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 will make it enjoyable to talk through how your heroes just solve everything, ended up being borne out - at least by this test. Billy and I agree though - something is missing. Even though this is working, and it feels great to reveal new crises, each crisis on its own feels like it's missing a period at the end. We need something to punctuate each crisis. Once we have that, we might be done with the whole game.
From here, we need more tests. We still haven't played this crisis round with 4 players, nor have we had enough testers to run a game without one of us playing. We also need to keep an eye out for upcoming game design events that we can take the game to and get more professional feedback from.
So yeah, the long and short of it is that this seems to be working for now. More testing is required. And the game needs a period at the end of it. Our goal is to get a publisher for this game within the year.
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 will make it enjoyable to talk through how your heroes just solve everything, ended up being borne out - at least by this test. Billy and I agree though - something is missing. Even though this is working, and it feels great to reveal new crises, each crisis on its own feels like it's missing a period at the end. We need something to punctuate each crisis. Once we have that, we might be done with the whole game.
From here, we need more tests. We still haven't played this crisis round with 4 players, nor have we had enough testers to run a game without one of us playing. We also need to keep an eye out for upcoming game design events that we can take the game to and get more professional feedback from.
So yeah, the long and short of it is that this seems to be working for now. More testing is required. And the game needs a period at the end of it. Our goal is to get a publisher for this game within the year.
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