Upcoming Playtest

So, this is definitely premature, but I get excited about the mere prospect of cool art in my game. Today I was speaking with one of the artists who works for the company I work for. She was once an animator for Disney, and we discussed the possibility of her doing some of the art for Kalimundar. Check out her stuff:

http://molliesketches.blogspot.com/

Pretty freaking amazing.

In other news, Kalimundar is due for another playtest this weekend. I’ve redone all the cards and the board. Hopefully it is kick ass. I’ve got high hopes.

Also, I played a neat game the other night called Ghost Stories. It was a great chance to see yet another co-op game in action. I’ve played Battlestar, Arkham Horror, and Shadows Over Camelot. All have interesting mechanics that make them more than just playing the board (traitors, cylons, and more) but I’ve often wondered if my highly theme-driven adventure game will hold up under gamer scrutiny. The game itself has to be a puzzle with enough randomness to be entertaining, involving skill and some luck without making players frustrated at unbeatable challenges beyond their control. It seems like the way co-op games stay interesting is by being very hard, requiring good use of strategy AND some good luck as well. This weekend, we’ll see how well the revised Kalimundar delivers.

Race Cards

Hammering out the redesign of the newest prototype. Here are some Race Cards (which provide ship stats as well as a one time use special ability which can be recharged in Port only.)

Race cards with temporary stand-in artwork.

Ok, Kalimundarians.

Wow, I’ve been busy lately. Development on the game’s been slow, but not for lack of me thinking about it. The new prototype board is sitting on my desk, just waiting for a trial run. I feel as though the cards need to be revamped before a real playtest can happen, but that might not be totally true. Matt and I could probably run through it and do some good at this point, but I really want to polish up some things first.

I had 2 ideas today. Sometimes if you put things away for a while, a great idea will come to you out of nowhere. Here they are:

1) The Encounter Decks used to be roughly 15 card decks with between 5 – 10 different card types. When drawing, you’d cross reference the Depth on the Encounter card with your own Depth to see if you Encounter it. Turns out this sucks. We’d forget to do this all the time, and end up facing challenges we shouldn’t have, and also it sucks to draw a card and instantly discard it if your Depth doesn’t match. Very anticlimactic.  So we scrapped that idea, and now Depth does something else entirely. The new encounter decks will consist of 6 ‘Open Water’ cards (no encounter), 1 – 2 ‘Murky Water’ Cards (which make you draw another card with no chance to avoid it) and then 2 – 4 Encounters (ships, creatures and hazards) plus 1 Random encounter card (to keep things interesting and add the element of surprise.)

2) Most encounters lead into Fights or Confrontations. In a fight the encounter acts, and then the players act. Repeat. In a Confrontation, the encounter acts and then departs (such as a trader who offers to trade and then sails off.) One element missing here is an in depth approach to Hazards… lets say you encounter a massive cloud of floating ship debris. You obviously cannot have a fight with it, because its mostly just sitting there. Even if it took ‘actions’ such as ‘You are struck by a drifting hulk of debris!’ there is no intent behind the encounter, and therefore I imagine it would come off sort of dry. I’m not ruling this method out, but my idea was to have what I’ll call Passive Hazard Encounters.

Instead of the Ship Debris hazard rolling to do an action against the players and have them respond back and forth, I think this new class of encounters might function on a different mechanic. Perhaps players are presented with several choices:

1) Go around

2) Quickly pilot through

3) Carefully pilot through

4) Blast through

5) Scan for Cargo

6) Radio for advice

Each option then has MODIFIERS and RISKS. Modifiers are resources or requirements that can be met to increase the chance of success. Lets say to succeed you have to roll a 9 or greater on a 6 sided die. Each Modifier you meet adds +1 to your roll. If you roll an 8 or less, you face the Risks, which could include all kind of negative stuff.

1) Go around – MODIFIERS: Power, Crew in Scanning – RISKS: Lose 1 Fuel

2) Quickly pilot through – MODIFIERS: Power, Morale, Crew in Bridge – RISKS: Take Damage

3) Carefully pilot through – MODIFIERS: Power, Crew in Scanning – RISKS: Exhaust Module, Draw New Encounter

With these encounters mixed into everything else, it introduces a whole other kind of challenge. Off the top of my head I image: Thick Kelp Beds, Debris Fields, Pods of Docile Creatures, Ice Shards, Caves, Mountains, Ship Traffic, and more. Certain choices might have advantages too, such as Scanning for Cargo might yield valuable goods or even new Modules, but the risks might still be in place.

Power Generation

A new element of the design has been to incorporate POWER GENERATION and ALLOCATION as Day Actions. Depth plays an important role in this, as power can only be generated at the top level near the ice (this might be too restrictive, in which case power generation will not be limited to only the surface but strongly encouraged with some kind of bonus, like you generate 3 Power at the top and 1 at all other Depths.)

The dilemma I’ve been considering is that changing Depth uses Power. Therefore, what happens if you run out of Power while you’re not at the top (power generation) Depth?

One idea I came up with is that your ship has a safety system that automatically makes it drift to the top level should you loose all your power. I’m not throwing that idea out without testing first, but now I’m leaning towards fate more drastic. If you run out of Power, game over. Your life support dies and your crew is doomed. Seems brutal, but hey, its a co-op game. There needs to be lots of things to fear sprinkled in. And if this is the way I decide to go, then the ‘default float to the top” method can be implemented as a module you can buy in case something like this happens.

New Board

This is before I glued everything down.

I’ve finished the first draft of the new board. Its not much to look at, but its purely for prototyping and playtesting. I am trying a new thing where I make things as rough (but clear) as possible to prevent myself from getting caught up in the artistic side. I know I talk about this a lot, but it really is my weakness. Every time I sit down to work on Kalimundar, I dream about how amazing it will look with all the final art.

Everything glued into place and labeled properly.

I imagine the whole game will have a dark, rusty, beat-up feel to it. The ship will be very detailed, so that you can see all the panels and switches, spare boots strewn across the crew quarters and tools scattered about engineering. Wires and cables run everywhere, and the dim walkway lights cast shadows across the cramped rooms and corridors. You’ll also be able to see the outside of the ship, which will be beaten and speckled with strange hard-shelled sea creatures, as well as the murky depths all around the ship, filled with schools of alien fish, kelp leaves, bubbles and floating specs of debris. It will be epic to match the game itself!

The green counters represent power which gets used up as systems are activated.

Ship stats are no longer assembled by mixing and matching board sections; instead, each crew will be of one of the three races, Cesson, Amok or Iligo. Each race has a backstory and specific strengths. For example, Cesson are warriors. If you’re the Pilot and you choose to be a crew of Cesson, you add +2 Strength to the Hull of your ship and also gain the racial ability “CESSON: When hit, decide which section of the ship is damaged” Racial Abilities are powerful one-time use effects that can only be “refreshed” by paying your crew while in Port. Right now the abilities we have are as follows (thanks to Matt for coming up with this first draft of abilities):

ENGINEER
ILIGO: Fully Repair 1 module
AMOK: STABILIZE the ship without using power
CESSON: Generate 2 power

PILOT
ILIGO: Change DEPTH during Engineer turn phase
AMOK: SPEED BOOST or break ENEMY TARGET LOCK* without using power
CESSON: When hit, decide which section of the ship is damaged

TACTICIAN
ILIGO: Re-allocate any 1 power
AMOK: Skip TACTICAL CARD draw for this turn
CESSON: Score an automatic hit with a single weapon

*Read “EVADE LOCK”

The next step for me is deck balancing. We’ve now nailed down the ranges of stats for a ship. Next I will look at all the weapons strengths and speeds and compare these against the enemies you can encounter in the game. I want to make sure no enemy is too strong or too weak, and that many require the full use of your ship systems in order to overcome. For example, if activating BOOST (which adds +2 to your ship speed for one turn) might be the difference between taking damage and avoiding enemy fire, then it makes it important for the Tactician to consider. If however the enemy has a very small chance of hitting the ship as is, or is almost certain to hit the ship regardless of BOOST, that totally removes the value of that system. So I need to go through and balance all the cards in this way, in regards to the changes we’ve made.

Power must be generated and allocated now, which is new.

Plus, many mechanics have been changes or removed. Decks need to be reworked to reflect this. Hopefully we’ll be ready for another playtest in the next few weeks.

Combatting the Alpha Dog

This article brings up a good point about trying to avoid having one player take over the entire game in a co-op game.

This article talks about why some co-op games fall flat. I’m pretty confident the AI in Kalimundar avoid these pitfalls and instead falls exactly into the sweet spot he discusses here, with some predictability to avoid total randomness but also not so predictable that you can ’solve’ an encounter. (And I’m very proud of how simple the AI system is. The design does all the heavy lifting, while the players simply roll a die.)

My idea about how to prevent one player from taking over the game is 1) to have lots of options always available that are equally important, so that its not always clear what is the best strategy, 2) each player is in charge of their separate crew and makes the final call as to what they will do, and 3) perhaps there will be a rule that other players are forbidden to offer advice to the active crew unless that advice is requested.

Reference

I want the final board to have the feel of something kind of like this, but much grittier and with a lot more detail added.

New Board

My original idea was to have 9 small boards, 3 sterns, middles, and bows which could be mixed to create 27 different ship designs which would make up the game board. While this seems really cool, I realized that if we’re working hard to balance the ship sections so no one ship design is the ‘best’ then all these options start becoming less and less noticeable (although the concept remains a challenge to design for.) Not to mention the extra cost and time to do artwork and all the materials for printing.

New idea: 1 board/ship layout but now the type of crew you choose changes your ship’s stats. There are three races in Kalimundar, Iligo, Cesson and Amok, each with their own specialty (for example, Cesson build the slowest but most powerful ships. If one person elects for their crew to be Cesson, it will add to their ships Hull Strength but not Speed) In effect, the players themselves set the stats of the ship but only one board needs to be designed and printed, therefore letting me focus alot more on a single, fantastic board.

I’ll get some pictures up here once the new board is designed. Should be soon.

New Idea

Matt and I have been stumped for some time because our ship was short by 1 system. See, each room has a single use during the days, and then 2 other uses (Systems) while caught up in an exciting encounter. So every room has a total of 3 things it can do.

We’ll, we’ve been kind of stuck for the 3rd action in Engineering. Since you actually go to the place where broken stuff is in the ship, you can’t have a REPAIR option. We do have a Reboot / Reload, since Modules get exhausted when used and need to be reset to reuse. Power Generation is another option, but that makes more sense for a day action. Therefore, we were stuck.

But by shifting some things around, I’ve created a new Tactical action and moved one of the previously Tactical things (the EMP which stuns enemies so you can escape) to be an Engineering system. The new idea we’re playing with is this: COMMAND CENTER (Tactical System) – use this system to give each other crew a single action die to roll. Effectively it functions as though the active crew member is helping to coordinate the actions to make the crews perform  more effectively. More after we playtest.

New Progress: Chamber Redesign

Tonight I redisigned the chambers of the vessel, factoring in some of the new ideas for power generation and allocation.

The new room design has spaces for each crew member (the circles) plus indicators for which systems use Power. The top System is the DAY system, which means that is the only use for this room during the days of travel. The lower two option are the Encounter Systems, which are used in an Encounter. Shown here, the Stabilizing and Hazard Control Systems are used during an Encounter and both use up power when used. There are also spaces for “Status” tokens to denote if the chamber is Flooded or on Fire, or if the Systems require Maintenance or Repairs.

This design is still very much for prototyping and will later be totally revamped (assuming this design works and doesn’t need a whole other overhaul.)

I really like the new system of power usage and I hope it works. The idea is that Engineers generate power and the Tacticians allocate it. Vital systems like Scanning, Bridge and changing Depth use Power every day, so the Tactician and Engineer should be plenty busy making sure there’s Power where there needs to be.  In practice, there might still be too much going on for the Engineer during the Days and not enough for the Tactician, but if thats the case I might give both Power generation and allocate to the Tactician.

Another thing I’d like to try is giving the Tactician’s Scanning room a duel function: 1) check the Tactical Deck and see if an Encounter occurs, if it does the Tactical crew in Scanning may choose to bypass it if they have enough crew in Scanning (taking into account the Encounter’s difficulty to avoid + the visibility of the current Depth) … if they do so, they may draw a new Tactical Card but must face it; 2) if the ship has no Encounter, then the Tactical crew may place resource tokens in marked areas on the map, signifying they have Scanned and discovered collectable, valuable resources. The Pilot may choose to scoop these up at a later time by traveling through them while at the lowest Depth.

I’m really starting to feel good about the interaction of different roles. They feel much more dependant upon one another than before, which is good. I hope to get the new ship boards finished and printed soon so I can run the ship through another playtest.