Fights in Tight Spaces survived Early Access
Figuring out which game concept to select from the mass of pitches or concepts swimming around these days can be pretty challenging. There's a concept from Derek Thompson's book The Hit Makers which I find helpful: "familiarity and novelty". Briefly, this is the idea that in order for a work to have a chance at attaining the ever-elusive "hit" status, the audience needs to recognise aspects of it which they already enjoy but also be surprised and excited by a twist on the formula.
Obviously, this can be tricky to negotiate: too "familiar" and the game is generic and boring; too novel and it comes across as weird and disorientating.
When James Parker from Ground Shatter first showed me his concept for Fights in Tight Spaces back in 2018, I was drawn to it for a few reasons. Firstly, I had significant experience working on tactical games with Mode 7's Frozen Synapse projects, but perhaps more exciting was the fact that it represented a meaningful twist on a popular formula. There's certainly an over-abundance of deck-building games out there, but none (to my knowledge!) which combine cerebral card-wrangling strategy with over-the-top pugilistic action.
In addition to this, the positional element of the game added some valid mechanical depth. This in itself isn't a totally original proposition, but is something I feel is slightly under-explored in the deck-building arena.
Originality is definitely important but it can take many forms, some of them quite subtle: games don't have to be outrageously different in order to succeed. They do, however, need to attract attention and keep it.
In this article, I'll take you through how we tried to protect the integrity of FITS' familiarity and novelty during its development by listening to
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