Date of Posting: 04/10/2023
It's been a couple of weeks since the release of Bunker Busters, so now is a pretty good time for me to write a whole bunch of words about the process of making it, inspirations, etc. But first, what even is it?
Bunker Busters is a single player pen-and-paper dungeon crawler in which all the events and loot are determined by drawing from a deck of standard playing cards, while you explore a the setting of a procedurally generated private emergency shelter. It's way more complicated than it needs to be and simultaneously too simple to have that much depth. It's a bunch of ideas mashed together and it is definitely a game you can play, although I don't necessarily recommend you do so. It's also my second game in the Alphabet Superset Challenge.
I don't think Bunker Busters is an especially good game. But I do think it's interesting, and I'm glad I made it. Also like everything in this series you can enjoy the game document simply for the flavour and worldbuilding content, as well as trying to grapple with how I jammed in so many mechanics to such a shallow game.
Bunker Busters wasn't the first thing I tried to come up with for B Week. In fact I had several false starts, because my initial prompts were trying to work with were the following: Blood, Bees, Birds, Biomass. I wanted to do something about processes playing out over a map, and following a path in some way. Perhaps something to do with interacting with an ecosystem, or animal pathfinding. I spent a couple of hours trying to turn these into something with some sketches and rough prototype elements getting thrown around, then got annoyed that it wasn't amounting to anything, and decided to take a break.
After returning to the project I decided that my initial ideas for the project were mostly bad, and to just start working on something else. I instead decided to pick a completely different approach, and settled on the word "Bunker" instead. I kept all my notes because I knew that at least one of the ideas I'd come up with had potential, even if it was going to have to spend a bit more time baking in the brain oven in order to get big and tasty. This later developed into the following week's game "The Crows Know" but I'll go into that in it's own post.
I decided to make the game a dungeon crawler, the most obvious thing I could think of for a game about post-apocalyptic bunkers. You're an agent of Division 7, whatever that means, and you're going to explore these old sealed off bunkers where there's a known issue of something terrible happening to the inhabitants, and you're going to rescue any survivors. Nice and simple. You ever play the Alien 3 game for Megadrive/SNES? Something a bit like that, but turn based and on paper. I still had playing cards in my head from spending so long playtesting Annihilation, so I decided to work those in as a key element. Early on I was considering how playing cards could be used to form a map to work through, but abandoned that in favour of having the cards form a broad range of random events that take place in the bunkers.
As a quick aside, if you want examples of thematic inspiration I suppose the most obvious would be the Vaults from the Fallout series. I don't actually like Fallout 3 that much but I did spent a lot of time on it as a teen, and the way most of the Vaults just completely suck and have this awful grey metal layout and eventually loads of killer monsters in them helped inspire some of the mental imagery I was working with.
I split the deck into two halves- Red for Encounters, and Black for Loot. We therefore end up with two separate decks to draw from. Within each of these the suits form different types of Encounter or Loot. Spades are Tools, which help you do things in the bunker and go into your inventory. Clubs are Weapons are are valuable for surviving combat. Hearts are Survivors- ostensibly the main objective of the game is to rescue these people, and you get rewards for doing so. Diamonds are enemy encounters, in which you must fight off Bunkrites. I decided to give as little context as possible for what Bunkrites actually were, outside of there being 4 different variants (Young, Adult, Queen, and Chrysalis) and what might be a partial image of one. One thing you can be sure of, they have teeth. You might find out what they are through further game releases. I guess we'll see.
With the deck now split in this way I quickly generated a whole bunch of items and encounter ideas straight off the dome and then came up with what they would do mechanically. I tinkered with these a bit later on but mostly they stayed as first imagined. I also had to start thinking about what the play area would look like, and as you will see in the document where I outline the envisioned layout of the play space, it was absolute chaos.
Map generation took a couple of iterations to get something good, but it wasn't too difficult just to get a D6 to produce some basic layouts for passages and rooms. One inspiration I have for this is the game Advanced Heroquest, which I played as a kid, and found myself fascinated by the rules included for procedurally generating unlimited dungeons to play through with your friends, as well as rules for solo play and how enemies would act in combat. I suppose this is probably going to be relevant as an early inspiration for various things I'll be doing in this project.
The biggest problem solving innovation I found when working on the map-gen was to solve the way that the dungeon layouts just kind of went on for ages and you could spend a long time picking up loot before ever having any encounters, as Rooms where you could take encounters were all dead ends. However, just putting in more Rooms on the proc-gen table would cause the game to peak too early. My solution was to use "Junk" cards, the most common form of Loot, as a sort of counter. Once you've picked up a certain amount of Junk it can be assumed you've spent a while wandering around and generated a reasonably novel layout, so you then switch to a second layout generation table which produces far fewer passages and junctions, and more Rooms. This allows a period of quiet early on where you can be fairly sure to pick up some useful loot before you inevitably end up with lots of Rooms to explore.
Combat was extremely simple, just rolling dice to beat a pre-set number based on whatever the random encounter was. You're encouraged to see Bunkrite encounters as always high-risk, and hard to overcome without previously picking up useful Loot, to encourage you to spend time exploring before you do encounters.
I wanted there to be a level of tension as you work your way through the Encounter Deck. Obviously you'd know from the tables that almost none of the cards are Bunkrite encounters (only 4 cards out of the 26 in the deck actually result in combat). I thought as you work your way through the many "False Alarm" events in the deck it would increase the tension of the game, as you know that for every false alarm or survivor you get through, you're one card close to an enemy encounter. I don't know how "scary" this actually is, but I really like this knowledge that things are eventually going to get worse if you keep pushing forwards, similar to how games with reshuffled danger cards like Exploding Kittens and Forbidden Island do this.
I think I'll revisit this tension building mechanic again in later projects. I really like the way you can mentally gauge the probability of future events based on which cards have already been drawn, similar to the ideas behind counting cards, and I think this sort of limited predictability is a really interesting mechanic I'd like to spend more time playing with.
There was a very simple attempt at a level of reward and persistence of upgrades, stat increases, etc. I didn't want to just use a simple points system and leave it at that, but I also couldn't think of much in terms of interesting or novel player progression outside of just boosting some basic stats to make subsequent encounters easier. Feel free to invent your own mechanics.
Also I ran out of room on the document to post how Chrysalis Bunkrites work! The intention is for them to turn into a copy of the last Bunkrite you encountered if you don't kill them immediately, but I had no more room for text (I had to turn the map generation table on its side in order to fit the whole thing on two sides of A4). However, the rule isn't actually in there, so if you play the game and encounter Chrysalis Bunkrites, again, please feel free to invent your own mechanics to allow things to make sense!
I playtested this partly on paper, but mostly within the game Tabletop Simulator, which is a pretty great way of getting a whole bunch of pen and paper stuff and playing cards into a space without having to actually clear your entire work space in order to continuously rearrange things. I (obviously) take quite a lot of notes while I'm working so it was much easier to be able to do both things at once by using a virtual tabletop environment. I'll definitely use it more in future for further testing of games of this sort.
I think that's about it for Bunker Busters, how it came to be and how it ended up like that. I like it even though it's bad, and even the document is kind of ugly, with a horrible shade of olive green used for the outlining of items. I'm glad I made it and it has a bunch of interesting process ideas, although perhaps this article provides better insight into that than the end product.
I think one thing which I was made quite sure of this in terms of my creative process is that sometimes you will spend a while working on something and all your ideas will feel like they're total shit, and it's like you're making no progress. Now, perhaps you're right in some way that you're not making progress, and you should take a break if it's starting to stress you out. But it's important that you come back and keep working on something. Even if it turns out the ideas you had were all dead ends, that's fine, now you know and hopefully you've recorded them in case they turn out to be useful later. You can now move onto other things. Sometimes you just have to try a bunch of stuff, and sometimes, simply due to the fickle nature of creative work, it turns out that stuff sucked. Keep trying stuff. Learn from your failures, and then go back to trying things. You'll find something. I found this, and it wasn't amazing, but it was something and it did turn into both a game and an article, and I learned a bunch of stuff from sticking it out.
I'll probably speak more on my thoughts about creative work and persisting through blocks in later articles, but for now I'm ready to move onto the next one of these, which will be about "The Crows Know", my favourite of these games so far, for various reasons.