The Weeks and Months that followed April, 2018
It's been a long, long time!
First, why haven't we updated this in the interim? Well, I mentioned that we would be able to update again as soon as things calmed down, and things still haven't quite calmed down. Work and life have kept us both quite busy for the last few months.
The other reason why we haven't updated this blog in forever is because it's a design blog for a game that is now done, or very, very close to done. We generally post updates to this blog after our weekly design meetings or our weekly playtests, but we have transitioned away from playtesting gameplay mechanics and towards playtesting rules documents, which means we have less to share here.
Still, we do have improvements to make to the game. This August, at Gen Con, we went through about eighteen hours of blind playtests. The first day was a bit disappointing, because we got a lot of feedback about how the game didn't have a finale, an issue we had thought we'd addressed back when we added crises to the game forever ago. The same day, we met with a friend who gave us some valuable advice on contacting publishers, and suggested that some of those publishers might be looking for a mechanic that references previously built characters. We wanted to satisfy both desires, but we knew from experience that the finale would have to be quick and would have to be very similar in play to the rest of the game to avoid introducing unnecessary amounts of complexity.
That's when we had the idea to introduce a new mechanic: a final round. It functions almost identically to the other rounds in the game, but the talent scout draws more crisis cards, more twist cards, and makes a three-card combination of them to form a kind of "super-crisis". The other players create their heroes as normal, but when it comes time for the pitch, they must mention how they pair-up with an existing member of Reject Squad to save the day. We tested this final round the next two days and the response was very positive. We stopped getting the feedback that players wanted a finale, or a way to tie the whole experience together.
In addition, all these blind playtests gave us a ton of notes to act on to revise our rules document. In general the rules worked. People got the gist of the game, even if they only skimmed the document. But we could be a doing a much better job of breaking out each step of each round and cutting out all unnecessary prose. We also need to introduce some visuals.
Our search for a publisher hasn't been successful so far, but Gen Con provided us with a lot of great new contacts, not to mention invaluable advice from multiple people on what our next steps should be. We'll likely update this blog the next time we have news on that front.
First, why haven't we updated this in the interim? Well, I mentioned that we would be able to update again as soon as things calmed down, and things still haven't quite calmed down. Work and life have kept us both quite busy for the last few months.
The other reason why we haven't updated this blog in forever is because it's a design blog for a game that is now done, or very, very close to done. We generally post updates to this blog after our weekly design meetings or our weekly playtests, but we have transitioned away from playtesting gameplay mechanics and towards playtesting rules documents, which means we have less to share here.
Still, we do have improvements to make to the game. This August, at Gen Con, we went through about eighteen hours of blind playtests. The first day was a bit disappointing, because we got a lot of feedback about how the game didn't have a finale, an issue we had thought we'd addressed back when we added crises to the game forever ago. The same day, we met with a friend who gave us some valuable advice on contacting publishers, and suggested that some of those publishers might be looking for a mechanic that references previously built characters. We wanted to satisfy both desires, but we knew from experience that the finale would have to be quick and would have to be very similar in play to the rest of the game to avoid introducing unnecessary amounts of complexity.
That's when we had the idea to introduce a new mechanic: a final round. It functions almost identically to the other rounds in the game, but the talent scout draws more crisis cards, more twist cards, and makes a three-card combination of them to form a kind of "super-crisis". The other players create their heroes as normal, but when it comes time for the pitch, they must mention how they pair-up with an existing member of Reject Squad to save the day. We tested this final round the next two days and the response was very positive. We stopped getting the feedback that players wanted a finale, or a way to tie the whole experience together.
In addition, all these blind playtests gave us a ton of notes to act on to revise our rules document. In general the rules worked. People got the gist of the game, even if they only skimmed the document. But we could be a doing a much better job of breaking out each step of each round and cutting out all unnecessary prose. We also need to introduce some visuals.
Our search for a publisher hasn't been successful so far, but Gen Con provided us with a lot of great new contacts, not to mention invaluable advice from multiple people on what our next steps should be. We'll likely update this blog the next time we have news on that front.
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