Week of August the 18th

This week was the week we attended GenCon. We only had a day to drive to Indianapolis, test Reject Squad for 8 hours, and then drive back. It would be grueling, but we had counted on that. What we hadn't counted on was the hour we would lose crossing time zones! Still, skipping breakfast would have allowed us to arrive on time - had we not come across two pretty nasty accidents on the road. We lost our first two-hour block of testing, but we were able to catch some lunch and see the convention a bit before pressing on.

We returned to the First Exposure Playtest Hall and dove into six full hours of testing and feedback. All of our testers had a great time, and hero creation continues to shine as the best part of the game. That means our next big hurdle is to improve the crisis solving part of the game. Right now, it's too often the case that either a hero's restriction, the opposition, or the location is more or less irrelevant to the crisis at hand. It's also uncomfortable to be encouraged to talk about the crisis with one another while at the same time needing to be careful about not tipping your friends off about what you're about to pick.

Not only do we have a lot of ideas on how best to address these issues, but our playtesters do too. Suggestions from playtesters on what to change are maybe my favorite form of feedback. Rarely do designers follow these suggestions verbatim, but they give us ideas for things we can try out, as well as some insight into some really important questions, like: "What do our players want?" and "What aren't we giving them enough of?"

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