Developers Diary: Playtest # 3

Hello and Happy March Gamers!

Welcome to the beginning of the end of winter. With it comes rain, dressing for every season but the one that is currently outside, and good ol’ game design. And welcome back to another wonderful edition of updates from our team to you. 

How have you been? What’s new? What brings you by? We hope you are hungry for more of our content and as excited for this next chapter in our story. 

Yes, yes, the title explains it all... So to further elaborate… We have completed our 3rd internal playtest of Project: Hexed over Tabletop Simulator! To summarize, we will dive into each of our thoughts on the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (“boo I hate this one”) from the whole team. Then, summarizing what exactly we gathered from it to work on before our next playtest.

Fair warning this may be a tad bit dense so be sure to grab a snack, a drink, and your favorite jammies while we tuck you in and tell you this fabulous bedtime story… but first.

QUICK SHOUT OUT!!

Last time we spoke, I mentioned how we were working on getting all of our board game materials uploaded to Tabletop Simulator (TTS). This process was simple and difficult… AT THE SAME TIME! Our team had to learn a lot of new programs such as blender, inkscape, and even some google slides. We also had to hone in on certain skills to be able to get everything working properly. We want to give a shout out to TTS Discord, without them we would have been stumped by some of the more complicated parts of TTS, so thank you to those of you who helped us out! 

If you plan on using TTS and need assistance, go and check out their server through this clickable link. Quite the bunch of brainy individuals that really know how to work around the varying problems you may encounter. After we got everything working, we ran our 3rd playtest and it went almost flawlessly. We gathered a ton of new data and insights and have our next design steps for Project Hexed.

Our Thoughts <3

Before I start to dive into all of the juicy details and that sweet, SWEET data, let me outline how I am going to share this info with you. 

After the playtest, each of our team members wrote down their thoughts on how it went overall. We broke this down into the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (because we thought this would be a succinct and clever way to analyze the state of the game). In this context we used the Good to talk about what we liked, the Bad to talk about what we disliked, and the Ugly to talk about what we wanted to see changed for our next iteration. I included some snippets from each of our design reviews below.

Brett -

The Good:

• The most fun I had in the game was when the Elder was used to score a “touchdown”. I liked this because it felt different than other games I have played and felt uniquely us.

• Another thing I liked was the new combat system with the new combat cards.

The Bad:

• The dice odds felt instinctively off. There were a lot of ties and the combat cards didn’t do enough to help this issue.

• Movement felt clunky and slow and if our focus is on the Elder scoring, then I think we need to have more movement abilities or re-evaluate our current movement rules.

The Ugly:

• The game felt too long. We played for over 90 minutes and only completed 4 rounds. We need to look at the length of our game and work to have the game finished in this amount of time.

• It's too hard to focus on the whole game because there is so much happening. We need to trim some of the fat to make this game more palatable. 

Brian -

The Good:

• I think the core mechanics are easy to grasp and remind me of other games. This is a good thing because it gives potential players a starting point.

The Bad:

• So much reading… There are a lot of different abilities on cards and it makes it difficult to remember when to use abilities and which cards they are on. Nevermind trying to respond to my opponent. 

• Not enough action cards. I loved using combat cards, but it felt like we didn’t get to use them enough because they were hard to obtain and difficult to ascertain when the correct time to play them was.

The Ugly:

• Skills were a particular sore spot for me. I wanted to like them more, but they felt ineffective. We need to focus on making these more punchy. 

• I felt like I lost the objective of the game in all of the minutia, we need to make sure that we clarify this going forward. 

Gavin -

The Good:

• Game flow felt fun and natural, after the first turn of course.

• The game slowly teaches fundamental mechanics as the game progresses.

• The board felt fun to play on and provided several different opportunities for tactical advantages that I hadn’t foreseen in designing it. 

The Bad:

• Movement felt too slow and clunky. Maybe we need to figure out a different way to move units because currently it doesn’t feel fun.

• Too many meeples. There were too many on the board and it felt congested. This made it harder to focus on my next tactical move and utilizing my tribe to it’s fullest potential.

The Ugly:

• Skills felt not great. We had so many options, but I only used one of my skills once. We need to work on these more.

• There are not enough ways to easily earn Victory Points. We need to address this and make the objective more achievable through several different tactics.

• The FOG wasn’t important. We need to make this have a more important role in our game to ensure it achieves our design goals.  

Where to Focus Currently

That is a lot of differing design opinions. However, there are several themes that begin to emerge when we start to look at them in conjunction with each other. Let me break down the three biggest takeaways for you here.

 

1. Movement - This was something unexpected that we all mentioned in one way or another. During our previous playtest, we hadn’t noticed this issue, but with more units on the board and more moving pieces from our opponents it became apparent that our current ruleset for unit movement needs a bit of rework. With this rework we want to focus on making this phase of the game quicker and we want to increase the distance units are allowed to travel per turn.

2. Information Overload - This was the most common theme in all of our feedback. We all pointed out that there were just too many options. For this playtest we were experimenting with split cards to give players more options, but in the end we found that having too many options led to analysis paralysis. We are looking into ways to keep the options open while reducing the amount of information that a player needs to focus on at the same time.

3. Unclear Objectives -  Maybe the most surprising piece of feedback that we all had was that the objective felt unclear. This took us by surprise and we were a bit shocked that we hadn’t felt like this before. Part of this may be due to the information overload that we were all feeling, but I think the majority of it comes from our lack of focus on this portion of our game. Up until now our development was very focused on the mechanics of the game and the objective kind of took a backseat. We have discussed this and have made some exciting new plans for how we can approach this subject.

While this hits on all of the things that we found that were problematic, I want to take a moment to point out at least one positive finding from our playtest. We discussed last time how we wanted to really focus on combat in this playtest and we thought we had come up with a much better system this time around. That isn’t to say we didn’t identify some things we want to improve upon, but for the most part it felt much better! This newest iteration was quick, fun, and engaging. All things that we had set out to work on last time. 

That’s all the feedback and analysis I have for you today. Our goal for these next few weeks is to brainstorm some creative solutions to these issues. We already have some ideas, but we want to work together to come up with something that we are all happy with. After that we will move towards implementing them into TTS and moving forward with our next playtest. Everytime we do one of these internal playtests we get closer to playtesting with people outside of the team. Hopefully, there will be more on this in the near future. 

Thanks for reading!

Catch you next time!

- Gavin Ames

PS: Here’s some images of each playerboard with their score (in yellow frame) resources (little cubes also total listed off to the side), equipped cards, and cards in hand. 

Blue was the winner this time around.