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Zulus on the Ramparts! - The Making of a Game
On the Ramparts of Solitaire Gaming – Just Add Zulus
By Alan Emrich
If you want to make games, or you’re just curious about this subject, it helps to know the process of how games are made. This article looks at one Victory Point Games title, Joe Miranda’s Zulus on the Ramparts!, and shows you the evolution that it went through from concept to post-release.
If you want to have your great idea for a game published by VPG, it will go through a similar process – and it is the purpose of this article to let our future game designers know what they’re getting into and how things work on a game project.
The Inception Stage
Our story begins in the carefully crafted cranium that is The Mind of Miranda. Joe Miranda was born to make games like Charlemagne was born to rule. Where other game designers try to plant the seed of an idea in the rocky or barren soil that is their busy, chaotic life, The Mind of Miranda is more fertile than most other game designers can even imagine. With scores of published titles to his credit and about ten more per year being added, The Mind of Miranda is a primordial soup of game progeny; it is a constantly-evolving world surrounded by an atmosphere of brain storms that engender ideas that strike like lightning to begat the miracle of game creation...
Now, most game ideas are not that original. They begin as inspired by some aspect of other games and are melded in the mind of their designer to create a new hybrid idea for an original game design. In this case, Joe Miranda was inspired by Darin Leviloff’s States of SiegeTM series games, Israeli Independence and Soviet Dawn.
“When I played Darin Leviloff’s Israeli Independence game, I realized it could be used for similar situations: a beleaguered defender winning against seemingly impossible odds. And so I decided to tackle the battle of Rorke’s Drift.” - Joe Miranda
What caused lightning to strike was a long-standing observation from another noted game designer, Richard Berg, about how some great military situations and war movies, like the film Zulu, usually make for dull games.
“The problem, of course, is that when translating these kinds of ‘last stand’ situations into wargames, you quickly discover that the situation it not all that exciting to play. This is, in part, due to a lack of movement.
Wargame design guru Jim Dunnigan once proclaimed that the foundation of a successful wargame design is: ‘There must be movement!’ At Rorke’s Drift, there was little in the way of tactical movement on the part of the British other than shifting around some reserves. As for the Zulus, their movement was linear, charging in then breaking off. There was little in the way of maneuver." - Joe Mirnada
Alan Emrich teaches in his game design students that, “The original game designer is not one who imitates nobody.” That is, as Jim Dunnigan tells us in his famous second rule of game design, game designers use available techniques invented by other game designers all the time. Re-inventing the wheel in every game would greatly increase the learning curve for the players and usually increase the complexity of the game to near-incomprehensibility. So, we are urged to work from a foundation of the familiar and “player comfort” in games. Alan Emrich’s quotation concludes, “The original game designer is one whom nobody can imitate.” For his part, Zulus on the Ramparts! game designer Joe Miranda also found inspiration in using available techniques that he found from another game and game designer:
“I was also inspired by Dan Verrsen’s Midway card game. In that game, the player must make command decisions, such as readying various types of aircraft on his carrier decks. In my view, card-based wargames do not usually work because designers too often use the cards as mere substitute for unit counters (just larger and holding much more data on them), resulting in a clumsy, table-consuming design. But in Midway, Dan used the cards to simulate not so much the carriers and airplanes, but rather the mental processes inside the heads of the task force commanders. That was brilliant!” - Joe Miranda
Joe Miranda once explained that, wargame systems are a lot like mathematical theorems – that is, with them, you can build upon them to create new concepts. In other words, a solid core game mechanic or game ‘engine’ is a lot like a computer programming language – a great tool for creating your own original applications (or games, in this case).