The week of November 29th

What?! What happened to November?!

Apologies for the lack of updates last month. I'll try to use this post to quickly sum up the basics of what's been happening for the last month:

  • Testing with only the talent scout being able to ask questions felt fine. Often, compelling enough heroes will generate greater discussion, but keeping the questioning in the hands of one person greatly helps the pacing of he hero creation phase
  • Testing with players being unable to speak during the crisis round was also successful. This is a social game, and we don't exactly like that you can't talk during this round. However, this is almost the only way to keep people from giving away who they think should tackle each task. We also like that it leaves all the story details concerning the task and how it's completed to whoever actually gets elected to solve it. And, people can still chat between tasks, at least.
Specifically last week, we did the following:
  • We made the decision to make our "Beginning Tasks" (the ones that kick off each crisis) take up the final pages of the instructions booklet. Beginning Tasks have a lot of information to cover, and it would be murder to try to fit it all onto cards.
  • Billy made a bunch of new "Intermediate Tasks (the tasks that fill out a crisis and bring it to its conclusion).
  • We needed more tasks that involved combat. At the same time, we had a bunch of left-over cards from when your opposition could randomly be "Intelligent Dolphins" or "Super-gorillas." To solve both problems, we made those left-over cards "henchmen" cards. There are a bunch of tasks which instruct you to fight the opposition's henchmen, drawing a card from the henchman deck to find out what those henchmen are.
  • We want to make a prototype box so that we can start the process of sending the game out to publishers. That means we need placeholder art on everything, including card backs. So we decided on a really rough graphic design for all of our cards and card backs.

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