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.
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.
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