Developer's Diary: Happy New Year!
Happy New Year Gamers!!
This winter has been a very prosperous one in the Pacific Northwest, one with bountiful snow and logistical nightmares for every business. While times have been tough, I am hoping that everyone of you had a holiday season worth remembering.
It’s been a minute since I have checked in, so let's catch up a little on the game.
What are our current objectives?
Well initially, it was to be 100% playtestable by the end of December. That being said, we have played the game a few times since the beginning of September. Each time we have discovered new areas that we want to target for improvement. So we hit our goal, but we aren’t happy with the current state of the game.
For those that are not aware of how the game plays...
That being said, your main focus is to gain resources to upgrade your ranks and out maneuver your opponents in the ever changing battlegrounds, and directly engage with combat. Every tribe wants to come out on top and it's your goal as the player to lead them to victory.
To allow us to play the game and get the feel for the movement of our forces, we had a very early concept that was our combat mechanic. This was super simple that allowed us to engage and to see where we should go from there. In one of the playtests we figured out how the game moved, which is extremely important, but also how the combat felt when you were in it vs. how it felt after you had been a part of it.
That combat system left us feeling unsatisfied and that's a huge problem because combat was one of the major pillars of the game. Our latest creative efforts have all been focused on improving this system. We all had ideas buzzing in our heads of what we could implement, so we decided to go separate ways to develop each of the ideas, then come back together and try each of the combat systems out to see which felt the most appropriate for the game.
And this I feel was the best move to make as the team. This allows each of us to take our past board game experiences as well as what we liked and combine them into a very creative exercise. Each of us then presented the ideas and even got to the point of playing it out and finding the items we loved and felt would need improving.
I loved the directions that were taken; each being widely different from the rest with some very unique touches. We had an idea based around rolling special dice, an idea to utilize cards to add in some deck-building mechanics, and one that was heavily inspired by UNO.
The dice mechanic was inspired by Warhammer 40k: Kill Team & King of Tokyo had a baby and her name was KING OF WARHAMMER: KILL TEAM TOKYO 40K. In this system, players roll a number of dice and compare them with your opponents. The symbols would be similar to a hit/miss/crit and def/miss/crit basis. Then you would upgrade skills on a skill tree to then buff stats of your army.
We loved how this played initially with the feel of getting some good dice and rolling them. It brought back some sort of nostalgia to the tabletop wargames we enjoyed together long ago. What we noticed was even though this system was still very fast at working through, there was the lurking feeling of being too luck-based. Which was what we had set-out to avoid in our redesign.
There was a lot we felt this solved but we still wanted to tweak that luck problem and add more strategy in.
Next, we had the love child that was a mixture of Dune (not to be confused with Dune Imperium) and Magic the Gathering, Let's name it THE GATHERING OF THE MAGICAL DUNES. It was one in which we had a hand of cards that would be how we were to engage in combat. There were several layers of points added to determine how you would fare in combat. Things like the amount of people, how many resources you were willing to give up, as well as the combat power of the card.
What we thought was very interesting was the depth in which you could fine tune your attack to make it feel like you were making a unique move. One that fits the situation based on the luck of the draw but also your own wits. Unfortunately we felt when playtesting that it was too long of an engagement that would be happening several times every few minutes. This would end up making the length of the game longer than necessary. We knew at least we had to alter/trim some of the layers to make this a viable option.
The last one is actually a funny happenstance. You may have recalled a 3rd option that was UNO-esque. This one was heavily inspired by UNO’s interaction among players with their card symbols and colors. It is sort of a game of hot-potato where people are going until some unfortunate soul must draw more cards, making them worse off than their opponents. Well our idea was essentially rock-paper-scissors meets UNO. We themed it around swords, shields and magic. Basically each is defeated by the latter, with the fun addition of 3 standard colors that could also beat their opponents.
We all felt that this game was very much a fun idea. It played well, there was little to troubleshoot, and there was a fairly easy learning curve. The art was memorable and stood out from other games, and really felt like you were in a quick combat environment. However, while playtesting, it felt as if we were more interested in that combat more-so then the conflict on the board.
Each time we would turn to the UNO-inspired idea, it felt we had to change way too much of the game to really focus on that mechanic, so we decided to remove it from the race entirely and potentially develop it as a separate game. So stay tuned for updates on that down the road once we have this game more developed.
Now you’re probably ready to ask me if we decided to go with our beautiful child KING OF WARHAMMER: KILL TEAM TOKYO 40K, or the elegant THE GATHERING OF THE MAGICAL DUNES. And let me inform you, we love our brainchildren very much and want the best for each of them. So we decided to smash them together and pull off the features we felt… didn’t fit.
That’s right, we took the parts we loved from the 2 systems and mashed them together using science! We renamed it to “KILL THE MAGICAL KING BEFORE HE GATHERS 40K DUNES IN TOKYO AND SUMMONS HIS WARHAMMER”. We like to call it KTMKBHG40KDITASHW because it just rolls off the tongue and is quite easy to remember.
We decided that there were good items for both of these mechanics that practically filled in the gaps of the other. So this upcoming week we are going to playtest our newest version and evaluate how this mish-mashed system works before deciding on next steps. More on how the playtest goes and our final iteration of combat will follow.
We are currently working to get everything uploaded into Tabletop Simulator (TTS) in the hopes of playtesting from the comforts of our own homes.
That being said, again with the time that has transpired between this blog post and our last, means good things are coming. We are getting things ready to begin accumulating lists of people that may be interested in playtesting. If you or perhaps a friend are interested when we get to that phase, please follow my twitter handle @Bored_G_Ames for regular updates!
Anyways, thanks for reading gamers, please leave your thoughts in the comments below, drop us a like, and please share this with the communities you may think would be interested in our project. It would mean a lot and help us immensely. Thanks for reading!
Until my next post.
Gavin Ames
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