Physical Artifice

So, The Artifact...

Of the projects I'm currently working on, this one is probably the one that has most consistently been developing over the last year and a half. It is a co-design with the inimitable Alex Cannon, who I got to know through a couple of Twitch streams in the first year of the pandemic, and who has an uncanny mind for puzzles. Since January 2021 we have been having an online meeting most weeks, usually working on or playing a virtual prototype we had built in Screentop.gg, and sometimes just chatting, partly about life and partly about the project.

Then a few days ago we managed to get together with a physical prototype and play the game on a real table. We sat in a coffee shop for a while, drank beverages, had a couple of plays through, and talked through some of the implications of what happened in the games we played.

A 2-player game (the blue meeples are replicants) coming close to an end.
Just off-camera to the left are project boards, which are the paths to victory.

Boy, I have missed this. While we have got this game a long way with essentially entirely online collaboration and testing, you can't beat moving components on a table, at least not when that is the intended playing format for the game.

The big headline is that the game felt pretty natural to the two of us to play, and took maybe half an hour or so per game. How it would feel to other people is unknown right now, but hopefully we'll find out sooner or later. The half hour of play felt pretty good -- a bit of brain crunch that might have been too much if sustained for a load longer -- but it occurs to me that maybe there are too many bits for a relatively short game. The setup and teardown is not exactly challenging, but... I dunno, it's just something in my head as I write this.

Just to catch you up, the central conceit of the game is that there is an alien artifact that has crashed to earth and we are corporations (or something) trying to research and exploit the technology contained within by assigning researchers to work on the expanding knowledge space that is represented by (mostly) domino-like tiles that get added on each player's turn. The game ends when one of the several project tracks off to the side is completed (each works a little differently with how they can be progressed and what benefits they provide, and there is a little interaction between them), and the completed project dictates the victory conditions for the game.

We've been tinkering with a new mechanism based on what we are labelling as alien slime (in this prototype it's to do with the yellow cubes and the black squares), which we think opens up some interesting possibilities, particularly adding more spacial elements to the game (which otherwise are less than you might think for a tile-placing game). The couple of variations on the mechanism we tried were underwhelming, but found some directions we could push in, and a later, virtual session experimented some more. Still a long way to go here, including considering whether we really should be using this. 

The Artifact has twisted and changed quite a lot in its 18 month history, with mechanisms added and removed along the way, but it has always revolved around the tile placement and use of workers/researchers to tap into knowledge resources on the tiles. We seem to have settled on a form of path to victory now, but in the last few months we have just been testing with the two of us while we made some major changes, so we don't have the important data from other people looking at what we have been tinkering with week in, week out, and that is potentially concerning. But I think we're getting to that point of going back to our friendly (but occasionally brutally honest) volunteers/friends and seeing what they think.

Re-Exposed

Oh my, it has been too long! Part of the reason I started this blog was to keep myself accountable, if only to myself, and that all fell apart last autumn. Not because anything particularly bad happened - I just got out of the habit. And then, every month that passed without me posting again seemed to make it harder to get back onto the proverbial bicycle. 

But now, I'll write something and see if I can get back into the swing of it again.

As you may have heard, last weekend was UK Games Expo at the NEC, just outside of Birmingham and, as per last year, I went up to spend most of my time working in the Playtest Zone, an area that provides table space for designers to test their unpublished prototypes with players drawn from the expo attendees. I love helping out with this and seeing such a wide variety of prototypes on the tables; these days we even see good numbers of people who come specifically to play prototypes and some of these folk spend most of their day just hopping from table to table, playing and giving feedback.

The Playtest Zone in full flow on Friday

Apart from that I didn't have a lot of time or energy for other things, but I did manage to have a couple of pitch meetings with publishers, for two different games ("Grab Bag Zoo" and "Snails and Grails", if you are interested), each of which I designed with different co-designers, and I eventually was able to play a fun game designed by a couple of young lads, as well as joining in a game design brainstorm (a gamestorm?) with a group of other designers, which resulted in some fun other stuff. 

I was planning on doing some playtesting of one of my games, but that didn't properly work out due to a clash of commitments that cropped up, but I was touched and delighted when someone who had played Grab Bag Zoo at a previous event came and asked if he could borrow the prototype and try it with his friends. I wasn't able to follow their play properly, but it was interesting to just let them try playing with the series of challenge cards in the current version, that step you through the game rules and features over four games instead of having to explain everything up front.

Other major highlights included meeting a few more online friends who I hadn't met in person, which was awesome and delightful, hanging out with some new friends, and of course seeing those old friends I have missed through the pandemic.

And this is it, once again: for me UK Games Expo is not really about the games, it's about the people, who happen to be drawn together by a love of games. I rarely get to play very much when I go (and this year was no exception), but it is always a great reminder of what matters to me, why I like playing games and why I like designing games.

Anyway, this is just a quick post to try to get myself going again. Over the next few weeks I'm planning to start posting again about the various projects I have on the go at the moment and where they are heading.