The Game Design of Codex

Codex
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I wonder if Keith is familiar with the concept of “coupling” from software engineering.

I think that the property of games with a strong core mechanism that actually makes them good is that they have strong coupling. This means that the various mechanics of the game are very strongly interconnected. Each action in any given system has a clear, direct effect on many other systems and you cannot understand any system of the game in isolation from the others.

In software, tight coupling is very bad, because it prevents you from breaking down your code into discrete comprehensible sections and thus understanding the entire system in such a way as to actually be able to solve problems. A system with only a few simple components can be a nightmare to work with if they’re highly coupled.

But in games having total understanding is bad, that means the game is close to dead. And having a game with lots of simple systems that are easy to understand but an overall system that is very complicated and multifaceted is like, the holy grail of game design.

When Keith talks about a “clockwork game” I think what he means is “games with very strong dependency between systems” And yeah, games with a strong “core mechanism” will be have high coupling.

Codex doesn’t have a core mechanism but it’s got really, really strong coupling. All the various different systems, hand size, tech level, building damage, board state, money economy, deck size, board state, patrol zone, cycle speed, tech progression. They’re all really tightly linked. No decision that you make in game affects only one of these systems. Every decision has effects on multiple axes which makes them super ambiguous and makes the game strategically deep.

A game with a strong core mechanism will have strong coupling/dependency because each subsystem or supporting mechanic will touch the core mechanism. But it’s not the core mechanic that’s important. It’s the property of high dependency that arises from that structure that leads to compelling gameplay.

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Really well said, @Fenrir!

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I think I learned something. I’m totally not going to use this in some bad fan-fic thatmost likely won’t see the light of day.

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I disagree. Or at least, the win-more aspect only kicks in when one player is already winning by a large margin. When someone is winning by a smaller amount, the catch-up mechanisms are quite strong.

That’s a result of 2 things. First, Codex has a huge amount of very powerful effects, so even if you are down you can do some crazy thing to get right back into it. Second, resources are usually very tightly constrained, and you just barely can or can’t make the play you want. That extra gold from Scavenger is often the difference between a good turn and a great turn. And great turns in Codex are really really great.

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I had an opponent once who won by playing two stampedes with Guargum, and after the match he was surprised he won, because before that explosive turn it looked like the match could be a dragged out fight. Codex reaches a critical mass where the game is just going to end, one player or the other is going to get an explosive turn eventually. Its not exactly random, as you have to be at least a little clever in teching in the right cards. But Barrelfish’s point is valid, there are a large number of very powerful effects that can swing the board state back and forth. With the right tech choices, the game isn’t really over until someone’s base is at 0.

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I don’t tend to like the snowball effect either. But I agree with @Barrelfish that it’s not as delicate in Codex as you might believe. Once you reach that point there are some really silly comeback mechanics that are contained in Ultimate Spells and some colors’ T2 cards that act as a last resort. You probably won’t be able to play these if your opponent is doing a good job though. But sometimes your opponent takes a big loss in economy to put you in a bad position; at that point you can exploit it.

One thing that I enjoy far less is when there is always a way for the opponent to come back despite all of the work you did to place them in an unfavorable game state. This sort of thing really betrays what I take to be the goal of the game and most competitive games. The game should encourage optimal plays, smart responses, and small risks. If you achieve these things then you should have an advantage over the opponent because you have performed well and shown superiority that is reflected by the game state. If the opponent can turn their situation around from this point in a non-skill-based way, it appears arbitrary and undercuts the goals of the game and the incentivized actions, because actually those actions did not benefit you as much as the comeback mechanic did the opponent.

This sort of thing is pretty hotly debated in the fighting game community (who often do not have the best heads for game design) with respect to the ‘comeback meter’ and more recently in the discussion of removing chip-death from Street Fighter V. I dislike comeback meters for precisely the reasons described above; basically it can level the playing field with a simple low-skill command. Further, it might incentivize poor play in order to gain the advantage, which I take to be confused. The latter feature allows for comebacks in a more mitigated way: if the player can block and execute perfectly from 1HP, then that player can still win. This is an example of allowing a comeback mechanic that still involves a great deal of skill.

I don’t value arbitrary comeback mechanics. I wonder what kind of mechanic you would envision in Codex that would not benefit the player simply because she is losing. Do you value these sorts of comeback mechanisms? It seems to me that they create the illusion of a competitive match rather than displaying a true representation of skill.

Sirlin has more to say about these mechanics here, and while I’m not sure that I agree with his thoughts on the matter, we might see how some of these topics were reflected in the design of Codex.

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Something I really, really appreciate about the design of the game is how the deckbuilding aspect works. In a traditional CCG like Magic/Hearthstone/whatever, you have this fundamental feel-bad problem where you need different cards in different stages of the game. So you’ll have a bunch of early-game cards, then some midgame cards, then some lategame cards, and you have a few cards that are useful all around.

But, well, for the sake of example, I’ll talk a little bit about my experiences with Anyfin Paladin in Hearthstone: I’d have tons of games where I’d be in a tough situation, and I’d have the ideal card to deal with that situation…except that the card was still in my deck, and I hadn’t gotten lucky enough to draw it. That feels really bad. And instead of having those cards, I’d maybe draw cards that aren’t useful in the early game. So I’d spend the first few turns getting blown out of the water by an aggressive deck for the mere reason that I had only drawn early-game cards, or I hadn’t lucked into any of my card draw.

I think it’s telling that in traditional CCGs, cantrip cards and card draw are valued immensely, because they increase the chance that you’ll get lucky and draw into the cards you need, out of the entire deck you have. Also, every traditional CCG has a mulligan rule, because of the possibility of getting a terrible starting hand of cards you can’t use in the early game (or not getting enough early-game cards)–and there’s no mulligan in Codex, because it’s not needed.

But in Codex? If you don’t need a card until Turns 5-7, then don’t tech it in at first. Your Tech 0 cards are exactly what you need to handle the early game, and you can tech in midgame and lategame cards as the turns pass. It’s a really brilliant bit of design that makes a huge amount of difference. Suddenly, instead of crossing your fingers and hoping that you draw the right cards for your situation (or, in the case of Hearthstone, a card you can play on the mana curve), you mostly get decent plays for your situation, presuming you’ve teched well. To top it off, you get to start workering cards from the get-go, slowly filtering the weaker cards out of your deck.

It’s a great cycle that, I think, promotes decision-making and skilled use of your resources. Plus, the game doesn’t totally remove randomness, because randomness does often lead to more-skilled play. You have to figure out what the best response is, given a limited set of options. I think that Codex hits a Goldilocks level of randomness here: it dispenses with the feel-bad “I hope I draw Card X” of traditional CCGs but keeps a “well I don’t have exactly the card I need, but I can use these cards” level of random draw. I really like that.

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Was thinking about this, and wanted to add something to this and how this post relates to the core mechanism concept. The “coupling” idea is a good word for referring to the kind of elegance I think a lot about in game design. I have talked before about an abstract illustration of the concept in this way: imagine you have every rule in your game written on an index card, and each card is placed on a large gymnasium floor. (You can be as granular/not as you want with this; instead of a “rule” being on each card, you could have a “mechanism” or even a whole “system” written there.) Then tie a piece of string from each card to each card it has a relationship with.

Looking at it just from a “coupling” perspective, the more string you have down, the better. Right? Because coupling just refers to how interconnected everything is. And I do agree that coupling, in this way, is important.

But at the same time, it has to be ordered - it actually seems like it’d be a bad thing to have literally every rule/mechanism connected to every other one in some way.

So since there is going to be some order to the coupling, I think it makes sense to ask if some kinds of orders are maybe inherently stronger than others (at least in the ideal, if not necessarily in practice for a given system). To me, it makes sense that, in a vacuum, the most elegant order would be one core system/mechanism/rule - a spine, a thesis statement, etc, and everything else in support of that thing.

I also recognize that this kind of theory does not necessarily apply all of the time in all cases, and I think Codex is a case where it doesn’t apply. I do not think you can just “improve” Codex by “giving” it a core mechanism (nor do I think that’s even possible).

I think Codex does have strong coupling, and I think if we really broke it down, it probably has 2 or maybe 3 core mechanisms - which is what works for this system.

Hopefully this kind of clears up the whole “coupling” concept and how it is related to core mechanism concept.

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There’s been plenty of interesting discussion around determining the ‘core mechanic’ of Codex.

While it is true that Codex is a complex game of many interacting systems, I feel like the obvious answer is being overlooked here: teching cards, or the unique take on deck building. This is the core mechanic that the entire game is built around, the primary innovation and likely the first thing you would describe about the game. The fact that you build your deck over the course of the game from a personal binder of cards determined by your spec selection.

Resource management is clearly central to being a good player and winning the game, this is true of nearly all games of sufficient complexity. Gold, hand, and board management are all parts of this.

But for Codex, the deck building would be the one thing you couldn’t take out without completely destroying the design of the game. Could you simply draw a set number of cards a turn? Yes. Could the patrol zone not exist? Yes. Could tech buidings and add ons be removed? Yes. The game would play quite different, but it would probably still feel like Codex.

If you removed the deck building aspect, not only would the game be completely different, but many of those other mechanics would now seem strange or unnecessary. To me, every aspect of the design flows from that central ‘pull cards from your binder’ principle.

Workering allows you to thin your deck of irrelevant or poorly chosen cards, while allowing your teched cards to matter more since there are no dedicated mana or energy cards filling up your deck. Discarding your hand and drawing new cards allows you to cycle through your deck quickly while still punishing you for using too many resources. Tech buildings add nuance and complexity to teching.

The game is even named after your binder after all!

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To dig into this a bit more, it seems to me that playing Codex well involves being able to thoughtfully tech well, thinking ahead to know not just what you need right now, but what you’re going to need in the future.

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The patrol zone is just as innovative and important as teching cards. If you don’t patrol right, what could have been favorable trades become terrible.

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Codex has an active measure to prevent slippery slope with the patrol zone. You can point to any number of games where players have made comebacks without their opponent making in egregious mistake. You can also point to a lot of games where someone makes a mistake early and it costs them the game (slowly).

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I’ve deleted some off-topic posts. Please stay on-topic.

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Sirlin said this in the Rules Questions thread and I am curious to know: why is that intentional? I would have thought, based on how much balance and even playing fields are a priority, that you wouldn’t want player 1 to ever have any advantage over player 2 at the start of a match (beyond what’s simply unavoidable). Maybe I am making some mistake or mis-read that comment but if heroX + specY counters others, doesn’t that mean that that kind of advantage sometimes exists?

I understand that the countering effect is really minimal since, as it was stated in the other thread, there’s plenty to counter the countering effects with. In other words: this is not at all a criticism of Codex; I just am interested to hear more about the design philosophy, from anyone who knows the answer to this question.

(Sorry if this is a dumb question. And hopefully this is an OK thread to ask this question in, as it is a question about the game design of Codex!)

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I think the issue here is one of interpretation: I’m pretty sure the the “counter” thing applies in terms of things you can do to use an option available to you as part of your loadout to counter one of the options your opponent is using from theirs, rather than in the usual sense of “this choice coming into the game beats the opponent clean before we even start.” More like playing scissors when you expect them to play paper than playing an anti-goblins deck in MtG when you expect a tournament full of people playing goblins.

I may, of course, be mistaken.

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You’re not understanding what’s being said. Imagine a game where all possible things you can do are equally effective against all possible things the opponent does. Besides being practically impossible to construct such a game, it would make no sense to play and be terrible. Of course some things need to be better than other things against various things the opponent does. That is why there is even a game at all to play. That is how you use strategy and get ahead. The notion mentioned here has nothing to do with uneven playfields, so leave any discussion of that out of this. It’s just a simple fact that all possible things can’t and SHOULDN’T be equally effective against everything.

So yes, it’s intentional the some combinations of a certain first hero you summon (e.g. Blood hero) + a certain tech 2 path you choose next (e.g. Fire tech II) are stronger against some things an opponent might do and weaker against other things an opponent might do. If we made that particular combo have no advantage ever and no disadvantage ever then it would be a much worse “strategy game”. Your choices wouldn’t really matter because no tech path would have advantage over any other tech path.

You have 3 heroes to play first and 3 tech 2 paths to play first, for a total of 9 different common starts. That doesn’t even count spell-based strategies, so really it’s quite a bit more than 9. The set of all possible strats you you can do with a deck should have somewhere in it a good thing to do against whatever specific thing your opponent does. So that’s why you shouldn’t really need to sideboard. In essence, your whole deck is a gigantic sideboard, an order of magnitude bigger than an MtG sideboard.

In other CCGs, it’s much more important to be able to switch decks or add a separate sideboard mechanic or something. Usually your deck is tuned to do ONE thing really well, not this huge bag of tricks with 10+ tech paths like it is in Codex. So in that kind of game you sit down to the table at a big disadvantage a lot of the time because the ONLY thing you can do loses hard to the ONLY thing your opponent’s deck does. Here’s it ONE thing you can do loses hard to ONE thing your opponent can do, but you each have like 10+ other things you can do, so there’s enough leeway that your not destined to lose before a single card has been played.

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Ah, okay. I did in fact misunderstand you, sorry. I thought you were saying you wanted there to be like a “black slightly counters white” effect, but I see what you meant now.

To summarize what you’ve said, it’s something like, “any starting conditions’ counter-based biases in Codex are so vanishingly small that they aren’t a concern”, which is why blind picking is all that’s necessary - right?

If so, that is a cool game design thing that I think people should really appreciate about the game. Probably most people would agree that this cannot be said for a lot of asymmetric games.

Thanks again for the responses!

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Here’s how I take it, based on my brief experience with the game: a hero/spec combination is often able to answer another hero/spec combination effectively. For example, teching the Blood spell Kidnapping against Feral Tech II, because that lets you absolutely destroy them with their own powerful units. And that’s definitely crucial to the game. By anticipating someone’s plans, you can tech in cards to help you deal with that.

The balance comes more in terms of any monocolor having answers to the shenanagins that any other monocolor tries to pull.

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I’m not sure this is quite right, though perhaps I am simply misunderstanding you; the way I would phrase it would be

“When beginning a new game of codex, each deck should have an answer to virtually anything the opponent’s deck may throw at them. Advantages and countermeasures are then the responsibility of the players to identify within their chosen deck, and add from their codex to their deck at the appropriate time. The player who more effectively counters their opponent’s gameplan should win more often than not.”

In essence, since you should be able to construct a balanced deck that has multiple winning strategies based on how you tech cards in, blind picking is totally sufficient, as you won’t accidentally blind pick into an unwinnable or extremely unfavorable matchup.

You may “play into” a poor matchup over the course of the game (like for example, choosing to max out Rook as a white player when your opponent is playing Purple and can Origin Story Rook for a very effective trade), but you weren’t doomed from the start of the match: you could have instead played Setsuki and beaten purple with a swarm of ninjas / stealthing into the backline of the purple player.

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Any deck should be a complete toolkit; it will have the tools to have a reasonable matchup against any other deck. The player still has to pick the right tools and use them correctly, with their opponent doing the same, providing the opportunity for counters.

The big thing for me is that the overall game design provides so many mechanisms to give reliable access to the desired tools (heroes, add-ons, teching cards from your Codex, workering useless cards, deck cycling, patrol zone).

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