The week of September 27th

This week we reviewed the beginning tasks we had brainstormed alone and continued to define what we want them to do in the game. We decided that, in addition to the six things I mentioned in the last post, beginning tasks have an overarching goal, a greater objective that lets players know how to frame success and failure. This can usually just be rolled up into the task's description, but we separate it out on our card file just to make sure we give each task it's goal. Our overarching goal for the Prison Break from last week, for example, is to stop the opposition from escaping with the prisoner. Here's another example of a beginning task, a new one from this week's meeting:

  • Name: Gala
  • Quote: "And these are my +1's"
  • Description: Reject Squad is attending a black-tie event! Unfortunately, so is the opposition!
  • Task at Hand: You weren't actually invited to the event! Find a way in without disrupting the attendees.
  • Important Question: What is the nature of this event?
  • Overarching Goal: Figure out what the opposition's plan is, and thwart them.
We also discussed, from a more pulled-back perspective, what these tasks will look like in play. From a bird's-eye view, our crisis system is still following a similar scheme as it was before: reveal the opposition, the location, and then the tasks required to solve the problem. Allow players to gauge which of their rejects would be best for each task, but limit their planning. If all tasks are complete, the crisis is solved. But for this version specifically, we mulled over whether we should even have our beginning tasks be "tasks" at all. Maybe they should just be informational. Maybe they should be broken up into two cards and one is revealed at the start of the task, the other at the end. There are a lot of ways we can take this, but the thing we know we need to do is start testing again with this system, and see what it feels like when it's in the hands of our players.

Oh, and finally, I came back with the notes I took after speaking with that friend of mine. Without going too deep into it, we had a lot of knowledge dropped on us all at once (thanks again, friend of mine! You know who you are!). For now, we want to focus on keeping eyes out for upcomming UnPub and Protospiel events, and doing lots of research on board game development blogs. We'll work our way out from there. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The week of January 24th

This week we realized we put the horse before the cart, so to speak. We weren't able to get a group to test with last week (hence the lack of an update) but since then we've tested with a four player game (two of which were us) and a 6 player game (none of which were us). The crisis system we had settled on was put through the ringer and we realized that it's... not really working. For some groups - groups that are far more comfortable with improv, groups that are happy telling stories together at the drop of a hat - the crisis system works fine. Rarely, they may be saddled with a truly terrible reject squad and they'll have their work cut out for them, but in general they'll be able to tell a fun story and move on to another crisis.  But for other groups, this step of the game just falls... flat. The game suddenly stops, flips around, and asks you to do something completely different. As one of our testers today put it, the hero creation part of the game is...
Read more

Is this thing still on?

Hi! Really  long time since we last updated - but that's a good thing. We've been busy working on: Getting Reject Squad  published and A new project called Lanternkeepers  that we'll have to start a new blog for at some point We're looking into a bunch of options for publishing Reject Squad  still. One of those is self-publishing. If you're interested in getting notifications when Reject Squad  does go up for sale (Probably in like another year) please send an email to RejectSquadGame@Gmail.com Thanks!
Read more

The week of January 10th

So we're now in the new year. To celebrate, we had our first real test of the new crisis system. As a refresher, under this system, all players draw 3 "twist" cards, then the crisis is revealed, then the players all simply play one of their three twist cards onto that crisis. This is how you get things like a hundred invisible kittens stuck in a tree with no gravity. This method of crisis generation is good. We knew that. The major problem is: what does it lead to? We want the game to be about telling funny stories about dumb superheroes, and we want the crisis to be the celebratory capstone to all the fantastic ground work that gets done during hero creation. The best we have so far is that, once the crisis is created, players simply tell a story about how their heroes accomplish their goal. We weren't sure how that was going to play, or if it was going to work at all. The good news is that it does work. Our earlier hypothesis, that making the crisis crazy enough...
Read more