Ridere, ludere, hoc est vivere.

Saturday, September 18, 2010

Developers tweaking ...

I just heard from my developers, who are working on "PDO's Eagerly Awaited Game."  They really like the overall design.  There are a few changes they want to make to some rules to clean it up a little and simplify some things.  Sure enough, they'd pretty much zeroed in on the one or two weak areas that I wasn't altogether crazy about myself. 

I had invented a pretty convoluted rule for what to do when your piece lands on another player's piece, and writing it all out ended up taking up maybe a quarter or a third of the whole rulebook.  Well, that just doesn't make sense for a rule that's supposed to handle a contingency case.  So we're going to fix that.

I also have a few immunity cards in the original prototype that we think might just be too powerful.  I'd really hate to put out a game, only to have it end up that "whoever gets card x usually ends up winning."  Who would want to play that twice?  So we're kicking around some ideas to mitigate the power of those cards while keeping the intended effect of having them in the deck. 

I've been thinking a lot lately about what makes a game a success.  I have a few thoughts for tomorrow on what makes a game a failure.

Meanwhile, may your game closet be full of successes, and your game room full of friends to play them...

2 comments:

  1. Well, if you have to drop some cards from the game, just think...you can work on them for a while, tweak them a little, and then release (say it with me)...an EXPANSION!

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  2. Oh, don't think I haven't thought of THAT! I'm even thinking of expansion maps (a la Power Grid).

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