Some of you who are familiar with our projects on the website may notice similarities between Argument Wars and the Guardian of Law project. Man, you guys don't miss a trick! This is not a coincidence. Argument Wars is actually a mini-game experience originally designed to be embedded in the Guardian of Law game. Not only was it designed to connect to Guardian of Law's larger universe, the mini-game itself was much less mini. Given the versatility of the argumentation mini-game, we made a decision to break it out and deliver it as its own experience. Argument Wars was born!

So, what kind of things were changed? How do you small-motize a bigger game without losing the spirit and intent of the original?

Our initial thought was, "hey, we've already built this game...we're basically done!". Boy were we wrong. At every level of development, from design documentation to data structure, we had work to do. It's not necessarily harder to retrograde a game, but it DOES require earnest design and development effort, and the alteration process can be sorted into three basic categories:

Things We Kept
The core mechanic of the game involves analyzing evidence and applying it to arguments. That core activity was what made the game worth playing in the first place. We knew that the game's main metaphor of laying cards down onto the board and watching them march back and forth was the story we wanted to the game to tell.

Additionally, a lot of nice art and animation went into the Guardian of Law prototype's incarnation of the game. In every place where it made sense, we kept that work intact. Having said that, there was still a lot of work in front of us, and by the end, there would be very little of the codebase and interface that wouldn't get touched in some way...

Things We Tossed
The Argumentation model received a liposuction- no longer would players flail across potential lanes of argumentation: it would be trimmed to two lanes. Additionally, players wouldn't juggle their argumentation and support cards at the same time- they would tackle the arguments first in an explicit starting phase, and focus exclusively on support cards during play.

Also trimmed was the dynamic judge feedback system. Previously the judge would use a metadata-based feedback system, providing his justifications for rulings on the fly. The judge however was still battling some semantic difficulties, and the smaller scope of each game now enabled us to write custom feedback for each argument and support combination, maximizing the quality of feedback in all cases.

Things We Added
It might seem counter-intuitive to add things to a game in order to make it smaller, but pulling Argument Wars out of its larger, Guardian of Law context made it lose some coherence. Without the bigger framework of Guardian of law, questions like "who am I?" and "why am I doing this?" emerged.

To provide basic identity, we created a simple character selection option. Then, to justify the player's perspective, we have them choose a side and set of arguments. Now that they've answered their "who" and "why" questions for themselves, they're ready to play.

With less "lanes" of argumentation, we realized we had some breathing room to re-design the player's hand of cards. The Guardian of Law Prototype was pretty strapped for space, so we took over that real-estate and added clearer tools for using the cards.

Final Thoughts
All in all, it was an interesting experience. It's not often that we build games using a reductive process, but it was an interesting process to re-visit game mechanics and implement them for new purpose. I think it's safe to say that we wouldn't plan a design and development process to unfold in this manner, but it's nice to know that you can return to good work and bear even more fruit.