One recent success...

One of the nagging problems I've been having with Nebula is how to handle the 'goal' tiles. For a while now I've had rectangular tiles with various objectives and victory point values on them. These tiles serve three purposes: to give the players another vector for scoring victory points, to add variety between plays (because the tiles are randomly selected), and to give players some direction on a board that otherwise has an overwhelming number of possible starting strategies. The tiles have accomplished these purposes. However, just because they fit the parameters doesn't mean they are good:

• I've tried putting many goals in the center of the table that apply to all players, with the condition that each player can only choose two of them that they want to score. Players complained that they couldn't decide between too many options.
• I've tried putting just two goals in the center that apply to all players. Players either forgot about them, ignored them, or claimed that they weren't 'interesting' enough to pursue. (And then were unhappy when they lost because they didn't get the points from them.)
• I've tried giving 'personal' goals to each player. Players complained that that the goals weren't balanced.
• I've tried putting goals *between* the players (ala Between Two Cities), so each player had one goal to each side that applied to them. Still got complaints about balance and disinterest.
• I've tried making the goals use player interaction; goals were stated as 'first to do X'. Players didn't want to be bothered with parsing other players' boards to determine which goals were worth pursuing.
• I've tried stating the goals as 'player with the most X'. Same problem with players not wanting to look at other players' boards.

Frustration. Couldn't find the right idea. And then I got a suggestion from another designer: tie the goals into the Upgrade system.

Aside form the 'goal' tiles, Nebula also has square 'upgrade' tiles that give special powers and a small number of victory points. Players can only hold a certain number of upgrades at a time, though that capacity can be increased by repairing one of the ship's systems in particular. The suggestion was to roll the goals into that mechanic, have the goals occupy the same slots that the upgrades use, forcing the player to choose between special powers and victory points, and perhaps creating an inflection point during the game when the player would want to switch from one to the other.

I further modified the upgrades to not have victory points at all; tiles are now either resource boosts or vp, not both. (Okay, with one exception, but that one's pretty small and might not even survive testing.) I also ditched the upgrades that give a one-time special power or boost, and balanced the power level of the rest so that they are all now consistently 'once per round' effects. (Fewer variation in the mechanics means easier to learn game.) I changed the upgrade slots to designate that they can hold an upgrade tile, a goal tile, or the player's choice of either one. I also got rid of the rule that some upgrades are locked in place; any tile can be discarded at will, making for further consistency.

So far the change has worked very well. With players having to acquire the goal tiles themselves (all tiles are draw-two-keep-one), instead of just having them assigned, it gives the players a choice of what strategy they want to pursue. Also, since players now have to work a little for their the goal tiles, it forces them to invest in them mentally, which means, they are less inclined to forget about or ignore them. The tiles themselves are not well balanced yet, but that is secondary to making sure the core of the mechanic works.


One problem solved, about a thousand left. But it's progress, can't argue with that. Hopefully I should have another post soon...  I have one more hurdle that I hope I'm about to get over.

Progress on Nebula continues! Slowly, anyway. Here's where I'm at...

3-D

I've had a minor (and to most people, probably obvious) epiphany about the ship layouts. Working off of the crawlspace feedback I got last time, it occurred to me that I was thinking about wrong. Instead of trying to add more crawlspaces, I should be thinking about the ships in terms of 'upper' and 'lower' decks or floors. The Terran ship's lower deck consists of just polyomino squiggles, but not all of the ships need to have that same layout. Taking inspiration from the Xyxyx ship, where all of the crawlspaces are linked into a circle, I redesigned the Ferrite and Rhox ships so that they have an entire fully-populated lower floor. You can stick to wandering around just the upper deck or just the lower deck if you wish, but there is something to be said for climbing from the upper to the lower, moving around the lower, and then popping back up to the upper deck in a different location to continue your repairs. I really wanted the ships to feel three-dimensional, and while I don't think it's quite there yet, I feel like it's a step in the right direction.

(The Rhox ship, pictured above, actually has three decks. You start in the middle deck, you can climb up to the top deck to hit some of the spaces there, or you can climb down to fix the ship's FTL core. If you can't tell from the layout, I'm attempting to make an 'onion' ship, where each deck is a 'layer' and is smaller than the one above it, and each layer wraps around the sides like a cylinder rather than having a discrete 'port' or 'starboard' side. Hence the "Bullet" in the name; that is supposed to describe the actual shape of the ship.)

Areas

Okay, so the ships are no longer flat. So what? My goal from before was to add more candy to the ship in the form of ship regions that could give bonus points or powers if all of the spaces in the region are repaired. I ended up going back to all of the ship layouts and re-coloring the space backgrounds so that each ship has several of these regions present on all the decks of the ship, not just the lower one. Right now, the candy for completely repairing these regions in just victory points. I've had trouble with the crawlspaces before where a player would finish one and then forget to collect the special power it granted. Now, with just VP on the line, the rewards can wait to be tallied up until the end of the game and don't cause a cognitive interruption on the part of the player.

Success! After a couple of playtests, the ship regions idea seems to be going over well. Players appreciated having some extra goal to work towards and found the extra VP for finishing a region satisfying. That's not to say that the idea was 100% accepted; some players wanted more than just VP rewards from the regions (which butts up against the forgetting to claim the reward problems I mentioned above), and others didn't care for the goals that I tied into the regions, where you get points for completing certain colors of regions. (The regions are still color coded, based off of the location of the region in the ship and what track symbols you might expect to get from it.) But despite that, I still call the idea a success, just that it needs a little bit of tweaking.

One point of contention, though, is what to call these new spaces. I used "Areas" during my playtesting. "Rooms", "Regions", and "Zones" all came up as alternate possibilities, and I'm sure other ideas would fit. I don't know what the correct term for them should be. Minor point, I know, but having the right word in there can help evoke the feeling that these spaces are connected for a particular purpose. Because flavor is important too. :)

Goals

Still with the goal tiles. The idea of having player interaction through the goal tiles looking for 'most of' values did not work out. Players complained that they were satisfied enough with the puzzle presented to them, and they did not like the cognitive interruption caused by having to check other player's progress to determine the value of pursuing the goal. Fine.

The latest iteration of goals set them to about as simple as I can possibly make them. The goals are reworked to be 'get 1 VP per XYZ', capped at 8 VP per goal. Two random goals are dealt out to the center of the play area and applied to all players at the end of the game. And that's it. I tied the areas mechanic to a few of them, giving points for certain colors of areas, because the goals I had before based on the ship geography didn't apply anymore.

Still with the thud. Some players appreciated the goals; they give direction when you don't have an idea of what strategy to take. (3 VP for doing this thing, or 6 VP for doing this other, equally difficult thing. Which would you do?) Additionally, they change the point landscape for each game, forcing players to prioritize things differently each playthrough, which should hopefully increase the game's replayability.

However, other players were still complaining that the goals weren't influential enough. Some players want the ability to ignore the goals entirely and 'do their own thing'. Others complained that the random chance nature of pulling cubes means that they don't always get the necessary resources to be able to even pursue a particular goal at all. (I thought I had enough randomness mitigation in there so a player could overcome that if they chose; perhaps the players just didn't feel like they needed to prioritize the conditions specified in the goal and so suffered at the end of theg ame when VP was tallied.)

In any case, I'm still not there with this part. Strange that this little detail is something that keeps eluding me. One player suggested tying the goals into the areas in a different way; maybe have variable rewards for completing areas or something like that. I'll have to investigate.

Blind Playtesting

In my last post, I mentioned that I wanted to start doing blind playtesting on Nebula. That idea fell by the wayside while I wrestled with getting some of these last mechanical changed locked down. Now that it's starting to (again) look like the game is settling down, I know I want to get back to the blind testing idea. I don't know how many more iterations I'm going to need, but I hope to be able to update the rulebook and get it looked at very soon. I'm starting to see that a lot of these nagging problems with the small mechanics aren't going to be solved by just a few designer playtests; I think I need a larger audience and more opinions as to what feels the best. To that end, I need to get the mechanics at least stable, so I can capture them in the rules and present that to the playtesters.

The rest still applies...  I want to get signups going on my mailing list again (because I want to advertise my playtesting on there), I want to get my Discord safe for public consumption, and I want to get the feedback form tweaked to help target feedback towards these hot-button mechanics.


Soon, I keep telling myself. We'll see how long it takes for then to become now.

Been a while since I last wrote anything. Haven't been able to put a lot of time into Nebula lately, but there have been a couple of developments.

Goals Redux

So, the mission cards I posted about last time didn't really work out. I stand by the idea; I think it was a neat concept. And players liked how they gave you a sequence of goals to follow and injected some story into the game. However, they were too complicated. That material would be better left as an expansion, something to add in once the game starts getting stale. They definitely aren't suited for new players.

So, back to my previous idea. I'm going back to the goal tiles, which always worked reasonably well but just had some balancing issues. Hopefully I may have figured that out?

This latest iteration of the goals has two goal tiles dealt out in the center of the board. Each goal tile has two pieces of information: a 'metric' that refers to a player's progress in one aspect of the game, and a 'minimum' that represents a threshold for that metric. For example, a metric could be 'number of repaired pink spaces' or 'number of marks on the track with the least marks'. The threshold is just a number... 3 or 5 or whatever.

Under this system, scoring goes as follows: for each goal, each player with at least the minimum amount of whatever metric the goal cares about gets 8 points. Then, the player with the most of that metric (or tied for the most) gets an additional 8 points. So each goal is worth up to 16 points, and there are two goals, so 32 points total for getting everything.

This system actually worked better than I expected. The minimum threshold gives players some low-hanging fruit to score, and the 'player with the most' comparison gives a target for overachievers and players who like to outdo others. Adds in a tiny amount of players interaction and forcing awareness of the overall game while not absolutely demanding it; players can ignore some or all of the goal points at their own discretion. While I think the point value is too high (32 points is huge for a game with average point totals in the 60s), the mechanic seems to be sound and I think all it needs is some tweaking.

On top of all that, the system is much simpler compared to previous iterations. Each goal is worth the same number of points. Each goal has the same two comparisons, 'minimum' and 'most'. The goals are balanced for all players; no goals are specific to a player. I think the only potential problem is some goals might not play nice together, but that shouldn't be too complicated to work around.

I hope this idea holds, because I really want to lock this mechanic down.

Center, Left, Right

The idea I had for the cube draft from last time is still there and holding. (Each player pulls three cubes, keeps one, then take one from the player to the left, then from the player to the right.) It's definitely an improvement from the cube market from previous iterations; it flows much faster and encourages all players to participate simultaneously. However, it is apparently a little confusing to keep track of. Both in the digital version of the game and the physical version, there are often some instances of an overzealous player rushing to take their three cubes and potentially grabbing something before the other players are ready, and then a slower player comes along and is lost trying to figure out what happened.

I'm not really sure what to do about this... I did get some compliments about the mechanic; it gives players some agency about what free cubes they get, and encourages a little bit of player interaction. The criticisms though are that it's unnecessary (since later in the game players are getting so many cubes that the colors of the first few are inconsequential) and physically awkward (since players are occasionally reaching past each other). I've been thinking if I can do anything about that, and aside from changing the draft to a bland pick-and-pass system, I don't know how else I can resolve it. So, this mechanic is still not solidified, though it is in the running.

In-Person Meetups

Speaking of a physical copy, just this week my Orlando designer group meet up again, for the first time since COVID hit. It was fantastic to get out of the house and back with my friends! Sure, things were a little different; masks and vaccinations were required for everyone, and we had to pack up when the store was close to closing time instead of the store owners holding the place open for us for a while. Still, it was totally worth it. We're only meeting once every two weeks for now, but it's nice to see reality starting to get back to nromal, at least a little. Looking forward to the next one!

(P.S. I might have another design bubbling in the background, and it might end up showing up at one of these in-person meetups, and it might fit into something a publisher is doing. TONS of speculation and vague possibilities here, but we'll see.)

Spaceship Architecture

I'm not sure what to do with one other idea that I got from one of my recent playtests. I haven't done any implementation of it yet, and I'm not sure that I will, but it's one of those feedback bits that caught my attention and just refuses to let me forget about it.

I had one of my playtesters mention that they liked the crawlspaces mechanism. As in, really liked it. So much so that they wished that that was a larger part of the game. As in, they wanted the ship to have more 'rooms', more discrete areas that can be individually repaired, and maybe more rewards or incentives related to repairing these regions.

While I don't really know what form these areas would take, one positive thing is that there would be little to no mechanical change to implement this; this is entirely a content change. It would amount to rearranging the ship layouts and adding in some strategically positioned walls, probably with some other minor adjustments. I'm a little wary of doing that at the moment, since generating and balancing the ship layouts is a surprisingly large amount of work. Still, I can't think of any specific reason why I shouldn't give it a try, other than the amount of effort it will take.

One added benefit to doing this is that I can inject a little bit of flavor in this way. Instead of just having a loose cluster of green spaces, now I can have a 'medbay'. Or the orange spaces at the bottom can be an 'engine room'. I can even switch it up between ship layouts; the Xyxyx (insects) ship can have a 'hatchery' for life support spaces, the Rhox (angry anthro rhinos) ship can have an 'incinerator' for power spaces, etc.

Laundry List

Feels like there's so much left to do on this...

• Finish rewriting the rulebook (very close on this one!)
• Update my google form for receiving playtest feedback
• Finish cleaning up my Discord server so that it can be used for playtesting
• Set up blind playtesting sessions
• Advertise blind testing on social media and Discord
• Re-open my mailing list for signups

And that's just to get the next phase of playtesting going. I had been saying for a while that I wanted to launch a Kickstarter in 2021...  that's seeming increasingly unlikely, considering the number of steps I have left to do. Still, even though I'm going more slowly than I would like, at least I'm still going. Which means I'll make it to the goal eventually.

 Happy New Year everyone! Wishing you all a good 2021...

Wait, what? It's March already? How did that happen?!

Okay, okay. I guess it's hard to keep track of time when you're cooped up in the same place all the time. Stupid pandemic. Here's hoping life gets back to normal sometime soon. At least I haven't been completely idle...

Nebula Blind Playtesting

My main objective right now is to get blind testing started on Nebula. I feel like the game is in a good place; the mechanics are fairly solid and I haven't made any major changes in a while. I'm certain I will need to make more tweaks; the balance is still slightly off but I'm thinking that should shake out with a large number of playtests.

I also have a rulebook put together for the game. This is not intended to be anything close to a final rules version. Instead, this particular rulebook is adapted for Tabletop Simulator, containing references to the game's digital interface elements, like menus and buttons and such. While I'm sure it could benefit from some diagrams and other improvements, it's not really intended for any use beyond the digital playtests so I'm not too concerned about how good it is, as long as it's understandable enough to play the game.

In addition, I have a Google Survey set up for players to give their feedback after playing. (The assumption being, since it is a *blind* playtest, that I might not be present for the playthrough.) Even if I am there, it's nice to be able to record players' feedback, and I've noted that players tend to be a little less inhibited with their criticisms if the medium is anonymous and I'm not there breathing down their necks. :)

Finally, in order to help facilitate the playthroughs, I'm trying to figure out exactly what players will need in order to playtest. 'Where' and 'when' come to mind as questions that need to be answered. In the context of an online playtest, 'where' needs to be a communication tool that can support voice chat and allow players to coordinate. 'When' means making sure all players know at what time to be ready to play. Both of those can be facilitated by my...
 
Discord Server

Mystic Tiger Games has its own Discord server! Currently, there's not much there. A couple of channels (text and voice) for playing board games online, and a couple of (text only) channels for playing with the server's bots. I intend to add more to the server over time; there's a couple of other Discord game bots I'd like to try out, not to mention still wanting to write one of my own. And I'd like to make a space for players to discuss games and such if they want.

I'm not ready to publish the link to it yet, as I have a little more setting up to do. (It's good practice to be able to moderate users if the situation requires it, and there are bots out there to help with that sort of thing.) But I do want to make it public, and soon.

Mailing List

One other thing that I haven't started yet, but I've been giving some serious thought to, is restarting my company mailing list. I've had a mailing list for a while but I've only used it a few times. Notably, the last time I used it was before they passed the big data protection law that basically says that everyone must explicitly opt-in to a mailing list in order to keep receiving stuff from it. Now, everyone on my list either requested to be on the list, or is someone I know personally. Still, since I don't have "explicit opt-in permission" from all of them, my best choice is to scrap the list and start over.

My plan is to send out one last email to the old list, informing everyone that there is a new list to subscribe to if they still want to keep receiving emails. If someone doesn't respond...  then they're done. No more spam from me. Then I can try again with the new list, sending out the occasional announcement for Nebula or whatever else I'm working on.

Links

While I'm not quite ready yet to make a huge announcement about playtesting Nebula (it's coming soon tho!), I will put the links up if anyone wishes to look at the game now. Feel free to play around with it, though if you do run a full game of it I request that you use the feedback form afterwards to let me know what you think. (The form should be anonymous; feel free to trash the game as much as you like, I won't know who you are. :D ) You can put your email address on the last answer if you wish to be added to the new mailing list too, though I won't actually be able to add you until I create it. :)

Link to the Nebula rulebook:
http://mystictigergames.com/Nebula_rulebook_v34_tts.pdf
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Link to the Tabletop Simulator mod:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2297746065

Link to the feedback form:
https://forms.gle/ws61sSjHgEtDgXR69


And that's it for now. Stay tuned everyone...  I hope to make this year much more active for Mystic Tiger Games! :)

It's been a crazy year so far. You'd figure that with the pandemic being a known quantity and the holidays coming up, at least there would be some semblance of 'normal' with everything that's happening, but nope. Still, life (and game designing :) continues to happen. Here's where I'm at:

Nebula

I 've been keeping up with Nebula playtests where I can. I keep making tweaks and adjustments, hoping to find the sweet spot for the game. I think I'm getting closer; I've had a lot of positive feedback lately from my playtests. I think putting it all into a list is probably the best way to organize it:

• My last couple of playtests have had very positive feedback. It seems like lately the players are more enthusiastic about the game after playing it. I've even had a couple of players say stuff like 'I'd like to buy a copy now' or 'let me know when your Kickstarter launches'. Very encouraging to hear!
• On the flip side, better game means less in the way of constructive feedback. I had one playtest that basically gave me zero feedback; the players thought the game was good enough that they didn't have anything significant to offer in terms of improvements. So, while it's good that the game is viewed well, I know it can't possibly be perfect, so I have to work a little harder to get indications of things to adjust.
• I'm up to four playable ships now! I was always planning on having multiple ship layouts, each with special little quirks and such. I had created some alternate layouts a while ago, but only recently did I do a balancing pass on those to get them roughly in line with the power level of the original ship. (Of course, I can't make them exactly equal, nor should I try. But they should be close while still being different.) I ran a couple of playtests with the alternate ships available, and while they're certainly not perfect, I don't think they're too far off. Just needs a couple of adjustments. Feedback on the new ships has been kinda meh, though. They're definitely different but apparently they don't change the play experience much. Something else to work on.
• Still trying to balance the goals and upgrades. The upgrades are, I think, doing well. It's getting harder for players to decide between different upgrades, which is good; two different powers should appear roughly equal in power level while still providing different strategy options. I think some of them might need a slight bump in victory point values, but that's mostly it. The goals I'm still having a difficult time with. I've got a few that are very good, and a few that are playable but not well balanced. Problem is, I don't feel like I have enough of them. For some reason these have been difficult in terms of trying to keep the amount of effort on par with the reward, and yet still keep then roughly balanced against each other. Right now I have ten goal tiles; I would like more but I think this is going to be the limit.
• I've been hitting a problem I call 'exploding turns' for a while, where one player gets a massive burst of resources (usually mid-turn) and ends up taking far longer to finish all their moves than everyone else, resulting in a lot of player downtime. (Not to mention that player usually ends up running away with the game.) I've been attacking that problem by trying to reduce the amount of resources players can gain during the turn; it's best when the gains are gradual and all players gain at similar rates instead of having the resources fluctuate wildly. I've been slowly turning down the bonus 'chaining'...  gain an energy instead of a cube over here, gain a track step instead of energy over there, gain a fuel instead of energy at this spot, etc. It seems to be helping; players are still making a lot of progress but it's more evenly distributed.

Still chugging away, but I'm happy with how the game is turning out.

Side Project

One of the things that has been slowing down my designing progress has been something new and shiny to work on. If you've ever done any sort of extended project like this, you'll be familiar with the feeling of some new and cool idea coming along, distracting you from finishing your current project. Well, I've hit one of those. It's not another board game, though, but something digital. Specifically, something on Discord!

I've been spending a lot of my time connected to Discord lately. Besides being a really great platform for video gaming, it's also vital for staying in contact with other board gamers. This one community I'm attached to also has a game, playable right within Discord! It's a mostly text-based game where you play as a fantasy adventurer, going around slaying monsters, gaining treasure, gathering crafting materials, and powering up your weapons and armor. It's fairly simple game compared to most games out there, but just the fact that it can be played through a text chat makes it highly accessible and playable anywhere.

So, of course, I figured if this is a thing, maybe I can make one too?

Cue the montage of learning about Discord API libraries, databases, Discord servers, network bandwidth considerations, connection pools, cloud-based private servers, Linux administration, SSH tunneling, Discord bot directories and rankings, image hosting, error-tolerant programming, and probably about a million other things I'm not thinking of at the moment.

After hacking at it off and on for a few weeks, I have a working Discord bot. Right now it just hangs out on my private server and one other. Say hello to it, and it will give you an uplifting greeting in return. Tell it to wait for a certain amount of time, and it will ping you after that time elapses. Ask it to search, and it comes back to you with colored hearts. Tell it to combine colored hearts into a gift, and it keeps the gift in your inventory for later. Tell it to throw a gift at someone, and it will send that other person a cuddly hug animated gif. And tell it you want to play a game, and it will give you a set of five dice and play Yahtzee with you. :)

Most importantly, each of the concepts I had to learn to make any of those features work will be useful in some way trying to make a full-featured game later. I'm not quite sure I have all the pieces I need to make a complete game yet, but at least I have plenty of ideas floating around and directions to go. Hopefully this is something I can continue to hack away at.


And that's all for now. Focused on one board game and one online game. Plus side orders of playtesting other people's games, staying connected on Discord, and watching Twitch streams. (Along with gaming streams, there's a surprisingly large amount of good music streaming on Twitch.)

Two months since I last posted. Bleh...  I've really been slacking.

Except, I haven't. It's been a really busy couple of months. I've been doing a ton of stuff, mainly centered around Tabletop Simulator. Three things in particular:

Manaforge on TTS

I finally did it. I realized a while back that I had left my implementation of Manaforge on Tabletop Simulator incomplete. I had it marked as a 'release candidate' version and had neglected to update it once the game was published. Once of my tasks was to correct that oversight.

Pictured above is the result of that work. It's still the same game, of course, no rules changes or anything. But it should be a lot more playable now. I switched out the table for a much larger one and moved all of the player boards to the same side of the table (not like elbow room is really a thing in a virtual environment), so everyone has the same view of the cards. I updated the token bags to actually look like the tokens they're holding. I replaced the pawn I had as the first player token with an anvil model. I added the rulebook as an object in the game. I added some scripted buttons for common tasks such as refreshing the cards on the central board or passing hands during the talent draft. And I added a UI element that I call a 'mana tracker', taking the place of the mana abacus accessory in the physical game, for use in keeping track of how much mana you have during your turn.

And, for flavor, I updated the environment. I found several freely-available mods on TTS containing various models for use in tabletop role-playing games; I copied a few of those into my game, added a floor and some walls, and decorated it with the same magic circle templates that were used on some of the game components. I'd like to think that it looks pretty good now.

The whole thing is published on the Tabletop Simulator Workshop as the 'official' version of the Manaforge mod. (It's the same link as before, just the content is improved.) Oh, and I prettied up the workshop page for the game as well. Added links to the rulebook, faq, and game page on my site.

(Come to think of it, I should have a link to the BGG page for the game. Add that to my to-do list.)

Check it out here:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=826257424

Nebula

Of course, I've still been hammering away at Nebula. Playtest, fix, playtest, fix, playtest, fix...  yeah, you get the idea. The game has been coming together remarkably well. I think I'm pretty close to done with the mechanical changes and I'm starting to get into balance tweaks. Pretty good sign that the game is coming together. It's also a good sign that my last couple of weeks worth of playtests have been giving me a lot of positive feedback. Players are almost always saying that they enjoyed playing. For the feedback I'm getting, it's more small stuff and balance bits. (And quite a bit of graphic design and layout stuff, but I'm not able to do much with that right now.) I've got several people asking when I'm going to host a playtest next, and one person even saying that they're ready to back my Kickstarter. Very encouraging! :D

At this point, I'm going to do a couple of rounds of balance changes, and then start on the rulebook. (Actually, I have a rulebook made, but it's from months ago and is way out of date.) Once I get the game playable from the rulebook, I'm going to start setting Nebula up to be blind testable. Running playtests is great and all, but the game needs a lot more testing than I can do with the time I have. Hopefully having the game played a hundred times will help shake out any lingering kinks that I'm not seeing.

After that, it might be time to start thinking about publishing. Graphic design and artwork and marketing and crowdfunding and production and shipping...  yeah, don't want to get ahead of myself. With luck I can start aiming for a Kickstarter date. Hopefully not too far into next year. I wonder if I'll hit a 2021 holidays delivery date.

OBJ Library

One other little side project. This one will only be useful to other people that are creating games on Tabletop Simulator. This is one of those things I did mostly to prove to myself that I could, although I'm hoping it might be useful to others as well.

I created and published a workshop mod containing a bunch of generic shapes. Cube, cylinder, flat plane, various regular prisms, and pyramids. All of these objects are done as model objects in TTS, and those models are using .obj files. While most normal people would use a modeling tool to create obj files, I decided to try my hand at creating them using a Java program. (Since I'm very bad at using modeling tools.) It was an interesting challenge, writing code to generate vertices, normals, and texture coordinates. Stuff that I haven't done in a long while, and certainly haven't done in Java at all. The file format for obj files is actually pretty simple (it's just a text format), so the main challenge was to come up with the coordinate data and figure out the quirks of Tabletop Simulators Unity rendering engine. (And yes, there are definitely a lot of quirks.)

The nice thing about using models instead of the built-in TTS components is that you can do several neat tricks with them. I used the cylinder objects I made as the bags in my Manaforge rebuild. Model objects have a behavior setting, which can give the object various properties. Examples of behaviors are 'bag' (stores other objects), 'die' (has sides and can be rolled), and 'figurine' (always uprights itself when interacted with).

I do want to add more shapes and better texturing options to what's there, but I'm hoping what I've done so far will be of benefit to someone.

Check it out here:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2217611502

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And that's it for now! I hope to have more news about Nebula soon. If you're interested in playtesting, send me an email and I'll see about setting up a test. I'm also going to keep testing on the various Discord-based playtest groups for a while, so if you frequent any of those you'll probably see me around.

It's been a busy month or so. Since I last posted, I've attended two different online conventions, done a lot of work (and playtesting!) on Nebula, and started learning the Board Game Arena platform.

Virtual Gaming Con 2020

At the end of June was the first Virtual Gaming Con, organized by a combination of The Dice Tower and BoardGameGeek. I want to say that this is the first virtual gaming convention that I enjoyed. (My first one was technically the PAX Online convention, but somehow that one kind of fell flat.) The focus of this convention was to recreate the feel of a Dice Tower convention, with both organized and open taming, panels and presentations, and a main hall with big events. While there were some aspects that could've used some polish (figuring out when the major events were happening and how to join them took too much effort), overall I think the convention was well organized and quite enjoyable. Clocking in at five days (the length of the corresponding physical convention) I think it felt a little too long, but I'm glad I attended anyway. I got to play several games, a few of them new to me, and I also managed to sneak one playtest of Nebula in there. It was also nice to be able to step away from the convention for a couple of hours, eat and rest and spend time with family, and then hop back in like nothing had changed. And while there was a $10 price tag, I think it was well worth it. Looking forward to the next one!

Protospiel Online July 2020

​Contrast this with the first Protospiel Online convention, which happened during the second half of July. This convention was organized by the Protospiel Indy crew, and was done specifically for the purpose of having game creators come together, playtest, and give feedback on each others' creations. This convention was sponsored by several different game creators and publishers and featured a good amount of dedicated playtesters and board game media types mixed in. It was an enjoyable convention, well organized and run, with ample opportunity to have my game tested and test a huge number of designs that I hadn't seen before. (I ended up getting to playtests of Nebula; I could've gotten more but I had all the information I needed so there was little point.) Finding something to test was a simple matter of joining the correct voice channel, and finding playtesters involved posting the game's 'info card' to a text channel, easy to do. There was also the ability to post sell sheets and pitch games to publishers, and there were a few 'coffee talks' featuring prominent industry types having a discussion on various topics. The convention was a long weekend (Friday-Sunday) and I felt that that was the correct length; by the end of Sunday I was exhausted and ready to do something else. Probably the only bad part of the convention was the price tag; it cost $50 to register as a designer, which left me wondering what all that money was needed for. If I end up not attending the next one of these, it will likely be entirely because of the cost. (Especially since I can get the same playtesting, though maybe not as concentrated, from the regional online playtest groups that I'm a part of.)

Nebula: Playtest & Feedback

I've gotten in several playtests of Nebula over the past month, and I'd like to think that the mechaincs are starting to settle down. The split of the Artifact tiles into Upgrade tiles and Goal tiles was well worth it. The structure of the upgrades is working well, and including one upgrade on the timer track as sort of an introduction to the mechanic works very well. The upgrade tiles themselves have some balance issues, but I'm slowly weeding out the ones that don't work and balancing the rest.

My current problem is the Goal tiles. My original idea was to have the goals be public, but with the ability to 'claim' a goal to make it private. Each goal had a unique endgame scoring calculation (such as 1 VP per step on a track or 3VP for each finished crawlspace). This was intended to create a sort of race between the players to get the best goal, as the players must fill in certain portions of their board to do a claim. It kind of worked, but ultimately claiming a goal created the negative feeling of taking something away from others rather than achieving an accomplishment. So in my latest iteration of the tiles, I have changed them to each have different claim conditions ('have 6 steps on your yellow track' or 'make a chain connecting the two sides of your ship'), with static VP values for each goal and a special rule that the first player to claim a goal gets bonus VP. I'm not convinced this structure is the correct one, but after a couple of playtests it does appear to be an improvement over the previous mechanic.

Board Game Arena

One of the things I was introduced to during the Virtual Gaming Con was Board Game Arena. This is another gaming platform that has been around a while and that I have heard of, but never really felt the need to research. The graphics on BGA are much more primitive than Tabletop Simulator or Tabletopia, but BGA has the extra feature of rules enforcement; the game specifically instructs you on what actions you may take and forbids anything that the rules would not normally allow.

I am currently researching how difficult it would be to port Manaforge over to this platform. I've registered for a developer account on BGA and started working through their tutorials. While the specific languages and technologies they use are very common, the fact that entire platform is based on web technologies like PHP, CSS, HTML, and JavaScript means that I have a little bit of stuff to learn before I can feel truly comfortable with porting my game over. (I have done some web development in the past but it's definitely not my specialty.) I am however excited about the prospect of porting my game over to a new platform so that it can be exposed to more people.

The Future

My current to-do list looks something like this:

- Finish developing Nebula: Pull & Write and publish it. This includes getting artwork, having a professional graphic designer make it look good, setting up a marketing campaign, launching a Kickstarter, and having it manufactured and shipped. Hopefully by next year.
- Get back to developing Sky Pirates. That game was coming along pretty well but I sort of lost interest in it; I need to reignite that particular flame.
- Get back to designing the Manaforge expansion. I've had one idea (given to me by another designer) bouncing around in the back of my head for a while and I think it might be time soon to let it out of its cage and have it run around.
- Make another attempt at designing Suicidal Cabbages. I could never get it to be truly fun but someone else suggested a change to the type of game (from timing and hand management to push your luck) that sounds like it could work.
- Get back to creating the Mystic Tiger Games branded felt component bowls. I'd like to find a way to construct them more easily and maybe come up with a reliable way to sell them.
- Take another stab at creating an 'art deck' for Manaforge; a standard deck of 54 playing cards that have the artwork from Manaforge on them. There's too much awesome artwork in that game to just let it go unused.
- Design Mystic Tiger pins; small decorative pins with my company logo on them that I can give out as swag to help push brand recognition.

Dunno when I'll get to all of that. :)

Time flies when your environment never changes.

Sure, the world has been going crazy. COVID-19, "Murder Hornets", police brutality, escalating politics, strong hurricane season. Seems like 2020 is set to become a recond year for events.

As for me, I've been hiding at home. Seems like it's still not safe to go out.

Which means that I've had plenty of time to devote to home projects. Including making games.

I've spent the past couple of months putting in as much time as I can into Nebula. I've gone through tons of revisions, changing a mechanic here, making a balance change there, all trying to make my game fun.

And playtesting. Lots of playtesting. I'm glad that Tabletop Simulator and virtual playtesting communities exist online. I've gotten many tests in on my game as it's evolved, and I can easily credit those testers for making my game better.

About Nebula: Pull & Write

For those of you interested in what Nebula is actually supposed to be, Nebula is my attempt at a pull-and-write game. I call it a pull-and-write because it feels awkward to me to call a game roll-and-write when it has no dice. Similarly, I would expect a flip-and-write game to contain cards. This game has neither. Instead, this game's randomization engine is pulling colored cubes out of a bag. I don't know of a better term for that, as I don't know of any published games that use this particular mechanic; I will sometimes call it a "random-and-write" game but even that seems kind of off.

Of course, there's more to it than just the cubes. The game's premise is that each player is stranded on their damaged spaceships in the middle of a nebula, using their ship's tractor beams to vacuum up clumps of dust and gas as raw materials to fix their ships. Players get cubes from them bag, then 'spend' them to move around their spaceship, repairing the ship as they go. Ship squares have a cost (in cubes) to repair them, and a benefit (icons) when repaired. Icons gained are marked on the ship status tracks, and the tracks give VP and special abilities at various spots.

Though playtesting, I learned that while the cubes from bag mechanic is interesting, it's not a big enough source of randomness; the game plays all felt the same. Therefore, the iteration of the game that I'm working on right now also has two types of tiles. There are 'upgrade' tiles that give you special powers, and 'goal' tiles that give you endgame points. Both are obtained over the course of the game, and both are an extra source of chaos. And staying true to the pull-and-write idea, the tiles are pulled at random out of a container. (TTS virtual 'bags' hold any type of object, so I'm using those. Not sure how the physical version will shake out; might direct players to use the box lid or something like that.)

Playtest, Playtest, Playtest

Interested in playtesting Nebula? Or interested in just playtesting in general? Or want to get a game of yours playtested? Join an online testing community! You will need two things: a copy of Tabletop Simulator (on Steam), and the Discord chat program. Discord is free! Tabletop Simulator is not, but it's a one-time $20 cost. (And if you're patient, it goes on sale frequently.) Plus Tabletop Simulator has a massive library of games (called 'workshop mods') that are free to download and play. Just add friends!

All of the communities I'm a part of have presences on Discord. Want to join one? It's as easy as finding the right server. Gil Hova (of Ludology podcast fame) has a list of Discord servers that are accepting new people. The servers are at many spots in the U.S., plus at least one server in Europe. (Seems like there should be more; our friends across the pond need attention too!) Whatever time and day you want to play, you should be able to find something that suits you. Try this link:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1XsXtPUtg8oGkirfdVRSPds5ywStqoO2p0fZjbPWSFKI/edit#gid=0

Looking to the Future

In an ideal world, I would be planning on launching Nebula on Kickstarter near the end of this year. I don't know if that's a realistic goal. I'm still hammering out the game's mechanics, though it feels like they're starting to settle down. I will need to start the process of getting publicity for the game. I will need to start commissioning artwork and getting other bits of game polish done. I will need to start pricing out the production process and figuring out costs. I will need to start setting up shipping and fulfillment. I have not done any of this yet. Plus, launching a Kickstarter game around the holidays pretty much guarantees that I'd be fighting with holiday gifts for a slice of people's wallets. It's starting to look like a Kickstarter launch in the first month or two of next year might be more realistic. But who knows; I'm not quite at the point where I can decide this stuff. It all depends on how much more progress I can make on the game in the world environment.

If anyone is interested in helping test but aren't sure how to contact me, feel free to send me an email! (The address is on the About page.) The more eyes I can get on my game, the faster it will become a thing!

So...  yeah. Weird times we're living in right now.

While 2020 didn't exactly have the best start, I never imagined that we'd end up with a worldwide pandemic. And I had no idea how much something like that could affect how everyone lives their lives. How much it could affect the world's economy. How much it could affect interpersonal relationships. How much it could affect everyone's mental health.

And, of course, how much it could affect the board game industry.

But life, as always, seems to have found ways to adapt. Board gamers are typically an innovative bunch, and it seems like we've found a new outlet for getting games made.

The Internet.

Sure, there's been lots of ways to playtest games without having people be there in person. There are many online play services out there with an enormous library of games available for play; some free, some not. (Manaforge has been available for online play on Tabletopia and Tabletop Simulator since around when it was published.) There are also several services available for doing voice chat with friends, and games can even be played using a few videoconferencing services.

But now, since gathering in groups is not a good idea at the moment, use of those services for board gaming has gone from a novelty to a necessity. And, all things considered, that's not so bad.

Sure, playing games online is more awkward that normal; there's often more setup involved, there are technical glitches that might disrupt games, it's sometimes hard to learn a new gaming interface, it's takes more effort to see everything that's going on, and simple movement of game components takes extra work.

But for every downside, there's an upside. You can play games with friends on short notice instead of having to plan a time and place to gather. You can play games with people from around the world. You can play games with people you've never met before (and would never let into your home or meeting place). You can play games without having to find a sitter for the kids. You can even play games in your pajamas if you really want to! (Because who cares what you're wearing if they can't see you? :)

And, most importantly for game development, you can get a new set of fresh perspectives on your game. While it's nice to have a dedicated group of friends to help test your creations, a larger pool of testers equals more perspectives equals more opinions and ideas and identification of flaws in your games and how they can be improved.

And that's the new normal for right now. And I'm happy that it's helping to push Nebula forward.
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​Nebula Online

In order to keep in touch with a lot of my gamer friends, both for playing games and for playtesting, I've been using Discord a lot. Discord is a great service; just about anyone can set up a server and invite their friends. The voice quality is good and it's not particularly difficult to use. I now have a ton of servers that I'm connected to and it's great for keeping in contact with the various groups.

One group in particular I've been in contact with is a group of game creators and playtesters located in New York. Due to the virus outbreak, they've ramped up their online testing, welcoming anyone and everyone into the group. They are a fantastic bunch, full of good game ideas and good feedback. I've playtested several games by other players, and so far I've gotten Nebula to the virtual table once, with more to come soon. My playthrough was very informative, with lots of suggestions for mechanical improvement and streamlining. (Of course, I'm not going to implement everything that was suggested, but a lot of it was very good feedback and I'm incorporating a pretty good sized chunk of it into my game.) Can't wait for the next time I'm able to get my game out there.

BTW... if you're interested in joining the group, it's still open to everyone! Use this link: bit.ly/join-rem-play. You will be taken to a short document to read, followed by a questionnaire to make sure you actually read and understand the document. (The info in the doc can be summed up as 'how to not be a dick'...  it's just some info on etiquette and such.) Even if you're not making a game yourself, you're still welcome! If you like playing new games, the games you'll find on these playtests haven't even been published yet, so you're guaranteed to be able to try something new! :)

Virtual Game Conventions

One other thing to have grown out of the current gaming climate is the rise of online conventions. Since so many physical conventions and events have had to cancel due to the virus, a few enterprising individuals have stepped up and created virtual versions of the conventions. Gaming areas, playtesting rooms, vendor halls, artist alleys, discussions and panels... all the perks of being at a convention without leaving your house. (And without having to put up with the smell of sweaty gamers and heat from poorly air-conditioned rooms.)

Since I'm a member of the Indie Game Alliance, I feel I have to mention their upcoming convention. It's called "Play Unconventionally" and it aims to recreate the convention experience as much as possible. There have been other such conventions announced, but as far as I know this is the first one. If you're interested, take a look here: www.playunconventionally.com



And that's really all that's been going on right now. Stuck at home with plenty of free time means I get to keep hammering on my game. With luck, I'll have something publish-worthy by the end of the year. Here's hoping!

Happy 2020 Everyone!

Wow, two months since I've last posted. Where did the time go? I guess there hasn't been a ton of new developments, but there are a couple.

Nebula

The bulk of my time over the past couple of months has been going into my Nebula roll-and-write game. (Picture above.) While I'm not completely ready to divulge all the details of the game, know that I've been through a ton of iterations since I last posted. (Last time I was on...  what...  version 2? I'm working on version 10 now.)

The game has been coming along relatively well. Sure, I've had some failures; I've tried a bunch of mechanics that didn't fit well or just didn't work at all. But each time I cut something and try something new, it feels like I'm inching a bit closer to the goal. (I kind of lost that feeling with the other projects I was working on, hence why this one has captured my attention so completely.)

Without giving too much away, at least I can mention the game's (possible) theme:

- The theme of Nebula is that the players are captains of cargo ships travelling through FTL. Each ship hit an unknown space anomaly and was forcefully ejected from lightspeed, getting badly damaged in the process. The only two pieces of good news are that the ship's power reactors are intact and functioning, and the ships are stranded in the middle of a gigantic nebula, meaning there is a virtually unlimited supply of raw materials nearby to repair the ships with. The players are using their tractor beams to suck up clumps of gas and dust and using that to fabricate replacement bits to get their ships working again.

One glitch I've already hit is the name; I don't think I can keep the name Nebula because there is already a game with that name. Granted, it's over 40 years old, but I still don't see the point of tempting fate. I'm trying to decide if I should just change the name a little (call it "Nebula 13" or "Nebula 4913" or "Nebula Roll & Write" or somesuch like that) or try to come up with something completely new. All of the completely new names I've been able to think of just don't fit the feel I'm trying to go for.


Escape Winter Convention 2020

In other news, the first run of the Escape Winter Convention happened this past weekend. Great stuff! This one was created by the people that previously ran the Dice Tower Con in Orlando, so you know they know what they're doing. Unfortunately for me, I managed to get sick right before the convention started so I was kind of dragging throughout the whole con and couldn't enjoy it to its fullest, but at least I managed to get a few games in. Here's what I was able to play:

- ​Fleet: The Dice Game (4/5 Liked) [own]

I picked this game up 'for research purposes' as someone suggested it would be an example of well done roll and write; I should be able to take some inspiration from this game. Turns out this was pretty good advice. I think this is a solid, if complex, take on a roll and write game. The core mechanic is pretty simple; twice per turn, roll a pool of dice, and everyone drafts one. Each player gets the effect of the die they drafted, plus the one leftover die that nobody drafted. Each die effect lets you mark off boxes in a particular section of your player sheets. Each section has various bonuses that activate when enough spaces are checked off. But that simple rule doesn't say anything about the staggering array of options that you have to pick from. In fact, I'd say the game's only major weakness is that there is a huge number of strategy options and you really can't grok them all until you've played the game a couple of times. I'm glad I picked up a copy of this as I can see it will get a lot of use, both as a good short-to-medium length game and as an example design to work towards.

- Azul: Summer Pavillion (4/5 Liked)

I really liked the first Azul game. The second, not so much. I'm happy to say that I like this third one as much as the first. The tiles are diamond-shaped instead of square, and you're making starburst patterns instead of a square mosaic, but otherwise it's a very similar to the previous games with the immediate scoring for adjacency and endgame scoring for completed patterns. Placing tiles around certain board features will allow you to take more tiles from a designated bonus pool. More than just losing points for taking the first player tile and 'dropping' tiles, now you also lose extra points for all the tiles you take along with the first player tile, so if you can see yourself getting hit with that then taking it early to minimize the damage is a possible option.  Finally, some tiles are wild, but the color of which tile is wild changes in a predictable pattern so you can plan ahead for what tiles you want to hang on to. Overall I think it's a solid addition to the Azul family and I'll be happy to play it again.

- Silver & Gold (4/5 Liked) [own]

Technically a roll and write game, but not really what you'd think of when mentioning the term. This is a very quick and light tetris-style game that lets you write on its cards. Each 'treasure map' card has a small grid of squares that must be marked off to complete the card and get its points. Each player has two such cards out at a time, and immediately gets a new one when one is completed. Each turn, a card with a polyomino pattern is flipped over, and players must mark off squares on their cards corresponding to the pattern, with the ability to flip and rotate the pattern. Some treasure cards have other features like X symbols (let you mark other squares for free) and coins (bonus points). Most points wins. Quick, easy to learn, and enjoyable. The gimmick of writing on the cards struck me as odd at first but quickly made sense and fit right into place. A friend gifted me her copy and I don't think I'm ever going to get rid of it. :)

- The Quacks of Quedlinburg: The Herb Witches expansion (3/5 Neutral)

So, I definitely liked the Quacks base game when I first played it. I was eager to give the new version a try; expanding the game to five players seems like a big plus to me. While that in itself was good, it seemed like the rest of this expansion fell flat for me. The expansion adds two new 'sets' of effects for the bag tokens, three one-shot 'witch' powers usable by all players, and one new type of bag token: Locoweed. Granted, I've only played the base game with the 'Set 1' effects (good for beginners, I'd think) so I'm not familiar with how the game changes with the various effect sets, but it seems like the effects in the expansion just weren't that appealing. The new token type was almost completely unused in our game. One witch power was really nice, the others mostly useless. Really the mvp of the game was the 6-power orange pumpkin tokens, which I never had the resources to buy; the player that won managed to get two of them. I might enjoy the expansion more now that I understand how some of the new effects work, but as of now the expansion is a take-it-or-leave-it proposition for me; I'll play with it if someone else has it but almost definitely won't be buying it.


Mystic Tiger Games Store Closing Soon

On a slightly sad note, I'm going to be closing my web store soon, probably within the next week or two. While I have made a few sales through my store, I'm definitely not bringing in enough revenue that way to justify keeping it open.

However, all is not lost! Besides being available at larger conventions through the Indie Game Alliance, and working with Atheris Games to make my games available at smaller conventions, my games will also be available through Cool Stuff Games! If you haven't already, pop over to their website and give them a look. Good news is that, if you've gotten a gift certificate or discount code for their site, then you can put that towards a copy of Manaforge! Oh, and if you don't mind a little bit of box smooshing, they have 'damaged' copies as well that you can get for a bit of a discount.

I'm not sure if it'll work like this, but theoretically this link should search their inventory for my games:
https://www.coolstuffinc.com/sq/?page=1&submit=search&s=bg&f%5BPublisher%5D%5B%5D=Mystic+Tiger+Games%2C+LLC


Thanks for reading everyone! Have a good 2020!