Tuesday, December 9, 2014

Game Design - What has happened the last 7 months?

So I have been negligent on updating this space now for too long.  Here's a recap of what has happened since May:

1) The original design of the game has been abandoned.  Gameplay was too long (2+ hours), I had to keep adding mechanics to get more player interaction (which made the game overly complicated), and it started to not be as much fun.

2) Stonemaier Games announced a Design Day that took place in November.  This jump-started my thinking into the common town approach to the game.  With only ~4 months to have something ready to show, I got started on the redesign of the game to use a common town.

3) The first playtest of the new common town design took place in September.  Jamey Stegmaier was present, and participated in the playtest.  There were many minor issues, but even from that first playtest, I knew this design was vastly superior to the old design.  Over the next couple months, several additional playtests were completed, and the design (now called Anytown: At the Corner of No and Where) was ready for the Design Day.

4) Anytown was playtested at the Stonemaier Games Design Day.  I was extremely pleased with both playtest sessions.  At the end of each session, I had questions ranging from "Is there a website where I can follow the progress?" to "When will this be on Kickstarter?"  I initially thought that everyone was just being nice and did not want to point out any flaws, but then I received news that Anytown was rated in the Top 10 of the designs presented at Design Day!  I was completely speechless!  I thought I had a good game, but I would not have guess that something I had essentially thrown together in 4-5 months would have been so well received.

5) Blind playtesting of Anytown is now available.  If anyone would like links to the documents for a print and play version, please let me know.

6) I have started designing a 2nd game.  More on that in a later post.

I think that brings you all up to date.  My next post will explain Anytown in a bit more detail for those interested.

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