Today I finished the flavor text, but more importantly, did another play test.
Again I noticed that the traits are meaningless and create dead zones in collaboration. Traits simply are not important enough and are hard to understand. So, in line with a book I'm reading, Make It Stick, I want to make them more concrete.
In the past, I had considered using traits as a currency to buy certain items. I also wanted them to give special decisions. I spoke to Alex, and he had a better idea. Make traits special powers that you can collect and use. To me, this makes traits more understandable, exponentially more desirable. It puts you in control of your fate and adds a new level of complexity, knowing players can do special things at any time. I have a list of the powers for each trait. It will take a little work code wise, but I think the payoff will be worth it.
I also need to work on some sort of "tutorial". One thing I noticed from both playtests is people don't really understand what they're doing until after they've played a round. This is typical for a lot of games I think, but any amount of that pain I can ease will be important, especially in a expo setting.
One final thing I noticed is that death is so rare unless someone really tries to get you. I want to make the fear of having dead teammates a legitimate thing, so I want to up the room count in a dungeon to 15, and have each combat room every third room, ascending damage. That way, if you have 2 dead party members on the final room (last stand), you will take 10 damage and die yourself.
Here is a new list of things to do before the expo, which I think is going to be pretty set in stone from here on out:
- actually implement the expired games cron job, setup logrotate for the new error log (1 hour)
- improved dungeon constuction (1 hour)
- trait abilities (6 hours)
- test and balance (??)
- alerting for account sign up (.5 hours)
- tutorial, messaging, sourceforge <==> app links (1 hour)
- deploy new version (2 hours)
- kiosk, business cards, banner, devices (??)
2 hours
Last edit: dungeonsoffear 2018-07-23
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Today I finished the flavor text, but more importantly, did another play test.
Again I noticed that the traits are meaningless and create dead zones in collaboration. Traits simply are not important enough and are hard to understand. So, in line with a book I'm reading, Make It Stick, I want to make them more concrete.
In the past, I had considered using traits as a currency to buy certain items. I also wanted them to give special decisions. I spoke to Alex, and he had a better idea. Make traits special powers that you can collect and use. To me, this makes traits more understandable, exponentially more desirable. It puts you in control of your fate and adds a new level of complexity, knowing players can do special things at any time. I have a list of the powers for each trait. It will take a little work code wise, but I think the payoff will be worth it.
I also need to work on some sort of "tutorial". One thing I noticed from both playtests is people don't really understand what they're doing until after they've played a round. This is typical for a lot of games I think, but any amount of that pain I can ease will be important, especially in a expo setting.
One final thing I noticed is that death is so rare unless someone really tries to get you. I want to make the fear of having dead teammates a legitimate thing, so I want to up the room count in a dungeon to 15, and have each combat room every third room, ascending damage. That way, if you have 2 dead party members on the final room (last stand), you will take 10 damage and die yourself.
Here is a new list of things to do before the expo, which I think is going to be pretty set in stone from here on out:
- actually implement the expired games cron job, setup logrotate for the new error log (1 hour)
- improved dungeon constuction (1 hour)
- trait abilities (6 hours)
- test and balance (??)
- alerting for account sign up (.5 hours)
- tutorial, messaging, sourceforge <==> app links (1 hour)
- deploy new version (2 hours)
- kiosk, business cards, banner, devices (??)
2 hours
Last edit: dungeonsoffear 2018-07-23