The Week of April 22nd
It's been a long time since we last updated! Well, we've been busy. The game has changed some more, although in smaller ways. And we've been testing as much as possible considering how irregular our schedules have been lately. I'm going to describe the current state of the game, what we've been up to most recently, and what we have our eyes on for the future.
Currently, the game has the talent scout drawing a crisis card and a twist card to determine the nature of the crisis. They create the situation and present it to the other players, who then have a chance to ask the talent scout questions about the crisis. Hero creation happens as normal, and the talent scout chooses a hero from amongst the options presented. From there, the next person in clockwise order becomes the talent scout, and the loop begins anew.
Most recently, we've been testing a mode of play where the next person in clockwise order continues the existing crisis, defining a new goal within that context for players to build heroes towards. We wanted to test this for a couple of reasons. First, my hypothesis was that if we extend the life of each crisis, it will make it easier for players to know when they'd like to stop playing the game, reducing the risk of players playing until they were tired. Second, and this became more noticeable as we tested this mode, treating crises this way makes the crisis feel like an evolving sequence of events rather than a story with just one beat. We played several games with this new mode, and found that there was a lot of variance in how it was received. Some groups loved it, and would rather not play the usual mode. Some groups felt the opposite.
This mode was really put through the wringer last week at Protospiel Milwaukee, where we got tons of feedback and tons of really great development advice from testers and designers attending the event. We drove up late Friday, and essentially spent all of Saturday playing games and getting people to come play Reject Squad. We found people who were clear fans of the original mode, and others who preferred the mode with extended crises. Perhaps most of all, it was great to see the game really firing on all cylinders. While we still have rough edges to even out, the experience has gotten so much more polished and streamlined since last year.
Coming up, we've got to get our ducks in a row for GenCon. We've been gathering some great notes and resources from developers we've met over the last month. Now we just need to produce a better game prototype (with temp art), revise our rules document, create our sell sheet, and reach out to potential publishers in hopes of setting up a meeting while we're at GenCon. We're already signed up for the full eight hours at the First Exposure Playtest Hall, so we'll have lots of testing to do also.
Finally, I know this is the Reject Squad "Weekly" bulletin, but our schedules have prevented us from updating regularly for a while now. Hopefully in a few weeks things will settle down, but for now we'll continue to update whenever we get a chance to.
Currently, the game has the talent scout drawing a crisis card and a twist card to determine the nature of the crisis. They create the situation and present it to the other players, who then have a chance to ask the talent scout questions about the crisis. Hero creation happens as normal, and the talent scout chooses a hero from amongst the options presented. From there, the next person in clockwise order becomes the talent scout, and the loop begins anew.
Most recently, we've been testing a mode of play where the next person in clockwise order continues the existing crisis, defining a new goal within that context for players to build heroes towards. We wanted to test this for a couple of reasons. First, my hypothesis was that if we extend the life of each crisis, it will make it easier for players to know when they'd like to stop playing the game, reducing the risk of players playing until they were tired. Second, and this became more noticeable as we tested this mode, treating crises this way makes the crisis feel like an evolving sequence of events rather than a story with just one beat. We played several games with this new mode, and found that there was a lot of variance in how it was received. Some groups loved it, and would rather not play the usual mode. Some groups felt the opposite.
This mode was really put through the wringer last week at Protospiel Milwaukee, where we got tons of feedback and tons of really great development advice from testers and designers attending the event. We drove up late Friday, and essentially spent all of Saturday playing games and getting people to come play Reject Squad. We found people who were clear fans of the original mode, and others who preferred the mode with extended crises. Perhaps most of all, it was great to see the game really firing on all cylinders. While we still have rough edges to even out, the experience has gotten so much more polished and streamlined since last year.
Coming up, we've got to get our ducks in a row for GenCon. We've been gathering some great notes and resources from developers we've met over the last month. Now we just need to produce a better game prototype (with temp art), revise our rules document, create our sell sheet, and reach out to potential publishers in hopes of setting up a meeting while we're at GenCon. We're already signed up for the full eight hours at the First Exposure Playtest Hall, so we'll have lots of testing to do also.
Finally, I know this is the Reject Squad "Weekly" bulletin, but our schedules have prevented us from updating regularly for a while now. Hopefully in a few weeks things will settle down, but for now we'll continue to update whenever we get a chance to.
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