A teammate asked me the damning question, “What is a Daniel Cook game?” I didn’t have a good answer. 

He was looking for some understanding of the influences behind the things we make. In his mind, there’s clearly a vein I’m mining when I lead a project (though I don’t lead all our projects) and it would be helpful to everyone involved to understand that space a little better. 

The individual creator is a flawed lens

The risk of this essay

By loudly defining a Daniel Cook (aka Danc) game in the context of a broader studio like Spry Fox, it can shut down other voices. My ideal is one of collaboration and mutually lifting one another up. But power dynamics are real. Killing this creeping conservatism is an ongoing project. 

Well, what’s the difference between a Danc game and a Spry Fox game?

We are aiming to create Spry Fox games, not just Danc games. I’m just part of the mix. 

There have been many moments in the past where the initial spark was provided by other people. 

• Realm of the Mad God with its action focus was not a Danc game. I was a highly involved editor.
• Bushido Bear was an early action prototype that I abandoned because it was not very Danc-like. Pat Kemp and David Edery were able to turn the design into a very shippable game. 
• I had little-to-no involvement in Alphabear 2 other than the core Alphabear design. 
• We are currently experimenting with handing off Cozy Grove to a new era of creative leadership. 

In these situations, I suspect that this Dancist view of games transforms from being a prime mover into yet another influence for someone else. Sometimes minor, sometimes major. Such is the way of things. 

Why still write this?

Yep, this is likely a fruitless navel-gazing endeavor. But maybe it prompts some curious conversations. Or sheds light on topics that were previously the dark matter of our team’s creative process. 

Foundational belief

I believe games and game genres are poorly defined and full of immense untapped potential. We are artists living in a frontier space that is ripe with the opportunity to create great new work within. Games should not be treated as an established or rigid form. 

Recurring themes

As I’ve worked on my games are number of recognizable themes keep popping up.

• Each game tries something new: Each game is always trying something new. Often several things that are new. A new verb. A new solve for an old problem. This is the fun part. How can we put those pieces together in a coherent way?
• Yes to systems and economy: There are usually interesting game systems or economics somewhere in the design. Rarely will you see me do a pure narrative game.
• The world is derived from the game mechanics. We slowly prototype and find the game. And then find the world, theme and characters that fit that game. There is a gelling process in the late state of the game’s development where all these ideas are in conversation with one another.
• Characters and setting exist as an entrance or rationale for the mechanics and social systems. They are a necessity, but not usually the original point. I like to try to use brand (cute bears) to give cover to the fact that we are doing something mechanically strange. 
• Bad copies. Even when there’s an obvious comparable, I try to adapt it to current design constraints. This twists the copy into something new with new problems to solve. My instinct is to synthesize and invent even when there’s an obvious copy. This can be quite frustrating! 

Crutches / Tendencies

When problems arise, there are tools I tend to lean on again and again.  My natural happy place.

• Grid and tile-based systems: I have a dot grid notebook. It helps me think through designs. 
• Clear / simple rules of cause and effect. I’m not really a big complex simulation person.
• UX: Coming up with new UIs. Solving the micro-interaction problem for a key game verb is fun.
• Loose level design: Our games often have messy procedurally generated levels whose goal is only to add in base variance. I’m not a good level designer and have little sense of space. Then I lean upon the mechanics to make the game interesting, no matter how crappy the level design. 

Early influences

I ingested media as a kid that now lives rent free in my head. Often my current dreams can be traced back to these early foundations.

• Amiga-era games: Faerytale adventure, Dungeon Master, Lemmings, Starglider 2, Paradroid, Elite, MUDs, Alpha Centauri. Game designs that launched themselves into the dark. 
• Art: Bitmap brothers, Psygnosis, Roger Dean, Moebius.
• Literature: Dune, Stranger in a Strange Land (lots of 70s introspective sci-fi)

Anti-influences

Some influences, I run away from. Other people can love these topics! I just don’t. 

• Disney: Crass Americana consumerism. The cartoon style, the wide-eyed heavily censored manipulative stories targeted at traditionalists and children, the hard nosed extractive machinery of the media and the theme parks.  The miserable empty suburbanism of it all.
• Console games. Early console games involved game planners creating a ride for players. They focused on fail/retry loops, level design with golden paths and gating progress via puzzles or bosses. I’m allergic to almost all of these design patterns. They take autonomy away from players and produce blocked states where you throw down in frustration the thing you once loved.
• Puzzles: I hate puzzles with a passion. The single solution type. Authored by a designer.
• Action: I’ve never had great reflexes and I have no intuition or patience for try/fail/retry gameplay. These are better designed and played by someone else.
• Games for kids: I have zero interest in making games for children. And correspondingly lots of interest in making games for thoughtful adults who live complex, intensely human lives. 
• One-off content: I’m semi-allergic to expensive bespoke stuff that is used once and never again. I am improving here! But still have a clear bias towards appropriate reuse and high leverage on content (while avoiding oatmeal) 

Process

These are some constant development processes I like to use when making games. 

• Prototyping with a designer and programmer: I don’t program. So I pair with a programmer who ideally is also a talented technical designer. 
• Creative tennis: Team members play high skill creative tennis; lobbing ideas back and forth to make them better. Each person adds their specialty in service of the whole. I can make games with almost anyone, but great partners are transformative.  
• Design-led strategy: At this point in my career, there’s usually a plan for the whole game. I practice visualizing the long term end state of the design, then add the starting steps and finally plot out the least risky ways to connect the start to the end. There’s an architecture to any design and an order of operations in how to optimally build the game. I only rarely design like a truffle pig, rooting for fun. 
• Turns of the crank: Designs are structured around inevitable iteration. New systems or content invest a lot in that first iteration. Subsequent iterations focus on clarity, efficiency, standardization, variation and scaling to production. 
• Content leverage: We seek leverage on our content. Reuse, variations, proc gen, deep mechanics that are amenable to these things. So at first we optimize for fun, but rapidly start thinking about potential.
• Creating knobs: As we create tools and prototypes, always thinking about knobs we can tune those systems with. So that as we get more gameplay feedback, it is easy to adapt to. I hate building things that need to be thrown away during balancing.
• Team trust: All this can only happen with a high trust, high collaboration, high skill team. I’d rather work with a small group of high skill crafts folk than a big group of cogs who need micromanagement. 

Topics I’ve explored

These are interesting problems that have fascinated me over the years. I’ve explored more but these are major ones. The important part is the burning curiosity that drives the creation of clever ‘solves’ in space full of impossible constraints. 

• Evergreen puzzle: What does elegant design look like? Can you get more gameplay with fewer rules?
• Baroque design: What does messy design look like? Can you add knobs and surfaces that create opportunities for future content and playfulness?
• Non-violence: What if we made games without guns or combat? Just toss all those mechanics. What else could we make?
• Friendship formation: What if we made games about where people formed deep connections?
• Content leverage: How do we get more bang-for-buck from our expensive content? See proc gen, content standards, tooling, trickle narrative. 
• Coziness and cuteness: What makes things cute? What is the adult version of positive emotions that enriches us instead of infantilizes us?
• Pointillist narrative: How do we paint the world through many intense modular snippets vs linear narratives?
• How do innovators survive or thrive? How do we keep making impactful, interesting new games in a hostile, increasingly conservative creative and economic environment?

What delights me about games is that these rich, unsolved topics keep popping up! Who knows what the next 20 years will bring. 

Major Periods of Flailing

I’ve been doing this for decades. And I wasn’t always the same person. You grow, you change, you realize how stupid you were. You try to do a little better in a differently stupid way.

You may know me for a game like Triple Town, but realize for me that was three lifetimes ago. 

Idiot days (1990 – 1996)

When I started making games, I was a pixel artist. Who then made UIs. And then decided how the UI worked. And then how the game worked. I had no idea what I was doing. But neither did anyone else. The world was new and the future of games unwritten. So I had room to fail. 

Nothing of value came out of these first 5 years. Lots of art, lots of incompetent design docs, lots of dreams. One shipped game (Tyrian), one big failed project (MMO rpg in Unreal). Here’s an example of what I thought game design looked like at 21.

Art tools and game design theory (1997 – 2005)

In the next decade I made digital art tools for my day job and wrote obsessively about game design theory at night. Learned a lot about interaction design. Learned what evocative and functional feedback looks like. Learned about business and team dynamics. Built up some useful theory practices around iteration. Produced even more bad game designs that I’d bribe random people on the internet to build by giving them free art. Ended up at Microsoft designing games. Some games at the end of this era include Bunni and Fishing Girl.

Evergreen puzzle games (2005 – 2010)

Around the start of Spry Fox, I had the goal of making “evergreen puzzle” games. Which are not puzzles, but are closer to single player strategy games. Think Tetris. What’s the simplest rule set that results in the most gameplay? Triple Town, Alphabear and the original turn-based Steambirds happened here. All that theory? It worked. 

More-ish games (2011 – 2017)

Triple Town got cloned. A lot. It wasn’t yet a genre, but it was enough to hurt. So I started designing games like Road Not Taken and Leap Day that were harder to clone. But also harder to land. Lots of failed prototypes. This was also the time I stopped doing much of our art and embraced creative partnerships with folks like Brent Kobayashi. At the end of this period, we took 7+ years to make a failed MMO, Steambirds Alliance. It was our least Spry Fox game and shaped what came next. 

Life sims and social mechanics (2018 – Now) 

Upon reflection, there was an ongoing ‘cozy’ thread in our early games (Triple Town, Road Not Taken, Alphabear). I was also becoming increasingly intrigued by multiplayer (RotMG, Leap Day, Steambirds Alliance) Also, the pain of the More-ish period finally (to David’s palpable relief) convinced me I needed a new set of production and risk management tools. And we’d bounced around from genre to genre excessively and weren’t able to build team momentum. 

So my next set of designs tried to lean into all these factors. 

This period starts in a wobbly fashion with Beartopia and Alphabear Hustle. And continues with more confidence through to Cozy Grove and our next game. I think of them as bigger projects in the life sim space with less design risk at their foundation. But still some big bets. And a concrete goal of training the studio to become excellent at making a recognizable genre. 

Current status

I’m currently deep into making multiplayer life sims. We’ll see where it all goes. What an exciting time to be making something new!