A Q&A

Welcome to your weekly update! We collected some questions from last week’s submissions and will be answering them periodically in the lead up to relaunch this Spring.

In terms of accessibility, the update mentioned “consulting”. Can you elaborate on that? Are you consulting accessibility specialists?

Yes! We are consulting with an accessibility specialist about many aspects of the site, as well as our design and evaluation processes internally! While designing for accessibility is an ongoing process, we’re working on fixes with high impact first and then plan to build out a longer term plan that extends beyond launch.

How linear was the path to the current iteration of the sim? Do you encounter a lot of dead ends?

When asking our head of Engineering this question, he said, “Linear is a hard concept here. I see it more as an amorphous blue cloud that rotates slowly around the shared mind-space of every engineer and sometimes takes the form of a small, feral marmot that whispers its secrets in our ears as we sleep.”

We think that translates to, “It really depends on what part of the sim we’re working on. The rebuild was very intentional and based on how the old sim evolved. If we know what we want the sim to be able to accomplish, it’s just a matter of building a more stable, modular system. Any conflicts with the sim are more vibes-based and come from things like testing how often weather events occur. Even that is fewer dead ends and more ‘oh that didn’t feel as smooth as we’d like. Let’s turn the dial up.’”

What work was done during the nearly two-year siesta? If you were to re-write Blaseball from scratch again, what would you do the same and what would you do differently?

Here are the highlights:
Experimentation. The first two Eras allowed for a super fun, very rowdy few years that led to burnout of our team and Fans time and time again. It also meant most of our energy had to be spent keeping the game live instead of trying new things. Siesta gave us the time we needed to really explore what was possible. We spent countless hours exploring features like the Idols Board, new election systems, new Gods and mechanics, at least 4 different schedules, a ton of community and marketing approaches, ethical monetization, and ways to run Blaseball sustainably.

We rebuilt the simulation, which sounds simple when you put it like that, but was a huge undertaking with greater long-term benefits. With the previous version, any time we wanted to do something cool, have a new mod, introduce a new story — it had to be a custom solution for that instance. We couldn’t build Systems, we could only build moments. It’s the difference between decorating your house by nailing a photo to the wall vs. rebuilding your house to install missing plumbing.

In the previous sim, introducing field positions was impossible because they would have just been a datapoint. Now the sim knows ‘where’ Players are, how their stats impact that position, and is able to systemically resolve play. The sim also knows ‘where’ the ball is! That was impossible before, and we can modify these things without having to shut down the whole site to change something. We’re still early in a Blaseball that demonstrates what the sim is truly capable of, but in short, it means Blaseball will be driven more by the Players and gameplay systems themselves, instead of just The Game Band and some dice rolls. We have plumbing now!

This also means more stability. Getting there meant re-writing a lot of code from deep in the Discipline and Expansion Era days. The trade off is that we can’t just plug in the old code for features like Shame, but we now have a foundation we’ve literally never had before.

We developed a mobile app experience for the game. Development for new platforms is never easy, especially when a number of factors outside of your control lead to reworking huge portions of development. All of that time re-evaluating and resetting led to improvements on initial features and a better user experience based on site feedback, so we’re hoping to get the app in your hands soon.

We worked out process issues coming from growing a remote work studio, and created & hired for multiple new departments to help support our team.

Fundraising. We had to dedicate a significant amount of time to pitching and securing additional investment for the future of the company.

Future Design. We designed the entirety of Era 3 (a few times!) and how it could lead into Era 4.

What would we do differently?

Knowing what we know now, we’d have a much clearer direction from the start. Short Circuits, the Siesta, and even Fall Ball have been immensely valuable in getting a better understanding of what we want to make and what our Fans want. So a lot of the time spent experimenting wouldn’t need to happen and a lot of unknowns wouldn’t need to be run. We’d also make the font size bigger from the start and plan for a few more unforseen roadblocks in the development cycle.

I’m so interested in the process of developing a narrative for a game like this. What is the workflow like (possible topics: pitching ideas, narrowing down/fleshing out, and how you incorporate emergent gameplay)?

Our game designers offered two answers. Both are true.
Option 1:

1. State a problem space, find something to solve
2. Come up with 2 or 3 practical answers that don’t end up panning out for various reasons
3. Go silent for anywhere between 10 and 120 seconds
4. Pierce the silence with “ok what IF” and then state the wildest idea you have
5. ????
6. Come out of a fugue state to see your feature in Blaseball

Option 2:

• Our process is usually this: We come up with a narrative idea — a story we want to tell, a funny moment we’d like to create, or a theme we’d like to explore. Then we brainstorm how to tell that story with systems.
• How do you do that? Well, break everything down to its essential elements (To tell a story about necromancy — what do you need? At the very least, a way to know a character is dead, and a way to bring them back). And then we make up rules for the sim and choices for the players that could create that narrative.
• What you’re left with is not a particular story, but a possibility space — a whole variety of narrative that your rules could create. And then it’s up to you to constantly iterate on the rules you’ve laid out and choices you’ve offered in order to adjust that possibility space.
• A good way to test this out without making a game wholesale is just to GM a tabletop game. Just do a one-shot! You don’t even need others — GM it for yourself, even! Just practice designing systems that lead to good stories.

More info soon! See you next Friday.