Oh good grief, it has been a long time since I wrote a blog post. I haven't stopped working on games, so let's catch up on one of the projects I have on the go...
So, The Artifact, the game I have been working on, mostly online, with Alex Cannon for quite a while now that has been through a good few iterations based around a core mechanism that is pretty much unchanged since the early days. Last year we had a really interesting playtest with someone who happened to be part of a game publisher. They gave some really interesting suggestions (being very careful to stress that this was not advice on how to get them to publish it) which we thought about, and then decided to run with to see where it would take us.
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| The first physical playtest of the new version, with hand-made cards because muppet here had forgotten to bring the cards he printed and cut out the day before. |
One of the biggest points was that all the way through our work, we had clung to a concept of the game being effectively a race to complete a certain number of objectives (though more recent iterations involved a sort of tic-tac-toe element on top); the advice was to try turning it into a more standard victory point game. This basically involved killing one of our darlings, but we thought, why not? If we couldn't make this work properly, we could always roll back to what we had before.
The other key suggestion was to move away from our initial setting, which was about exploiting alien technologies, and go with something more "boring". This may seem counter-intuitive, but I think the overall thrust was that the core mechanism (the way resources are accessed and exploited) seems reasonably novel, so fitting that into a more vanilla fiction and mechanical structure would be more comfortable to a lot of players - and, to be honest, it would probably work out being easier for us to actually finish.
And so, we now have a pretty generic fantasy setting, where players are building a series of artifacts, making use of magical resources that their assistants are collecting from around the land, with the artifacts being built providing various combinations of special abilities and victory points. The title, The Artifact, just doesn't seem right any more, so I've taken to calling the game The Artificers - though maybe better would be something like, Artificers of Ambivalencia...?
After some online development, Alex and I finally got a physical prototype built and met up to test it - we live a few hours apart, so this sadly doesn't happen often. A first play-through went OK, so we then concentrated on playing through the first few turns of the game a few times in a row, trying different setup options and seeing what would happen if all the random elements conspired to make things as frustrating as possible. It took a couple of rule tweaks until we were happy that things looked pretty solid, but obviously this was just with the two of us playing.
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| Another playtest: this time, four players, none of whom were me! |
I've had a couple of playtests so far since then and it's looking promising so far. The previous major version of the game was usually taking something like half an hour to play in physical form, but we're now looking more like an hour, which actually seems appropriate for the weight and style of the game.
So it seems we have a solid direction of travel here, and we have actually started talking about game balance, which is something that neither of us usually spend too much time on, and we think this might mean that the game is finally getting to a pretty mature state. Obviously a load more testing is required...
