Work Work Work

Hammered out more of the new prototype, plus had an ‘AH HA!’ moment.

1) Created the ‘Battle Die’, a single die that interacts with the combat system to calculate results in a clear and easy fashion. Basically the higher your combat value, the better your chance to hit. There is still a chance of a miss or an instant hit, regardless of combat values, but these are 1 out of 6 odds. Also on the die is a ‘Targeted’ symbol, which means you land a hit if your enemy is currently targeted. Basically, everything you need and you don’t have to compare any numbers or ‘to hit’ values.

2) Finalized modules and weapons. Cleaned them up, made sure every module in the game (these are auxiliary bonus systems you can install aboard your vessel) is interesting and not too overpowered. Adjusted costs and abilities. Printed this deck up and ready to start cutting and folding.

3) My ‘AH HA!’ moment came when I was thinking about Scanning. Scanning has 3 uses: avoiding unwanted Tactical Cards, moving safely through board hazards, and finding resources. I’ve been working on Areas of Interest, which are special areas the ship can enter to search for goodies (at the risk of negative effects.) It occurred to me that perhaps resources are never generated on the map, but instead only gotten by exploring the Ares of Interest. Before you could simply scan a Kelp Bed and the Kelp resource would pop up like a pacman dot, waiting for your ship to swim through and scoop it up. One of the big problems with this is that players can very easily fill their hold, making money much easier to generate and driving the whole economy into higher numbers. If resources are buried in Areas of Interest, players have to work harder for resources and I feel the whole mechanic is far more interesting.

Areas of Interest

One of the many methods used to flesh out the world I refer to as ‘Areas of Interest’. These are places which can be found all over, but by a quick randomizer upon entry are each different. They provide unique opportunities and hazards for the players to explore if they dare.

I have been drawing rough sketches for them because I feel like this is definitely an area where theme plays a large part, and staring at a blank page with only words and boxes on it won’t do them justice even in the play0testing phase.

Rocky Area, filled with caves, spires and quarries.

Diving Back In

Its been some time since I posted up here, but I have not been idle. Kalimundar is a beast, and I’ve been putting in some long hard hours to create the next prototype. I feel so good about it though. All the little pieces which felt clunky before or lacking, the parts of game that caused me to despair and cry out ‘This game will never work!’ have been dissolved. There’s much more to do, but the craft is sea-worthy and is being prepped for another voyage.

Concept sketches from my artist friend Mollie.

As you’ll know if you’ve read through many of my other posts, I’ve made a real effort to avoid trying to spruce up the prototype beyond the bare essentials. Just makes everything take longer and then harder to edit (or cut out) because you’ve become attached. But my friend Mollie drew up some creature sketches (plus a very eager looking sheep) and they give me a little glimpse into what the artwork should be like.

Mollie rocks.

Mockup of possible vessel design.

I created this to just take a stab at what the vessels your crew is piloting might look like. Eventually the board will be a highly detailed view of the inside of the ship, with all the rooms, hallways and systems visible.

These hexes represent the regions you have access to with the base game. They represent miles and miles of space to explore, all filled with intricate details and region-specific creatures, vessels, hazards and resources. All this is built out in a revolutionary way that won’t even hog your entire dining room table, I promise.

Stuff To Do

Boy, oh boy.

I have Kalimundar on the brain. Can’t stop thinking about it. Dreaming about it. The only reason the posts have slowed down is because I’m so busy working on the game I don’t have time to report.

Matt and I played last Saturday. Wow! It was a great session. We decided we’d be pirates and attack every ship we encountered. The first ship was a Vagabond, sort of a shady fellow. He actually offered to sell us some fuel, but we took the oportunity to launch an attack against him. After a long battle (which, as it turned out, we were ill prepared for, due to lack of power) we lost. But we had a blast!

In no real order, here are the things I am working on:

Command Deck: Each player will hold a hand of cards that describe the actions available to him. This should help new players learn the rules (since they will be written on the cards). Also, it helps to keep track of which system use Power and which don’t. Also, mixed into each player’s Command Deck can be Techniques.

Techniques: These are one time use cards which grant special abilities. You gain these at Port mostly. Here are my ideas so far (still need to discuss with Matt):

Hell of a Shot: Play after a successful hit to do 2 damage.
Rally: Play on a Crew member to gain 1 Morale for every other Crew member within 2 spaces.
Clever Power Use: Play to reallocate all Power on the ship.
Sprint: Play to double the value of a single die used for movement.
Shinning Moment: Play to roll 4 dice on your turn.
Jack of all Trades: Your class gains a +3 to all actions this turn.
Quick Reflexes: Play on a Crew member caught in an explosion to move them 1 space and take no damage.
Quick Thinking: Play after rolling to reroll any dice.
Brilliant Maneuver: Change both Range and Bearing.
Run a Tight Ship: Play to remove all Maintenance Markers.
First Aid: Play to move an injured Crew member out of Medical.
Overclock: Play to take 1 damage and charge the EMP.
Jury Rig: Damage any 2 Systems, Modules or Weapons to repair 1.

Damage Deck: Needed some balancing. Not enough fires and too many electric surges. Fires and floods make the Hazard Control system useful, so I had to make sure they were mentioned in this deck.

Boost Moved, New System Added ‘Divert Power’: Boost now can break Target Lock and attempt a retreat (a contest of speeds). It has been moved to the Bridge as a Pilot Encounter Action, and Range and Bearing have been combined into one system called ‘Maneuver’. In Tactical, to replace Boost, we’ve added ‘Divert Power’ which uses a Power in order to move 2 Power between Systems.

Areas of Interest: These represent special areas you can enter on the map that then offer unique opportunities, such as exploring for resources at the risk of suffering damage or delay. They will look something like this:

Area of Interest - Cave

Ports: Currently Ports are just stats that players interact with. Soon they too will be maps, and the way players interact with them will almost be like a mini-game where they can visit a certain amount of places each day, but must pay docking fees for each day they stay in Port.

Port Map

Redesign Comm Deck: This deck needs an overhaul.

Revamp Money System: The entire money system will be reworked so you’re always dealing with smaller numbers.

Revamp Encounter Mats: Lots of edits.

Revamp Control Panels: These could be reworked to be more intuitive.

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.