Behind the Scenes
Originally published Sep 23, 2018
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Here I have some of the behind-the-scenes on hosting Wynn Mafia.
I typed out the announcement post for Wynn Mafia about a month in advance, yet when the day came and I had the thread ready for creation, it took me about an hour to finally hit the “Create Thread” button.
Hosting Wynn Mafia was a significant challenge, because managing up to 30 players requires some serious time constantly monitoring players’ actions and conversations, but also having to put up results every other day for not just the game thread, but every single player.
I was able to get results out usually less than half an hour after the phase ended only because I wrote out most of the results in the few hours leading up to the deadline; if someone submitted an action during that time, I would have to go back and change the post I had prepared (which didn’t happen too often, but still). For the first few phases, getting all the results ready took 3-4 hours, roughly.
I had initially set the game up for 31 players, and it hit 30 when signups closed. The 31st role was the Powder Master, a mafia role that could use powders to bolster or disrupt role powers. In retrospect, it was probably a good thing that nobody else signed up and the mafia didn’t get another player.
This was the spreadsheet I used to keep track of player actions. Uncoincidentally, it also gave me a good idea of what mechanics I found too difficult to track during the course of the game. I don’t actually have a record of how many emeralds/HP everyone had at every point in the game, which would definitely have been a good idea considering I had a role that specifically required keeping track of that; when Chigo_ was asking me how many emeralds they had accumulated over the course of the game, I had to figure out that number on the spot based on the things I had written down.
The links lead to the private conversations sent to each player. Also, when I wrote -1 for health on some players, that was shorthand for “this role needs a replacement player.”
This was my system for determining what items would be put up for sale every phase. In a stroke of non-brilliance on my part, every single item was selected through an almost-literal close-your-eyes-and-point process, and it’s one of the many things I really should have done any other way. The only consolation was that it was at least random enough.
The basic player interface and role descriptions were in a Google Doc aptly titled “Copy-pastes”, most of which I typed out right before I distributed the roles. That’s where I kept the design for the OP of the player convos and the phase PM template. If I were to do this again, the biggest thing I would change is simply to put the BBCode formatting [I]directly into[/I] the Doc. Aside from that, it’s not half-bad compared to my retrospective opinion on most other aspects of the game.
And here’s where I wrote every single end-of-phase post, from Day 1 all the way to the end. It’s a whopping 45 pages long, containing nearly 15,000 words. For comparison, the game document itself is 31 pages with a little over 11,000 words. Kinda scary, isn’t it?
Though I’m still not sure about doing this, the next post might be showing off a bit about Wynn Mafia 2 even though that game’s still up in the air, so what’s a more fitting follow-up to the last paragraph than including that the WM2 game document is currently 77 pages and 19,000 words long?
(I’m using a lot more tables this time around.)
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