The following is abridged from my original weblog entry on designing "Fatal Frame: the Card Game." (February 2005)
The secret's out... I'm working on a Fatal Frame card game. Disclaimer: Again, this is purely a fan thing... just something I do to kill time. It's not endorsed, supported, approved or requested by the good folks from Tecmo who created this super-awesome PlayStation2 series. Just like I did with Red Dwarf, Mitchell, and my heretofore crowning achievement, TaleSpin, Fatal Frame: the Card Game will be freely available online in multiple PDF downloads until I get a call from a lawyer. I don't know if it's cathartic or what, but I seem to enjoy designing card games based on the media works I'm currently obsessing over. I have quite a few unfinished efforts sitting around my den, but Fatal Frame is the one that has made it to alpha mode... IE, workable ruleset and first drafts of Photoshopped card designs. Fatal Frame: the Card Game will be subtitled "Crimson Butterfly Edition" because I'm working solely with the second game in the series, Fatal Frame 2: Crimson Butterfly. The two PlayStation2 games in the series follow a common theme: reluctant heroine wanders into ancient haunted locales with only a spiritual camera for protection. The camera can exorcise the ghosts by taking pictures of them. While the heroine tries to find her way out of the mansion/village, she gradually learns of horrible and disturbing rituals that were once held there. And, of course, the ghosts are working to re-enact those days on her. I'm using actual in-game text for the ghost cards. Plus some pretty lengthy stuff for cards that represent the game's many notes and files you find. I'm hoping that players can piece together the story - or at least, shades of it - just by paying attention and sorting through the flavor text. It's Crimson Butterfly's story that makes it scary, with the rituals and sacrifices and pain and such. It still creeps me out. The camera is another important facet of the series. Duplicating that with cards is rough. I originally had a strange centering mechanic, where you would roll to see if your photo of the attacking ghost was centered, for maximum points. That got weird. We're down to a simple die roll now for fighting ghosts, but the camera asthetic survives via camera upgrades (film, etc) that help out your roll and a "photo album" where you store the ghost cards you have beaten. Basically, players will each start the game with a camera as they enter All God's Village (the setting for FF2). The Village is made of 9 exterior location cards, all facedown. So the Village will be randomized each game for variety. The game's Houses will be on these cards, and if you want to enter them, then you pull cards off a separate interior location deck. As you walk through these locations, interior and exterior, you will attract ghosts. Most will be played on you by opponents, but you can play ghosts on yourself if you're feeling lucky. Ghost combat is done with a six-sided die, assisted by the camera upgrades you've collected. Some ghosts are worth points, but the big points come from finding Items (which can only be played at interior locations). Once you get 15 points, you can enter Kureha Shrine to fight one of three random Boss ghosts. Beat the Boss and you win the game. I'm trying to stay as close to the source material as possible. But like I said, some things just have to be altered to make sense in a card game. I originally considered making it a two-on-two team game... to simulate Crimson Butterfly's focus on twins. But I decided I'd rather keep the format to the usual 2 to 4 players, plus I didn't want to hamstring the rules should I decide to make a Himuro Mansion Edition later on (based on the first FF game, which had no twins, although I suppose I could have treated Miku and Mafuyu as effectively "twins"). I'm actually not mentioning FF2 lead characters Mayu and Mio in the game much at all - although they feature prominently in the artwork panels - because I want the players to become their own explorers of All God's Village. What will probably happen is I will use their story to frame the rulebook. And yeah, I know FF2's final moments take place below Kurosawa House, not Kureha Shrine... but, well, it's complicated. Since Kurosawa House is the biggest House in the game, I wanted players to be able to explore it when they find it, just as Mio does. Alpha stage means I have a complete, playable deck. I'm testing out the rules and card interactions, seeing what works and what doesn't. This game will be simpler than TaleSpin by design; for example, the first thing to go was the concept of playing cards on an opponent's turn. Any game that allows you to play cards on somebody else's turn invariably leads to timing problems. Not that "fast effects" are a bad thing, just that for this game, I'm trying to forge a game that avoids those issues. Since I'm a sucker for good presentation, I have a nice red Asian-themed box to hold the cards (found at Pier One). I'm going to attach some bells to it so it jingles like Chitose! I also have a bunch of small photo frames, all black with red embroidery (found in the dollar bins at Target)... but I couldn't find a use for them. Maybe I'll print out some screenshots and hang them up somewhere. The design of the cards lifts some background elements from the FF2 website, lots of artwork found at my favorite FF fansite Beyond the Camera's Lens, and some screenshots from my own saved games. To get the screenshots, I ran the PlayStation2 into Rhonda's iBook. Unfortunately, the video-in box I'm using is fairly old and crappy - it uses a slow USB connection so the screen refresh is delayed, making gameplay difficult. I need some shots of the Houses, but I've been too scared (and unskilled) to play my saves much. I figure I'll have a "teaser" site up before too long. I won't get a complete site up for quite a while, not until the rules are solid and the card PDFs finalized. I think I had a TaleSpin teaser page up for almost two years before the final version launched. But Fatal Frame: the Card Game, Crimson Butterfly Edition is coming. Once I get into the Photoshop phase, that's a good sign that I'm serious enough about the project to finish it!

Message from the Designer #02

The following is abridged from my second weblog entry on developing "Fatal Frame: the Card Game." (April 2005)
Fatal Frame: the Card Game is getting dangerously close to completion. The game is currently being tested with a 90-card deck, which is up from the initial mix. I'm wondering if it won't hit an even 100 before I feel it's ready to debut. It's had some interesting developments; new rules have been added, old ones removed... some new rules have already been tossed out. The toughest goal to attain is to keep the game balanced. Since all players draw from the same deck, there's always the risk that Player A gets lucky enough to draw all the "good" cards while Player B continually gets shafted with crappy cards. One solution to that is to have lots and lots of good cards, or at least self-balancing cards, but that's easier said than done. TaleSpin has self-balancing cards in the form of the randomized die roll effect on the character cards. Fatal Frame at the moment is leaning towards lots of middle- to high-level cards... cards that are almost always useful. Or at least situationally useful. There are no weenie cards that allow minimal effects - say, Draw 1 Card - because cards like that are just waste. FF's action cards are pretty much all really good stuff. Die rolls are also big in Fatal Frame, which is another self-balancing feature. sometimes you roll well, sometimes you don't. Many cards assist in those rolls, therefore many other cards have to be included to remove those cards. I'm not sure I have enough of those yet. Much of that work falls to the Ghosts (for example, you might have to trash one of your Spirit Orbs because you rolled an even number), but that often isn't a direct approach. That might be the final frontier that I need to cover to polish off the game. Out of the rules that disappeared during playtesting, many of them were proven to be completely arbitrary creations on my part. Usually because I'm such a slave to maintaining the theme of the source material. For example, I originally mandated that you had to travel through the Houses left to right. No moving backwards, no leaving the House until you get to the end of your dealt path. This was meant to simulate the video game's tension when you're stuck inside someplace running from unseen enemies. In card game form, it locked players into turns of doing nothing, often missing opportunities to boot. So now you can walk in either direction inside a House, even bailing out on your first turn inside if you don't like the looks of what lies ahead. In this case, I'm sacrificing the theming in favor of a design that keeps the players feeling like they're in charge. The biggest guiding force in the development of Fatal Frame: the Card Game has been simplicity. As proud as I am of TaleSpin, TaleSpin's biggest barrier to entry is a pretty high complexity level; there's a lot of game actions that don't spawn from cards, lots of cards you play when it isn't your turn. Both of those facets lead to problems. I want Fatal Frame to be easier. Not easier as in weaker, or dumber... easier as in more straight forward, easier to learn. I'm sure I could talk more about this, but if I go any longer it's just going to make even less sense since you likely haven't seen the game yet. So watch this space; it's coming soon. I can't hold on to it too much longer, because Tecmo recently announced Fatal Frame 3 for PS2 (maybe even this calendar year!) and my FF2 card game will be unceremoniously obsolesced when that happens.

Message from the Designer #03

The following is abridged from my third weblog entry on finishing "Fatal Frame: the Card Game." (April 2005)
After approximately five months of work and lots of playtesting (particularly from folks at the office; thanks guys!), Fatal Frame: the Card Game is online and ready for your perusal. I probably would have had it all up sooner - in fact, I've had the website fully built for over a month now - but I spent far too much time working on the damn PDF files and tweaking rules and cards at the last minute. When you do something like this, creating a game from scratch, the internal idea is always that somebody else is going to play it. I could make games all day that only me and my select group of friends would understand, full of absurdities and in-jokes and complicated rules that would all but require my presence to explain (which reminds me of that awful Killer Bunnies card game, actually)... but part of the fun is releasing the game into the wild and seeing how it survives. In this case, it turns out the wild was coming to me. I finalized the website late last night: 1:15am according to the modification date on the last file I uploaded. I planned on a soft launch, more or less. Get the site up and running for a few days and then send word out to Beyond the Camera's Lens this weekend that I finally got the game finished. Well, before I even decompressed from an average workday, I had some appreciative emails waiting in my inbox. Less than 12 hours after the site went live, the Fatal Frame faithful had sniffed it out, spread the word to BCL, and commenced to downloading! It is gratifying to make something that people actually want. There's a big Fatal Frame fanbase out there (bigger than I have experienced with TaleSpin, to that game's chagrin) and that's who I made the game for. I'll be lurking in the BCL forums ready to discuss the game with anyone who has a question! Which just reminds me how vital it is to make something that doesn't suck. One of the delays to getting the game online was all the time spent making sure the PDFs worked and the rules made sense. I like to test my websites on the crappiest Windows machine I can find, so I used my office PC to see if it could view and print the PDF files. It's a slug of a box running Windows 2000, and if I could install a font and print a fairly large PDF from it, I'm confident almost anyone could do the same. As to whether the rules make sense, well, I hope that they do. I try to take a third party approach when I pen the "official" rules for a card game... because I know how frustrating it is to want to play a game but have to suffer through a crappy rulebook. I'll be awaiting feedback to see if I have succeeded in making sense. As far as the cards go, I made changes right up until this very week. One late (and major) change involved how you play cards... originally, you would draw 1 and play 1. I thought this was making the game slow, so I tried draw 2 / play 2 for a while. That was crazy fast, plus a little non-intuitive... how many card games have you ever played where you drew 2 cards and played 2 cards? (Although I did like the whole twin angle to that.) So the compromise became draw 1 card, play 1 card... but if you play a Ghost you can play another card. This makes the Ghosts a free play, thus encouraging players to drop Ghosts on the table since they won't suck your entire turn to do so. The card base had some ups and downs as well. The first playtest deck was 80 cards... then it ballooned up to 100... then ruthlessly cut back down to 85. I can thank my pal Mike for that one. We had a truly evil night where we eliminated entire card concepts, re-allocated artwork, and completely reworked all the weaker cards into much stronger ones. In a game like this, where all the players draw from the same deck, it's all about your card ratios. Are there enough Spirit Orbs in the deck? Does everyone have a good chance of getting a decent Film card? Are there plenty of Ghosts - that's the whole premise, after all - without feeling like there's too many Ghosts? Does it work just as well with four players as it does with two? Balance is a tricky thing, and at some point after a hundred playtest games you just go "Yep, I guess" and call it done. So I have called it done. I may return to it to clarify rules (especially if I get a lot of WTF? comments), but on the whole, it's a done deal. It would be interesting to create another edition, based on the first Fatal Frame game... although that seems unlikely since there just isn't as many art resources out there for it as I found for FF2. Plus, it's been longer since I played through FF1, so it's not as fresh in my mind as Crimson Butterfly. (Although I do still verbally quote that one priest who would moan "Kirie, poor girl... why did she have to become so attached to this world?" I loved that guy.) And, of course, I'm eagerly anticipating the third game in the series, which could inspire me in the future. I guess that's really what the whole project was about. I was inspired by these games, to the point that I wanted to find a way to re-experience them without having to fire up the PS2 again. (Not that that's a bad thing!) It's why people write fan-fics, or why they cosplay or do their own artwork. It's why we hope the movie doesn't stink. My venue preference just happens to be card games. As fans, we're motivated to share that spark with others, whether they have the same feeling or not. If they do, hey presto, you've got a community. If they don't, maybe they'll sense the passion behind it. Every time I play this card game, I'm reminded of what I loved about the video game... the characters, the themes, the storyline, the tension. If you're a Fatal Frame fan, I hope my design and presentation do the same for you. And if you've never heard of Fatal Frame, that's okay too. Of course you should... third-person survival horror with a cool first-person gimmick, one of the darkest psychological storylines ever seen in interactive media etc etc. But the card game will make sense to you unto itself, perhaps you'll just miss the intricacies of the backstory. Enough high-falutin' pontificating. There's a new fourhman.com card game out there, and the only cost of admission is a lot of printing, a lot of cutting and a lot of sleeving.