Jerry White has been attending our GMT Weekends at the Warehouse for many years now. A few years back, as I greeted him at one of the events, he mentioned that he had a game design that he wanted to show me. This happens a lot at GMT Weekends, and it’s kind of “hit and miss” as to whether the design is both  a) a good fit for GMT and b) in good enough shape to be ready for development. I had my doubts about whether a game covering a single historical mission would be something we could get enough orders for on P500. On the plus side, it was a solitaire game, which always helps sales, and Jerry is a very detail-oriented guy, so I went into that demo “wary but hopeful.”

What I found was a game featuring systems designed by an engineer that somehow worked together to quickly immerse the player in a tense, ever-evolving story. I kept looking for things I didn’t like (because that’s what we DO! 🙂 ), but I couldn’t really find any. I started to say “Wow, it’s pretty much ready for P500 now,” but before I could, Jerry said that he was still working on making the game better and would have something to show me in six months, at the next Weekend at the Warehouse event. So, I smiled, thought “I really like this guy,” and immediately put Enemy Coast Ahead into my “Future P500 Games” tracking spreadsheet. It was a beginning.

Six months later, the game WAS better, and it soon made its way to our P500 list, steadily rising and Making the Cut. Jerry supported the game online and proved to be excellent at handling customer questions and providing interesting historical perspectives and examples of play. Now, as the P500 process is coming to a close, I STILL “really like this guy!” Components for Enemy Coast Ahead are arriving in our warehouse now and over the coming week, and it should ship to our P500 customers right around the end of the month. So, to give you a sense of what this game is all about, here’s Jerry’s first post for InsideGMT. Like his game, this article displays the fingerprints of its creator: the “engineer with the heart of a storyteller.” I hope you like it! – Gene

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John Steinbeck began the novel Cannery Row by explaining that flat worms are so delicate “that they are almost impossible to capture whole, for they break and tatter under the touch. You must let them ooze and crawl of their own will onto a knife blade and then lift them gently into your bottle.” That advice for writers, penned in 1945 just as the war was ending, applies well to game design. Enemy Coast Ahead (ECA) attempts to tell a story, just one of thousands, that could be told about the war.

I wish I could boast that as a designer I have done what Steinbeck advised: “to open the page and to let the stories crawl in by themselves.” But a game is not a novel, and yet, it manages to tell stories nonetheless. A good historical simulation has the potential to evoke the time that it depicts, as well as the events that took place. ECA is intended to evoke the RAF raid on Germany’s dams in May of 1943, and it does so not by a linear narration of events but with a decision tree.

Games inherently allow stories to happen. They unfurl before a player, but that player is not a passive audience. He moves the story along by engaging with it. Perhaps it is this engagement, unique in these type of games, that allows the story to “be set down alive,” to borrow again from Steinbeck.  A game can tell a story in ways no other medium can match.

In ECA, engagement happens in a variety of ways, but its liveliness comes through by making decisions and then watching the consequences of one’s own choices. The game presents the player with a tantalizing military target and gives him a menu of tools by which to destroy it, leaving the details of how and when to him. The parameters are tightly controlled: you have six weeks and a single bomber squadron, you will use an untried ordnance that demands precision release, and you risk sabotaging your own mission if you do not attend to security. The player selects aircrew and groundcrew, and trains the former with the assistance of the latter. Train them in what? He must consider a training sub-menu: Low altitude night flying, navigation, precision release, the control of altitude and speed; he’d like to maintain high performance in all categories but these are men he is working with, not predictable machines, and he is constrained by a time limit. Yes, he can stretch that limit, if he dares, but he can’t control the cycle of the moon nor can he guarantee secrecy if he keeps at it for too long. Wait another two weeks and yes, his bomb-aimers will be experts at this job, but they won’t have the moon’s light to work by. And don’t forget the water. The reservoirs will be drained soon, in the normal maintenance of the dams, and his bouncing bomb won’t do the trick it is designed to do if he waits for that to happen.

Hopefully this story comes alive through the questions posed by the game, and then felt in the inevitable anxiety those questions engender. The player queries himself throughout the game:  Are my aircrews trained enough? Which skill is more important, bomb-aiming while at the dam or navigation to the dam? Do I really need VHF radio sets in the cockpits? Is Eder Dam worth attacking even when defended by a battery of searchlights and anti-aircraft guns? I managed to destroy two dams, but after the debriefing Bomber Command gives me the green light to conduct a follow-up raid. Is it worth sending my Lancasters out again or is the risk too great now that the Luftwaffe knows what we’re up to?

Enemy Coast Ahead is designed to strike a mood as much as it strives to present an interesting puzzle. Hopefully the player will surrender to the historical event and feel immersed, for that is how the game was designed. Like so many others of World War Two this particular military event, the famous Dambuster Raid of 617 Squadron, presents a rich story. My principal source was the game’s namesake, the autobiography of Wing Commander Guy Gibson, written shortly after the raid. That book’s style, and especially the colorful dialogues nestled throughout, provide the twenty-first century ear with the voices of historical characters, even if filtered through the pen of a single author (not to mention his wartime censors). That voice is strong and clear, a vibrant artifact of the past, strong enough for the designer to capitulate to the historical event and allow it to suggest its own features as a game. A historical simulation is a complex of systems, each with conceptual mechanisms intended to represent the interactions and mutual influences of military events and processes, but the best games make those features seem natural. They feel inevitable rather than contrived, as though the design involved little to no intervention on the part of the designer.

The Dambuster Raid is a story worth telling, and I would like to think ECA does it justice. Of course, it is not the designer’s place to adjudicate on the success of his own design, but he can hope — perhaps in vain — that the story it tells may appear to have crawled of its own accord into the game box.

Jeremy (Jerry) White

Author: Jeremy (Jerry) White