Blood Bowl & Systems Design

Data makes the world go 'round.

I've always had a fascination with game balance and stats. When I was younger I spent hours pouring over my D&D books and some of the home-brewed games and systems my friends made. As well, during the earlier days of the internet, I took part in daily play-by-post strategy games with complex (sometimes too complex) systems involving balancing economy with fleet power, intelligence services, research, and so on. These set me up to always look at the why of a game. It's not imbalanced because the developer hates you. It's imbalanced because the numbers aren't right.

When I was attending Full Sail, one of the classes a little over halfway through was called World Building. A rather unassuming name, but it turned out to be a very important class to me. It was all about systems design and how to use proper balancing and data management to create a world that actually feels right to play. In that, we also used Blood Bowl, with its reliable data and complex systems. Students create a team, and then each week play the team versus the other students, and returning past students. Tracking all of the data and entering it properly is part of the coursework.

After graduation, I was fortunate enough to maintain a good relationship with the teacher of the class and managed to secure an internship assisting him with the class. As someone who wanted to work with numbers and enjoyed the idea of the class, spending three months interning with the class sounded like a pretty good deal.

In the course of my internship, I helped to rebuild the spreadsheet after we overloaded google sheets with too much data. It turns out that once you have 200 workbooks talking back and forth to each other, the system starts to break down. So, we've started to migrate the system to a new series of interlinked books to spread the load out a little more. As well, I developed a helper application for the students in Unity to handle things like turn timers, quick reference guides for some of Blood Bowl's more complex systems, and being able to track basic data from the master sheet without having to have three pages open.

While my internship was only three months, I believe that it was a huge boon to my skills and will help me going forward as a designer.