#thefre

When I was very young, my mother would build jigsaw puzzles with me. Together we finished a great many number of puzzles. I don’t think she had any idea how big of an impact those times made on my life.

What do you see when you look at the world?  Life has always seemed straight forward to me. It’s the humans of the world that make it complicated. It wouldn't be inaccurate to say that a human’s primary function is to create problems, but it is also my firm belief that humans are incapable of making problems that they don’t have the answers to.

It's been a while since I've updated news. That's because there hasn't really been any! I've laid out all the different changes I need to make, but it's really up to some card redesigns now and I don't really want to do that until the tools I plan to use to make the new card graphics are made, and that is the current bottleneck.

Of course, I am the one that will be developing the tools I need, so work has not stopped. At the moment, however, the program is more something I would rather post info about on my personal site: www.thiefknight.com

So this past week has been about play testing the game which I still have not settled on an official name yet. It's highly likely, at this point, that this incarnation of the game will be Freya's Odyssey Epic as the cards, characters, as well as gameplay elements are all taken from that world.

After a lot of play testing, we've come up with some ground rules to go off of which we enjoyed. First I'd like to talk about some concerns I had going into this design. The game is centered about a fail group of adventurers that are incompetent in battle and are more likely to hurt themselves than the opponent. There was concern that having your heroes continually hurt themselves would lead to great frustration, but after testing it seems to be not an issue and can be a source of great hilarity. Another concern was that the rules would be too complicated, but in tests, the amount of math involved became more of a concern than rules. While it was still fun, I can't deny that it was a very math heavy game and not everyone will be willing to sit through the calculations, so I've heavily reduced the math involved in game play by reducing the amount of additions to attack and defense.

So I've decided to make a quick overview video of how the game will be played. Note that this is still early in testing so there will be a lot of adjustments to fix some issues with the game, but this should be enough to give you a general idea of how to play the game.

One thing I want to immediately append from the video is that attacks can be cancelled. This means if there are no enemies on the board, you do not have to roll your attack. It also means if you block an ally's attack with a counter attacking move, you do not have to roll the counter attack. However, cancelling an attack will not net you any experience, so there will be times when you do want to purposefully hit your ally.

A problem I encountered during test play is that we never really brought out a mini boss simply because it could be avoided. I'll be making an adjustment to have one of the quests require you to bring out a mini boss.