Lull

Been pretty busy lately, so the game design has slowed. Also responsible for this, however, is the fact that much of the first draft is designed and awaiting more playtesting. For a long time I couldn’t imagine exactly how this game was going to work. Now its all put together in a functional form, and really just needs polish. We need to balance the numbers, costs of things and smooth out certain mechanics… but the game is more than playable. I wonder how much more smoothly it will run when all the artwork is in, the graphic design is finished, and the rules are clearly laid out.

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.