Name Brain Storming

I’ve gotten a lot of feedback on names. I’m going to post a lot of it up here to keep track of all the good words and comments. Thanks to everyone for contributing ideas!

Kalimundar – A deep sea adventure game

The Mariners of Kalimundar

The Drifters of Kalimundar

Navigating Kalimundar

Journey to Kalimundar, Discovery of the Undersea Empire

Abyssos (greek)
Journey to the Deep
Adventures Below
Deep Expeditions
Exploring the Depths
Fathoms Below
A World Below
Sunken Creation
Sunken World

“KALIMUNDAR is a great name. Sounds mysterious, ancient and alien!”

New Atlantis

Poseidon

Blue Chamber
Deep Chamber
Water Chamber
Ocean Chamber
The Chamber

“…Also I agree that KALIMUNDAR is awkward sounding, even a bit forced.”

MARINERS OF UNDERSEA

“It feels both grammatically incorrect and generic. Not feelin’ it. I think the word “Mariners” in general is pretty blah, and “Undersea” isn’t doing it any favors.”

“It seems like a lot of the suggestions have been heavy in the undersea, diving, water categories. I’ve been following your game for a little while now, and I don’t think you should emphasize water or oceans in the title of the game. What makes your game stand out is the crew and the ship. So in that sense, I agree with names like “Mariners of Kalimundar” or “Journey to Kalimundar.”

Sub Aqua

“If you do go with a made-up word, it should be a shorter one so that people can remember and pronounce it more easily.”

DeepSea

Undertow

Aquanauts

Deep Abyss

Abyssal Plain

Crush Depth

LiquiQuest
LiquiTrek
MariCruz
MariVoyage
CruzOps
ExplorOcean
SpaceMerge
SeaPact

Current Tasks

Haven’t had much of a chance to work on the game this week, but this is whats on my mind:

1. Finishing the Comm Deck: going to try only adding Local Tasks, not tasks that take you to other regions, and increasing hte value of hte cards in this deck as a whole

2. Put into writing a solid turn order for all players

3. Test to see if the Tactical Officers drawing and then moving around guys, during the day, will work

4. Figure out a good name!

5. Playtest again…

Start Small

Matt and I worked on a game design not long ago that we were very excited about. It was to be the sequel to the game I’ve already published, GUBS. The game was called GUB ADVENTURES. We made a mistake while designing GUB ADVENTURES however, which really sucked at the time but taught me a great lesson.

Concept Art for GUB ADVENTURES

Our excitement drove us to craft up as much of the game as we could imagine. We created hundreds of cards which we printed and prepared. Then, as we begun playtesting, I came to a sad discovery: the game was not fun. Or maybe that’s not entirely fair of me – the game was not GUB ADVENTURES. It was not the sequel I was trying to make, and I was very sad to have spent so much time developing a bunch of cards that failed to accomplish my goal.

So I realized something tonight with Kalimundar, in regards to the region creation. Seeing as how a whole adventure can take place in 1-3 regions, it really would be foolish to set out to create the 70 regions I intent the game to include right off the bat. I currently have about 15 regions finished. I think what I’ll do instead is work on really developing those regions well and then playtest the heck out of them, using that time to balance the other decks and game mechanics. Then, once everything else is hammered out, I can continue to add regions until we reach either my original goal of 70, or decide on a better number.

Playtest 3

Played with my brother tonight.

We ran the same mission as before. He was the Pilots, I ran the Engineers and Tacticians. We made it through 3 regions and successfully docked at the Karasou Medical Facility, but not without taking some damage fending off a Pirate (a Harpooner, the worst kind – known for killing the crew and destroying the ships of their prey, morale instantly drops at the sight of their fearsom vessels) We avoided some Ice Worms, successfully bypassed some Patrolers and traded a few times with Kelp Harvesters.

A few observations:

1) My prototype is still rough. We ran into a few cards that needed work, but this is the whoel point of prototyping.

2) The Turn Order: each day, the Engineers act, then Pilots and finally Tacticians. Each group draws a card and then reacts, except for the Tacticians who must allocate their guys before drawing a card. This seems weird, and it occured to me that all crews could allocate first and then draw a card. The only thing this might reduce is the choice of the Pilot, who decides ‘do I want this Comm Card enough to sacrifice movement to get it?’ Which leads me to my next point…

3) Since movement is so valuable, I realize that the Comm deck must contain nothing but highly valuable cards if the Pilot is to be choosing between focusing on picking up transmissions or moving the ship. This isn’t hard. I just need to make the rewards of the Comm deck much greater.

4) During Encounters, Tacticians fire weapons and are very valuable. During the Days however, they choose between scanning (redrawing Encounter cards if you don’t liek what you get) or gathering resources (which gets you money, but isn’t even an option if your cargo holds are full of something more valubale than whatever is available). But the answer to this might lie in the Comm Cards as well. If some Comm Cards have requirements, such as ‘Place 2 Crew in Diagnostics to accomplish X and receive tons of goodies’ then Tacticians may be more readily used to accomplish said tasks. That would pull them around the ship more and make ‘I leave all my guys in Scanning’ not an issue.

5) Prices of cargo could be simplified, perhaps to avoid odd numbers (which I find more difficult to calculate in my head). Although players might benefit greatly from just having a calculator handy, too. Although most people who play games of this nature are very good at math, so this might not be an issue at all. It just gets tricky when you have FISH cargo, which sells for 3 each, and you’ve gathered 13, and you have a card that tripples their worth…

6) I put flavor text on certain cards, but I honestly think the game might benefit from removing that. Players can use their imaginations better if they are given an idea rather than a sentence of description, I think. This is all fluff for now though, I should focus on mechanics.

7) New way of firing weapons worked out great.

That’s all for now. Alex (my brother) said he felt the game has lots of potential and he enjoyed himself.

New Decks

This weekend I finished printing, cutting and folding the new decks: Tactical (previously called the Encounter Deck), Engineering (which includes Damage Cards and also the Maintenance mechanic), and the Modules.

Tactical – contains every possible encounter in the game, sorted into 3 groups: ships, creatures and random. Random includes things like Murky Water, Seaquake, Shipwreck, etc. The Tactical Officer will be in charge of creating from this ‘library’ of cards the unique Tactical deck for each region as they enter it. This might seem like a hassle, but it takes very little time and provides an encounter set unique to each region.

Engineering – each card contains 2 sets of info: first, a Maintenance Duty and second a Damage Result. Maintenance is checked each day and requires the Engineers to move around the ship, keeping it running. If they start to slip up, there is a small chance that ship Systems will become damaged. In combat, when your ship takes a hit, Engineers cnsult the second half of this card to see which Modules or System have become damaged, if any crew are hurt in explosions, if there is flooding or fires, and whether or not the entire vessel becomes destabilized.

Modules – this deck contains all the modules that can be attached to the player’s ship. Weapons are also modules. We’ve updated how weapons attack now. It used to use a complicated (but original system) which Matt came up with on the fly and I thought was rather clever. However, in practice we realized that there is so much going on in the rest of the game that a complicated firing mechanic was unnecessary.  So we ditched it in favor of roll 2 dice, one for weapon speed and one for strength. Add weapon modifiers. If both values beat the speed and strength of yor target, you score a hit. Currently all crafts and creatures are defeated after 3 hits, including the player’s ship.

Comm Cards

One very important deck that has yet to be figured out (mainly because it largely depends on the regions, which are currently unfinished) is the Communications Deck. At the beginning of the Pilot’s turn they flip a Comm Card, which will either reveal an advantageous effect of some kind (like so-and-so is offering to buy cargo at 3x the price) or a task that someone is asking for (like fight a pirate in the current region to gain a bounty of 75 money). If the Pilots successfully man the Comm Center, they can receive the card (they can keep a total of 2 Comm Cards at any given time.)

One concern of mine has been the random job offers. Its easy enough to have offers which apply to ‘your current region’ but what if the Comm Card specifies a certain region in the world? Chances are high it will be far enough away from you that the players will almost certainly avoid it, unless the reward is high. So I’ve been trying to figure out how to make a set of random cards that deal you location based tasks that are not always too far away to attempt.

This is my idea so far:

The black dots represent places that will be specified in the tasks. On this map there are 12 locations out of the 70 possible regions. Each location marked here will have 2 cards that specify it as the target region of a task. Since players will be flipping a Comm Card every turn, they should eventually see a task close enough to attempt. Its ok if this element has a high amount of luck, seeing as players will have a choice: do we go for this side quest to get the bonus, or do we focus on our mission?

I’m excited to build out this deck.

Revisions

New materials to be printed today:

Engineering Deck, Tactical Deck, Modules and Encounter Mats

Tonight going to work on finishing more regions (just 60 more to go, woo!) and also create the new Control Panels. Originally the Control Panel, which basically keeps all your ship stats like Damage, Range from Target, Attack Vector and so on, was a whole separate page. The problem with this is that during game play, players end up looking back and forth from the ship to the Control Panel. Instead what I intend to do is shown below:

The new way is to have 3 short, long panels with all the Control Panel functions on them, with each section being related directly to the section of ship is it above. For example, if you change your Depth (done in the bow of the ship, you would set the Depth marker which is in the Control Panel over the bow of the ship)

This will also give me more room to work with.

The Crew is Ready

Finished painting the crew. Still need to finish some officers, which will be wearing grey most likely.

First Glimpse

Here is the ice planet of Kalimundar, its oceans below the frozen surface, just as it must have appeared to the colony ships as they careened dangerously towards its surface:

Region Creation

Matt, Alex and I have been discussing world design quite a bit. How big is the planet? How large a space does our ‘world map’ actually represent? Yesterday I was thinking about it and if each space in the game is 240 miles wide, and there are 10 spaces to the width of a region, and 10 regions to the width of our big map, we have a map that spans 24,000 miles. Which is 901 miles short of the circumference of our Earth. I had imagined that the colonists of Kalimundar had explored a much smaller space, since they have not had a huge amount of time and not a huge population either (between 50k and 100k people). Also, Kalimundar could be a bigger planet than Earth, but I wonder how much bigger it could be before our colonists would have problems with high gravity. I need the assistance of an astronomer, a physicist and a geologist to figure some of this out.

Designing regions is turning out to go fairly quickly and be lots of fun. We now have 11 out of 70 finished. Each one only takes me about 10 minutes or so. I’m focusing on designing cool features, not worrying too much about game balance or overall location of each space. I figure we will take the maps I lay out and edit them to fit well into the big picture.

There was some concern that 70 regions might be too many. After all, a crew could undergo a whole adventure and only travel across 2 regions. Also, Matt shares my original concern that we could be trying to create so many regions that they start to look and feel the same.

But I’ve been thinking:

1) I really want the playing fields to be staggeringly massive. I want players to be shocked by how much there is to explore. This is perhaps the best way to create an epic adventure game where you don’t just wander from fight to fight; where your travels are actually about exploring and becoming familiar with the overwhelming amount of wilderness and pockets of civilization, I think it will create the sensation of an actual adventure. It isn’t simulating exploring on a little board – it is presenting a board that, were it strung together, would stretch to about 7 ft wide. Which is a big space when your ship is only half an inch long.

2) As far as regions being to similar, I am no longer afraid of that happening. First of all, the physical shape of the regions can differ, then the features, the hazards, and the tide lines (which burn fuel) can all be in different spots or consist of differed types. Then the amount of resources available, what kind and where they are on the map. Each region uses a unique Encounter Deck which means different ships, creatures and hazards will be found (or at least different chances for encountering these things). And finally, if there is an installation of some kind in the region, it will have a unique set of services, market place and location. So after considering all these variables, I think we can easily craft up 70 regions that are all different. And even if some are similar, the world map is so large that their placement will affect the overall adventure. And mostly likely exposure to different regions, from a players perspective, will be gradual over a lot of plays.