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.

Creating Each Region

We started building out regions last night, working from Alex’s world map. Building the regions is a lot of fun. Its neat seeing the world take shape. Each area presents different obstacles and is filled with different encounters, and we’re trying to make sure each region presents players with interesting choices.

I really don’t know how we’ll be able to playtest a game with the sheer amount of content that Kalimundar provides. Getting through a single region could be difficult, but traveling across several is an epic adventure. Which is, of course, the idea.  But even if we’re spending only 30 minutes in each region, thats still 35 hours of game play. Thats nuts!

Each region is an area about 10 hexes wide. If our vessels can travel at about 30 mph, which is around the top speed of existing submarines, then in a 24 hour day they can travel 720 miles. (Kalimundar’s days are based on earth time, because no one ever really sees the sun living entirely underwater, and it has very little axle tilt, no moons or close celestial bodies to influence much in the way of seasons) Since at full speed a ship can cross 3 hexes in a day, that means that each hex within a region is roughly 240 miles wide.

Painting Minis

The minis I ordered finally arrived! So, the process begins…

First steps is to get them cleaned up.

The Very First Dive

So clean.

Then gotta apply the base coat of black. This is my quick way of doing minis. I don’t actually have the patience to paint 9 guys and spend hours on each, so I like dry brushing. Creates a dirty shadowy effect right away.

And finally, some Engineers ready for duty:

Tactical Deck

The Tactical Deck, previously referred to as the Encounter Deck, is kind of like a library of possible encounters that can be used to create each region’s unique combination of possible encounters. Right now we have a total of 60 Encounter Cards depicting ships, creatures and random things your vessel may happen upon, each with their own chances to do various activities and the depths at which they can be found (since its possible to dive to different depths and therefore avoid certain encounters.)

When you enter a new region, whomever is in charge of the Tactical Crew is responsible for quickly going through the library of cards and building the Unique Tactical Deck for the new region. It will consist of between 10 – 15 cards. At the end of each turn the Tactician burns as many cards as spaces the ship moved and then draws the next card, turning it face up for all to see. This method ensures that players don’t comb through a region and draw every single card.

It is possible for players not to move the ship, thus burning no cards and flipping through the Tactical Deck one card at a time to see every card in that deck before reshuffling. But the downside is that players can only face mobile encounters in this way, so they will discover no hidden treasures but they may be confronted by hostile creatures and traveling ships.

Honestly, in this game it seems like the less Encounters drawn the better, since theres a good chance of dying in a fight. So moving as quickly as possible is desirable, to complete your quest and win the game.

Making the World

Now that I’m pretty happy with the mechanics of gameplay, I’m starting to get to the point where some world design is needed. This is a tricky task. A lot of thought and revision will have to go into it, where the cities are, why they are there, the routes between them, the resources available. Luckily I’ve got a lot of help (currently Matt and Alex H.) and also a lot of expressed interest in helping me to write the stories that will involve all the small details of indivual regions and locations. There will be a lot of back story available about everything; I think this will help make the whole game a much richer experience.

Mr. Havens sent me a very rough world layout, which I share here only because I’m so excited about this stage of the game (its far from finished, this may actually be the very first draft of the world):

Regions and Routes of the Trench World

Its complex because the layout of the world must both be great for gameplay and also make sense logically within the story. We’re working on getting these elements in tune with each other. Eventually every single hex will be a region players can fully explore. I’m guessing an easy mission will span 2-3 hexes, where as a difficult one could cross as many as 10. This will depend on playtesting to see how difficult it is to accomplish.

Revised Engineering Card

This is just a quick mock up of the new ENGINEER deck, which combines the two game properties of drawing a damage card when hit in battle and also the Maintenance roll that used to take place each turn. Now, at the start of the Engineer’s turn, they draw a card and attend to the Maintenance listed at the top of the card. When they take damage, they look at the information at the bottom. It used to be Maintenance was handled by a die roll which would essentially tell the players what systems were failing due to wear and tear. This card based system is much smoother.

Creatures

I sketched up some ideas for the critters which fill Kalimundar’s waters. These are only the big ones which can actively engage your ship in battle, and of these shown here we’ll probably only be using the best ones as Encounters.

Painted Mini

Looks much better painted.

Sculpey and Feedback

I got a little creative last night. It occurred to me that we need an awesome looking ship marker to move around on the board. Up until now we’ve been using a little piece of poster board with a ship printed onto it (lame). So I got out my modeling tools…

…after after a half hour of working (at about 2 AM) and 10 minutes of baking (at 2:30, hey, you gotta strike when the irons hot, and inspiration chooses its own schedule) I crafted my first attempt at our spaceship miniature. Here it is unpainted:

"No quarter!"

Yeah, its small. Putting that detail on there was very very hard. I hope to paint it soon. Probably just some silvers and rust colors, maybe a little dark blue. Fits perfectly on our hex maps:

After putting this one together, it occurred to me that maybe I can create my own mold for the miniatures and just plan on crafting all the game components myself for the first finished prototype. Maybe I can even create a few sets of the game to distribute around. We’ll see.

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Also, playtested with Jono and Katie. Oh my God, they are awesome – great with helping me brainstorm. Wow. We talked over the game for hours after just a short cruise to give them a sense of how the game works.

Basically, our adventure consisted of launching the ship, sailing past a deep sea vent and through some scalding hot water. I swear you could hear the ship groan as the temperature changed (and sent our Engineering team running around the ship, dealing with struggling systems). Our pilot took us that way because there was ore to be collected. As we neared the edge of Griffin Region, we sailed through a cloud of murky water (seemingly the bane of my existence) and lo, and behold! a pirate ambushes us!

We fought against him (being pretty well prepared for the fight, since not only was everyone close to their post but our Lead Engineer, Katie, had been resting her crew and had accumulated some Morale to burn). By the time he managed to hit us once, we had hit him twice and were targeting him for the final blow. And thats when he surprised even me… he entered into retreat mode, due to his heavy damage! Awesome!

In retreat mode there is a collection of desperate actions, but this pirate chose to fire up his Emergency Thrusters and shot off into the murky cloud! I had never seen a pirate do this before. It was awesome. Sadly, we didn’t defeat him so we got nothing out of it, but the responsiveness of the AI is astounding.

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After the playtest, we spent about 2 hours discussing other options and feedback. General opinion was that Kalimundar rocks completely. The feedback they had was great, too, about how to move certain layouts around among other suggestions. Can’t wait to make some edits and go back for round two. Maybe we’ll get that pirate this time.