NE1 Atoll

I had a blast at Gen Con 50! This was my first Gen Con and it was simply amazing. I want to write up some thoughts on the various games I played but since I played 23 individual titles and participated in one escape room I may spread that out in posts to come.  Until then here's some T-Rexs, Pikachu and a storm trooper in tails...

Despite having a sick Toddler the game I talked about pitching last time has been moving right along. You can now properly deduce in my social deduction game, which seems... important. At least, the mechanisms provide a way to do so. 

Game Design Rule 313: Until a player actually does a thing while playing your game it's not actually in the game.

So it's off to playtesting. Having lived in the Roanoke area for... 40 days now... getting a playtesting group together is still on the to do list. Hopefully I can fall back on some old friends in other places.

I've added light movement and area control elements to the social deduction and I'm using both a vote and a Battlestar style card challenge, which allows players some real decision points. I think this is pushing the game into middle weight/length (an unusual place for social deduction) but I feel like the game wants a little grit for the legacy aspects to grab on to. I'm going to let it sprawl a bit and then try to push it down to under an hour. We'll see how that goes.

I've got more to say about working with the legacy aspects but this blog post is long enough and I've got to actually get some work done. :P

So day 0 of Gen Con is in the books. Part of mine was filled with general logistics (Hotel check in, Gen Con tickets, prep for tomorrow) while the rest focused on pitching a clearly-not-ready legacy game...

See all that pen marks on the cards? Yeah, that's not a good sign. I fell prey to the temptation to be Johnny-on-the-spot, the guy with the exact right idea at exact the right time. I'll try and take some time next week to write about the process at length but the short lesson is, no matter how tempting the circumstances, don't go into a meeting unless your current game rules have...

A. ...been playtested to get the kinks out

B. ...are stable long enough for you to teach the game coherently.

Despite that the pitch could have gone worse. They got to see enough working bits to feel there was a game in there (somewhere) and they told me they're open to a second pitch. The unfortunate truth is that I didn't have that game yet and we all knew it.

One of the projects I'm working on is a legacy game, which is making my table look like the local post office...

 Designing a legacy game is surprisingly hard! My mind gets definite gear grind when working on long chains of linked events. It's akin to working with decision trees but with the added mess of physical components.

After a birth, a move and much more I'm finally set up and back at work! So, so excited!! More to come...

As I stated in the build notes the updates this week are a couple of days late, I spent the early week working on some key art and then pushed the posts to finish some work on the actual build.

 There days there are plenty of parts of game development that can be done on your own.  The quality and availability of tools are improving at an amazing rate. The number of viable platforms for independent games are at an all time high. It's a great time to be an indie dev but none of these mean anything unless you can find an audience.

From my perspective building  an audience is truly one of the most daunting tasks in-game development.  The last thing you want is to be that developer who spent hundreds of hours developing an amazing product that no one ever saw.  While I can't yet talk about hard and fast rules of finding a crowd I can give some insight into steps I'm taking.

The first is to take advantage of opportunities. I've only lately been turned on to the ECGC, which is happening in my own backyard next week.  You can bet I'm going and you can bet that I'll be shaking hands with and introducing myself to a few people. In truth, I don't have a strict plan as to how this gets Sanguis more notice, but you can't build a crowd without getting your name out there.

Another step I've taken this week is to recognize what my project needs.  I'm purposefully using "project" here as opposed to "game" because there's a difference. I've started to put together some key art for the project...

Even when I finish it I have no plans to use this art in-game but hopefully I can use it on the website and in media to capture the essence of the game.  Hopefully I can use it to build a crowd. 

The most important things I'm trying to remember is that you can't build a crowd without a quality game. So I've been working on that as well. Many hours were spend this week debugging various bits of data, a process that was not only longer and more tedious than I imagined but one that showed me distinct holes in what I was trying to do.

One of these holes was way opponents were being added to matches. I had made the mistake of drawing from the same list of gladiators that were available to the player. This meant that all of the gladiators had names and differentiated info.  The match screen was this sea of faces and names; the fact that every gladiator was unique made none of them unique, I needed a crowd for them to stand out from.

So I did something that's tough for a game designer, I made a bunch of unique characters into generic ones instead...

By adding a generic helmeted crowd of guys the important individuals immediately pop out at you. Improving you ability to grok what's important about the game is a big part of making it accessible and fun and a big part of attracting a crowd.

The takeaway this week is to keep an eye out for opportunities to connect with your audience. I know it's what I'll be trying to do at the games conference. Wish me luck.

See you next Friday,

The strange part about digging around in the statistical guts of a game is that what you're working on doesn't actually exist. My week was spent grabbing various bits of game viscera, skill numbers and win percentages, ability modifiers and rarities, and shoving them into the body of my game.

The thing is all this stuff that I spent my week agonizing over, the intestines of my game, it's not what the players will see. No, if I've done my job what they'll see is Frankenstein, the creation I've brought to life.  

When you're working on a game though the parts are what you deal with, what you spend weeks looking at, obsessing over and tweaking.  So, when you're working on the heart of your game, as I have been these last two weeks, it can be a harrowing affair. 

It's safe to say that Sanguis is not my end-all be-all project. There are worlds and characters that I hope to bring to the screen or page that are closer to me. What Sanguis is though is the exact right project at the exact right time. A large part of that is because of the heart of the game, the core experience of entering your characters in an arena to gain fame and fortune, is both simple enough to tackle as a one man studio and compelling enough to carry thematic weight. For me, that's perfect.

For the game to be what I want it to be though this experience has to actually be compelling though and that's extremely tricky.  I've spent time increasing your interactive ability, to make this moment of the game something that has depth of thought...

...but objectives, augments, tactics, leveling gladiators, etc. can only get you so far. I won't know how all this is coming together until I get this heart in the body, get the essential bits working and then get someone else to try it out. As it turns out, that bolt of lightning, the one that brings the monster to life, it's not always predictable. The test for life in Sanguis will come very soon as First Playable is just around the corner now. 

The takeaway this week is to make sure you've identified the heart of  whatever your working. At least that way when you get it working you know how to check its pulse.  

 See you next Friday,

Genre: Turn Based Strategy

Engine: Game Maker Studio

Platform: Steam, iOS  (tentatively), android (tentatively)

Current Build: 0.00.15

Back in the saddle!  After two weeks of delayed posts due to illness and (...ahem...) post-vacation-malaise I'm back to my Friday updates!  This one is a little light on the build notes but the match system is the heart of the mechanical game so I'm super stoked to be getting it working.  Once it's bug free (not there yet) this puts me very close to First Playable. More on this in the Dev Post.

 Match system auto-team selection reworked

This system selects a team based on the current objective. It's the base mechanic behind the objective buttons and needed some love.  The big point is that it now marks team gladiators as being in a match so they won't get used over and over.

Recklessness, Win %, Gold, Crowd Favor, and Crowd Appeal formulas added.

Genre: Turn Based Strategy

Engine: Game Maker Studio

Platform: Steam, iOS  (tentatively), android (tentatively)

Current Build: 0.00.15

Back in the saddle!  After two weeks of delayed posts due to illness and (...ahem...) post-vacation-malaise I'm back to my Friday updates!  This one is a little light on the build notes but the match system is the heart of the mechanical game so I'm super stoked to be getting it working.  Once it's bug free (not there yet) this puts me very close to First Playable. More on this in the Dev Post.

Match system auto-team selection reworked

This system selects a team based on the current objective. It's the base mechanic behind the objective buttons and needed some love.  The big point is that it now marks team gladiators as being in a match so they won't get used over and over.

Recklessness, Win %, Gold, Crowd Favor, and Crowd Appeal formulas added.

So this week has been a wash. My intention was to use the weekend to finish the guts of the Match system, which would get me a big win despite my illness.  Unfortunately, with my muzzy-head sorting out logic loops and correcting errors is going slowly.  

The most interesting part of that process has been the fresh reminder that game design doesn't mean much until implementation.  Just because I have my design on paper (and whiteboard...)

...doesn't mean it'll translate smoothly into the editor. Even the process of picking a default team, an  issue I supposedly "solved" in a previous build, required a major rework to be used in this context. Perhaps I'm getting ahead of my narrative here so let's talk about what Matches are for a moment.

A chat with a friend made me realize that the easiest way to look at Sanguis' match system is as a card game.  Basically to play out a match in arena first you choose a particular match type that comes with a team of opponents.  Then you choose three gladiator "cards", a tactics "card", a team augment "card" and one of five standard objective "cards" and attempt to defeat the opponents.  The game gives you a rough idea of the chances and benefits of choosing various objectives and tactics then, when you finalize your selection, it matches you against your opponents (along with a bit of dice rolling) and determines a winner and a loser.

This description leaves some bits out, for instance that your gladiator "cards" can level, gain special abilities and have equipment, but I think it does make the battle system more understandable. Does that mean I'll be visually turning all these things into "cards"... undecided... I feel like this would make it harder for the player to bond with the gladiators, something I want the mechanics to encourage.

To that end I've added gladiator leader boards to the design.  This allows the player to see how their individual gladiators compare to other families in fame and  win/loss ratio.  Treating these families as competitors, the way you might see friends you wanted to beat on your leaderboards is an interesting concept to me and I'll probably be touching on attempts to make those competitors come alive in future posts.

I think that's it for this week. This post is definitely more rambling then my standard, I'm going to blame the slow recovery. The takeaway this week is that sometimes you just have to take your lumps and put your time in on the hard stuff. I'll be back on Friday, I hope, and maybe with a working Match system.  If I've got it in by then expect a very happy post, it really is the heart of the mechanical portion of Sanguis.

 See you next... errr... this week,

In this case "that" is me.  I was down for the count most of the week so I don't have a huge update... yet.  I'm delaying this weeks post until tomorrow when I hope to have a really cool thing done.  In truth the work is in progress but until I actually get features working in the build I don't like to write posts about them (it's an incentive to get them up and working).  So, I've decided instead of doing a bit of lore or something off-topic I'll be back tomorrow with a full post and build update.

I will, however, include this one screenshot that I didn't get to last week. It show's the Arena screen (where matches are selected) and the opposing gladiators. Mostly this was showing off the addition of facial icons and the color-coded backers that indicate the rarity/rank of the opposing gladiators.  

  Leaders can be seen here in gold. I obviously still haven't gotten to the image clarity but it's on my short list. I'm off to get some rest and recovery time in.

 See you tomorrow,

I finally have a week with enough time to complete all the work I want to get done and it’s my first late post since starting the project, go figure. That’s mostly down to debugging running long yesterday. The function I was rewriting had more massive changes and more intricate dependencies than I gave it credit for which left me getting the last bits of functionality done late last night. On the…

  Working Title:

Genre: Turn Based Strategy

Engine: Game Maker Studio

Platform: Steam, iOS  (tentatively), android (tentatively)

Current Build: 0.00.12

So, this is the first time I’ve missed my self-declared Friday deadline. I did manage to post the build out but I ran out of time and didn’t get around to the update until this morning. Part of that has to do with some complications I ran in to…

Week 12: Shrinking It All Down

Somehow, despite all I had to go through to get things done last week, this week was tougher. Getting back to the project after vacation all I could see was this huge list of things I was hoping to get done. During vacation my mind had wandered away from the incremental path I had carved out for myself and I found myself on Tuesday staring at my computer lost in a forest of tasks.

It’s fairly…

Working Title:

Genre: Turn Based Strategy

Engine: Game Maker Studio

Platform: Steam, iOS  (tentatively), android (tentatively)

Current Build: 0.00.12

It’s amazing how behind you can be on a self-lead project with no specific release date. This post-vacation week was a tough one to get going on and I met with only partial success. I’ll probably talk a little more about that in the Dev Post, but…

Week 11: Knowing What to Save

…Control is a hard thing to measure. How much do you control? How certain are you of that control? There are those who would want you to believe that things have always been as they are now with the world in service of Rome. That fiction serves to keep many strong, the men and women who sit in the Senate, the great Caesar, even the “gods” who make their homes in the heavens and on Mount Olympus.

Working Title:

Genre: Turn Based Strategy

Engine: Game Maker Studio

Platform: Steam, iOS  (tentatively), android (tentatively)

Current Build: 0.00.11 (Reset the build numbers to correspond to the weeks, luckily version control through SVR is still a near future thing so this number was a little arbitrary)

I’m on vacation this week at the beach with my wife so the progress is a little light.…