Moving Forwards

At last I can share something that has been in the works for a while now, and it's something I am really excited about.  As of Friday, I am a signed game designer, and I have been doing my happy dance since then.

Things are moving quickly, and there is still quite a lot in the air, but the headline news is that Cubicle 7 Entertainment will be publishing my "Giftmas" and "Shooting Party" games as part of their new "Dungeon Abbey" line, which looks like it should turn out to be a lot of fun.  Cubicle 7 are best known as a roleplaying games company and are great at world development, and have some great writers and artists working for them, so I'm really looking forward to working with them on these projects.

This was recently released as a teaser image. See what I mean about great artwork?

There is a lot of work still to do, both by me and by the folk at Cubicle 7, but if all goes well both games should be available before the end of the year.

So this has all been dominating my game design and development time recently, and will continue to do so for a while yet, but it's a fun rollercoaster to be on, and I'm finding the opportunity to do something else from time to time. I'm even hoping to do a 24 hour challenge in the next few days, which is possibly a bit ambitious under the circumstances.

I will be sure to share further information as it becomes available.

Double Trouble in London

It's that time of month when I take a trip to London to playtest with a group of other game designers, something that I continue to be enthusiastic about and thoroughly enjoy every time.  The form of these events is basically that there are usually three or four "slots", generally running for about 90 minutes each, and in each of these three or four tables are running with a game and an appropriate number of players.  Sometimes the times vary, and if there are short games to be played, sometimes they share a slot, but it generally works out that everyone who wants to will get the opportunity to test one of their prototypes.  I was fortunate this time in that I was able to run two of my games.

Looks a bit of a mess, but I'm working on it...!

First up we had a slightly shorter than usual slot, in which we played the latest iteration of my Shooting Party game.  I'm still a way off being done with this one, but managed to harvest a lot of valuable feedback from the three awesome testers I had at the table.  Part of the problems that we had would have been fixed by a rule that I had planned to use but had forgotten to add to the player aid cards or explain to the players, a rule that allows players to discard cards to gain extra actions -- I have only myself to blame here and have already updated the player aids for this.  Other than that the main result is that I need to simplify way more than I have already and stop trying to be clever with the way monsters behave.

The next slot had me testing someone else's design, which was a fast moving card game which included a lot of terrible cat puns.  This is a game that I really enjoyed as it is, and look forward to seeing how it develops.

Finally we got to play Giftmas, which I am currently overhauling with a view to a new version.  The main change I have made is to streamline scoring, and I wanted to see how that panned out after my initial testing had suggested that it looked OK.  The game went down well, but we found a few details that didn't quite fit right.  A little discussion after a few hands of play yielded some tweaks to try out, which we did for the rest of the game and this certainly helped a fair bit.  Some more discussion after that and my players asked to play again (always a good sign), and the game totally fell together and had bluffing, trash talk, furrowed brows, and plenty of laughter.  Of course, one great game doesn't mean we're done, and more testing is needed, but it does suggest we're getting there.  Thanks to this set of intrepid testers too.

So, Shooting Party will be getting another overhaul, this time mostly involving removing stuff, and Giftmas just needs more testing for now in the hope of shaking out any other issues with it.  Get to it, Rob...

Moving Targets

The main focus of my attention recently has been Shooting Party, which is steadily improving, I think, but still needs a few tweaks.

A recent playtest with "hell mode" monsters appearing at double the rate.

One of the issues that have come up recently is something that I had not been thinking about really.  A major part of the game is a stream of monsters that come running along a path so that players can shoot them as they approach.  This is all well and good, and works fine, but a number of the monsters have special adjustments to how they move.  So most monsters just trundle along one space at a time, but others move at double speed, some move faster if there is nothing in front of them, some stay still if there is something in front of them, others make an attack or restrict player actions as they approach.

This sort of stuff adds variety to the game, but the problem is that it is really easy to forget to take into account the special rules for these monsters, and periodically we get a spell of, "Oh, crap, we forgot to double-move the hellhound and the dragon should have made a ranged attack last round."  Not ideal.

I think that, assuming I want to keep this part of the game substantially the same as it is, I have two major lines of attack to deal with this issue...

The first is to reduce the reliance on this type of monster effect.  Monsters can be differentiated in a number of ways, the most basic of which are their toughness and prestige value for bagging them.  Apart from the effects which happen each turn (like these movement rules that are getting missed), there can be effects that occur when they first appear, when they engage with a player close up, when they make an attack, when they are attacked, or when they are bagged/killed.  There are probably others too.

Observing how the game gets played, I see that monster cards get attention paid to them when they first appear, when they are in front of a player, and when they are killed, but when they are in the line, the only thing players really look at is their toughness and prestige reward.  So, if I usually use effects that activate when players are most likely to be paying attention to them, that should help.

But I would like to have the option of having some monsters that have different movement characteristics, or ranged attacks, etc., so how do I deal with that?  If only a few monsters have such effects, then it is possible that they are more likely to be missed.  If every monster behaved differently, that might encourage players to pay more attention, but in practice I think this would result in frustration and/or a slower game.

So, my second feeling is to use graphic design to make things clearer.  Now, I'm no graphic designer, so my work here is only any good to suggest how a professional could approach things, but I figure that icons and other graphic elements can be used to make the behaviour clearer.  So, for instance, arrows could be used to show the speed of movement: the number of arrows indicate movement speed, for instance.  Other symbols could potentially be used, but I need to be careful to not go too far with this and create a too-complicated graphical language; the aim is to simplify and clarify, after all.

A hastily hacked hellhound card, but you get the idea...

Back to work...

Hunt the Jugged Hare

This weekend marked my sorta-anniversary with Playtest UK, as it was the January London weekend meetup last year that was the first I went to, taking an old version of Boogie Knights along.  And I was back for my first meetup of the year, taking along my new Shooting Party game.

As usual I forgot to take a photo, so here's a totally authentic reconstruction.
(Luckily you probably don't know enough about the game to notice I forgot to add counters for this shot.)

As usual there was a good crowd in with a wide variety of games.  I kicked off with playing a game about stealing treasure from a volcano-dwelling dragon, followed by a game about TV game shows, and then one about making and decorating Chinese pots, before getting to try my own design and then finishing off with a game about getting drunk by drinking unknown liquids.

I was trying out a bunch of changes for Shooting Party, and was pleased to find that the bits that I had changed definitely improved things.  There were still plenty of things wrong with the game, though.  Many of the problems are basically balance issues (card A is too powerful, card B is pointless) but I'm not worried about those at the moment.  Yes, it's good to identify this sort of thing and start improving, but right now I want to get the general flow of the game good, after which I can do things like balancing up the cards (though some imbalance is appropriate in a light, fast game, as I want this to turn out) and adding some more interesting features.

The flow, however, was definitely being hindered, mostly by two elements:

• Reloading of weapons was clumsy, unintuitive, and un-fun.  Sure, it was OK from a thematic point of view, but it keeps players from having fun, so it'll have to change.  I have in mind a vastly simplified system to drop in and try out instead, and I feel confident it will make things work better.
• If a player starts with a poor hand of cards and is unlucky with draws, they can end up being left behind and have a boring game.  I have a plan to deal with this involving a stack of starter cards, and I want to playtest whether to just deal these out or have a quick round of drafting to ensure everyone has some control over their start hand.

In general, I think a playtest has been successful if it allows you to identify problems with a prototype.  It's even better if you can identify possible solutions to at least some of those problems.  As a result, this was another very successful playtest.

Shooting in London

This weekend was 2016's final Sunday playtest session in London and, having missed the last couple, I was eager to get along.  My plan was to take Invaded (the game about being attacked by a non-player colonial power) along, but over the last couple of weeks a new opportunity has come up, so I rethought things and I ended up taking along a game that is rather early in its development life but that I managed to get far enough with that I felt it was at least playable.

My basic prototypes definitely have a "look" to them.

Right now I don't feel I can go into great detail about this project for a couple of reasons, but in essence, what we have is a game of big game hunters going out to "bag" fantasy-style monsters.  I had four volunteers to try the game out, so I sat out to observe and act as the rulebook.

And then I experienced one of the most brutal take-downs of my game that I have had so far.  It quickly became apparent that there were too many rules, and many of them didn't make sense to anyone but me.

BUT...

But the general consensus was that there was a lot of fun to be had with this game if I can clear the deadweight away and tidy up the bits that are left.  We identified the parts of the game that were the most fun, and which just got in the way, so now I have a lot of information to be going on as I develop the next version.

I think that this is one of the most important skills to learn as a neophyte game designer: the ability to take criticism, to avoid being defensive, and to see what the feedback is really telling you.  Here, I actually had four people telling me what they wanted to do in this game (and what they felt was fun) and letting me know what parts of the game are making that harder.  What they wanted to do mostly lines up with the main concept of the game, and most of the bits that were getting in the way were elements that I thought would add more interest to the game.  Based on this, I think most of those extra elements will be dropped for the next iteration, but some of them are ideas that I may be able to reintroduce in a modified form later, if the game needs them (and it may not).  In the meantime, though, I need to find the core of the game and make it as much fun as I can.

Before moving on, I'd like to just extend special thanks to David Turczi. All of the testers were hugely helpful, but David put a lot of effort into questioning just about every part of the game, accepting some of my responses, arguing against others, and highlighting all sorts of problems, while also giving some solid general advice and saying a few very nice things about some parts of the game.  His, and everyone else's, input left me feeling a bit bruised, but really positive about the future of the game.

Of course, this being a playtest meetup, it's not all about my projects, and I was able to play a good selection of other games varying in completeness from just about ready to publish down to very early and creaky but showing promise.  So I played a micro-wargame about the War of the Roses, a game about printing money to rescue struggling businesses, a car racing game with a really interesting "exhaust" mechanism, a game about time travel and saving the world, and a really cute game about rescuing baby dragons.    It's really inspiring to see the huge range of what is being worked on -- and these only amounted to barely a third of the games being tested on the day.

So, I now need to get back to working on that Shooting Party game.  Time is a-ticking.