to a different audience. In a lot of cases it is an obvious decision because the wind for one is so much more than whatever detrimental would cause to someone else, but it's not never something that should be taken lightly. I think. Lauren W.: 08:12 Yeah, it's, it's the kind of thing where you want to think about the consequences and for games it's not always going to be higher cost, but there, there will always be, as you said, some kind of tradeoff and you have to make sure that you don't forget about what those choices are going to do. Jonathan C.: 08:27 Yeah, and the, and the other difficulty is that games are kind of inherently about inaccessibility in that you don't want the objective to be easy. So you are, when you're designing a game, you are putting obstacles in the player's path and that is going to be inaccessible to someone. My first published game was called Stroop, which is a speed game about the Stroop effect, which is a psychological barrier that makes different parts of your brain fight with each other if they're asked to do conflicting tasks. Lauren W.: 09:05 Yeah. That game melts my brain. Jonathan C.: 09:09 Yeah. So the main example is you'll have a color, the word, the name of a color printed in a different color and you ask the person what does this word say? And it sometimes is hard to say the name that is printed when the color is different or vice versa. [Lauren: mm-hmm] And so that is obviously a, an accessibility nightmare [Lauren: yeah (laughs)]. You're asking someone to engage with something that is inaccessible because it's fun that it's inaccessible. And that one was an interesting challenge too because we actually tested that with, uh, various, uh, colorblind players, which was interesting and a game about color. But, um, we ended up with a palette that can work with some common types of colorblindness successfully. Jonathan C.: 10:02 And you see that all the, all the time. I was just thinking about the game Qwixx which is a great roll and write game that has colors ascending from left to right and there's a much to me, much more interesting version of that game that is available. It's a variant called Qwixx Gemixxt, where the numbers are presented in a different order in kind of a random looking order which makes the game have a more interesting decision space because they aren't in predictable order - Lauren W.: 10:33 But also a higher cognitive load. Jonathan C.: 10:34 - but it's a much less - exactly a much less accessible game in the sense of teaching it and having people get it right away because you have this extra thing you're looking at at all times. Lauren W.: 10:45 It's a really good way of thinking about it that if you think about a game and trying to make it challenging so people keep coming back to it, trying to figure it out. There is that inherent inaccessibility kind of built in and we can just do what we can to minimize the unintended inaccessibility. For Filler, were there decisions that you made with these kinds of topics in mind that kind of shine through in the game? Jonathan C.: 11:10 Well, uh, one of them is the basic graphic design elements. Of course the normal publishing process is that the designer comes up with a prototype and then a graphic designer and artists to take over from there. But some of the basics really need to be in place at that point. So just basic ideas like double coding for colorblind accessibility, all the icons have a color to them, but also a shape associated with that [Lauren: absolutely]. In Filler, a constant struggle was getting people to understand the difference between the ingredients that are, that a card provides you when you're using it to make a recipe and the ingredients that are on a card that you need that are the, basically the cost of that card. So figuring out which locations that would go in to make it intuitive to the most people was interesting, 'cause anytime I switched it, some people would think, Oh that's great. That makes total sense to me and I would immediately have other people lock up with the change. So there was always, again, that trade off. Jonathan C.: 12:12 There are other other aspects of accessibility like inclusion as well. Of course the players each get a, an avatar, a set of cards that represents them. And as I was talking to the publisher, um, one of the things we we agreed on immediately was to be as inclusive as possible in representing a diverse group of people, but there are only six chefs, so that can only go so far [Lauren: Right]. Um, and so there are obvious trade offs in, in who we could represent visually. Mmm. So, so that it happens all the time throughout every part of that process. Lauren W.: 12:49 Mm-hmm, yeah, I really like the chefs that are available because by having such a kind of wide range of characters and not just a bunch of people that all fit the same kind of mold, it almost feels like they have more personality than like four characters that are all, you know, the same background or the same, um, the same race, things like that. And you know, when I play the game I always want to be Martha. And it's like I've just got this like connection to her now and it's nice to have those kinds of feelings of um, you know, this person Lance has a different feel than Martha does even though it's, it's roughly the same kind of setup. [Jonathan: Yeah, exactly.] And for the game, before we run out of time, what is your favorite part of the game, Filler? Jonathan C.: 13:39 My favorite part is proving people wrong when they think they have solved the game [Lauren: deep laugh]. There are often people who will play the first time and say, Oh well whoever gets the earliest card, they're just going to go first every time and win. And there are a couple more layers to the game to the game than that. And I like the moment when I can play against that person and notice they're always going to pick the earliest card. And so I will not take the earliest card. I'll just take the cart that's worth all the points. [Lauren: (laughs) yep!] But that's part of the game too. Yeah. I like, in any game, I like seeing those secondary tertiary layers of strategy that, that you can layer on top of each other to, to see the game in a new light. Lauren W.: 14:35 Yeah, absolutely. I enjoy teaching people this game because you can teach the rules and then they kind of slowly understand the strategy over time, including like some of the strategies of once you pick up your cards, which card do you going to take away from? People kind of do remember if they still have blueberries in their hand and can make that, you know, blueberry cream horn or you know, it's not just what card is best for you, but what card can you take away from somebody else. So... (laughs) Jonathan C.: 15:06 And I suppose my separate favorite part is just remembering each episode of the great British bake off that featured each dessert. That makes me hungry again. Lauren W.: 15:16 Absolutely. Absolutely. I'm sure that was, um, that was partly the inspiration behind the theme. For listeners interested in getting a copy of this game, where can they find it? Jonathan C.: 15:26 You'll find it in your friendly local game store, certainly, it's in white distribution or other online retailers will have it. Or you can order directly from publisher Green Couch Games on their website and that would be a fantastic Avenue to find it as well. And if you have any trouble you could talk to me directly, you could find me on Twitter at Uncle Jon Bob: U N C L E J O N B O B. Lauren W.: 15:56 Perfect. Well we'll have links, um, to all of that in the description and this was a fantastic conversation. Thanks for coming on. Jonathan C.: 16:02 Well thanks for having me. Lauren W.: 16:04 Have a good one. [Music starts] For more information about the topics that we discussed in this episode and the links that we just mentioned, we'll have those in the about this episode section on our website at playabilitypod.com and if our listeners have any questions or comments that you'd like to share with us, please email us at playabilitypod at gmail.com and find us on major social media platforms as @playabilitypod. Thanks again for listening. Play with a new perspective.