Warthog Asks: Tom Goldrick (Goldrick Games)
Warthog Asks: Tom Goldrick (Goldrick Games)
A tournament organizer and board game developer talks about Merfights and Shuffles
Sometimes a multiplayer game will be fortunate enough to attract a champion, someone who does their best to promote the game and even arrange events for it. With Merfight: Curse of the Arctic Prince, it has Tom Goldrick AKA MohastGridlock, who organizes monthly online tournaments on the game’s discord server. As a competitor and commentator in those tournaments I’ve gotten to know him.
In addition to running tournaments, Tom is working on Versus Tag Shuffle, a board game modeled after tag team fighting games. Since Versus Tag Shuffle and Battles Beneath the Star occupy somewhat similar spaces as pseudo fighting games, I thought it’d be appropriate to do some sort of collaboration, and decided on an interview, which Tom agreed to.
Disclosure: I am currently doing contracted editing work on Merfight.
[Logo for Versus Tag Shuffle, Tom’s fusion of board games and fighting games.]
What's the origin story for your screen name, MohastGridlock?
I used to have a screen name from when I was 12 and decided I needed an update. Mohast is an anagram of my name, Thomas.
It's not often that someone ends up as the unofficial community manager for a game the way you have with Merfight. Could you point to any quality of or experience with Merfight as the reason you became such an active community member? Or does the story involve something else?
I honestly found Merfight on Twitter, got hooked, and then had such a compulsion to see match footage and play with others that it became a bit of a hobby for me. I have worked as a social media manager before and I know how hard it can be for indie devs.
As a fellow low-budget developer, I know how important it can be to have someone passionate about your project and sharing it with others. Matt sometimes talks about being a little shy with promoting the game, so it's been a natural fit to have my loud mouth shilling Merfight for fun.
What are some hurdles you've overcome while organizing the monthly Merfight Kumite tournaments? Any challenges that might not be obvious to observers?
Its a testament to Merfight's capacity to run on low end hardware that I'm able to even compete in the kumites, nevermind TO them. I'm currently stuck using my work laptop and it is not meant to stream and play games outside of Fightcade. Having a backup streamer has always made my job easier, as well as someone to accompany me on commentary such as yourself.
The biggest hurdle I've found is balancing the competitive nature of the kumites with the fact that we are ultimately playtesting a game in early access. Separating what's good for the longevity of the game from reactionary balance decisions is a tight rope to walk. Kumites make up a large portion of our player feedback, but it can also skew heavily from month to month based on previous patches or player attendance.
Your own project, Versus Tag Shuffle, is a bit of a hybrid, bringing many elements of fighting games to the medium of board games. What inspired you to take that direction?
I have a lot of friends who plays board or card games and enjoy fighters but find it intimidating to play against me given my built up muscle memory. Versus Tag Shuffle is an attempt to remove the physical nature of fighters from the equation.
Are there any recent/current design trends for board games that Versus Tag Shuffle is either taking part in or pushing back against?
I can't speak to trends in board games writ large, but I am proud to say that GoldrickGames strives for all of their projects to use as few components as possible and provide players enjoyable experiences regardless of their financial investment.
What makes Merfight match footage compelling for you?
It's a great game that not enough folks have played! I'm also obsessed with the new player experience, so I'm always looking to hear feedback from new players.
Woolie, Reggie, and LordJimmyBones' stream of themselves playing Merfight was such a pleasure to watch as they discovered new techniques and explored the roster. Similarly, Team Best From Now did a live stream of the game as a joke and ended up falling in love with it. Seeing new players find something for them in Merfight is a great experience, and Matt deserves all the accolades for making a game worth sharing!
At the end of the day, I know I'm not going to be as good with any given character as a character specialist like Coderius or SylvieHorse. Watching great players show what they can do gives me inspiration for what to practice in the future.
Muscle memory and the like giving people an intimidating advantage is one we've also seen turn-based fighting games like Mega Knockdown and Your Only Move Is Hustle be made to address. Do you think we'll see more fighting games and fighting game adjacent works in that vein?
Absolutely! Turn-based fighting games have been a thing for as long as I can remember, but their popularity has risen as board/card games and fighters have both grown exponentially in the last few decades. The hope is that more developers will explore the design space available and showcase interesting and innovative iterations of the classic game of rock, paper, and scissors.
Have there been times where you've had difficulty striking a balance between the needs of a board game and the conventions of fighting games in Versus Tag Shuffle?
There are some popular gameplay concepts from fighters that don't translate well to a board game environment, but those are less interesting than finding the ways in which they do.
At their core, there are so many similarities between fighting games and board/card games that the design space is rich for exploration. It would be a fool's errand to try to simulate a traditional fighting game one-for-one, so the question instead becomes, "what elements of each ingredient does one mix together to create something new?"
For Versus Tag Shuffle, we decided to focus more on a few key features that both fighting and board game players would be familiar with: players jockeying for position/advantage, mind games, and team building.
What was the process like when coming up with Versus Tag Shuffle's roster? Were you guided more by gameplay mechanics you wanted to use like "I want a character with HP drain effects" or by general character concepts like "cat samurai?"
The former. At its heart, Versus Tag Shuffle was built from the bottom up; gameplay concepts were the primary focus of early designs with character concepts and artwork following afterward. We've swapped characters' identities around entirely to fit the needs of the project and aren't tied to many of our character designs at this point despite a few outstanding successes.
For example, players seem to resonate with Cattrip and Gunther, a devious duo of ne'erdowells with distinct artwork and backstories. Cattrip is an assassin disguised as a street vendor, while Gunther is an escaped convict on a warpath. They make an unlikely but effective team, and I'm not the kind of person to look a gift horse in the mouth. The fact that some players gravitate toward characters based on their artwork or storyline is thanks to our fantastic artists Dan Goldrick and Nate Medeiros.
To end the interview on a fun note, if you could have a character from Versus Tag Shuffle appear in any fighting game of your choice as a guest character, which character and game would you pick? You can invert the question if you'd prefer.
I would love to see Gunther in a Guilty Gear or Under Night game. His instant kill mechanic would probably not be too crazy given the other characters in the roster and I always want more big bodies who aren't necessarily grapplers.
Thanks again to Tom/Mohast for agreeing to this interview. You can find him on twitter here and more information about Versus Tag Shuffle, including how you could play the prototype right now, on his website. If you join the official discord server for VTS, you may even end up playing against me.
Due to the magic of scheduling posts I’ll be busy by the time this goes up, but I will get around to responding to comments once I’m able to.