2020 FEBRUARY
Monster Skills
The first 130 skills are ready. I'm now trying to finish and balance the cards for the first two Monster/Champion Line Ups before I develop the remaining 144 Skill cards.
Here is one of them as an example.
There are still many unanswered questions. How are the Skills drawn? How do they become available? Are the costs enough? Is the power structure of "low - power spike - catch up" correct?
Other perspectives
I had some great test games with Leonardo. This gave me some insights, because Leonardo is actually more of a casual player. When you test such a huge game with a casual player, you notice much faster if things are unnecessarily complicated.
Of course the game is more directed to real board game maniacs, but it doesn't hurt to take, for example, unnecessary arithmetic operations out of the game, which hinder the game flow and distract from fun and tactical considerations.
Through Leonardo I came to such considerations. This ended in 6 weeks of work but after that I removed easily 20% of un-fun arithmetics out of the game.
TERRAIN CARDS
I have made a new small set of terrain cards.
The terrain cards are a kind of "locations-light" that the players can look at before distributing them over the battlefield. In contrast, locations are not allowed to be looked at before they get distributed. This allows the player to make some tactical adjustments to the game board without heavily influencing the gameplay as it would be the case, if players were allowed to look at locations before laying them out.
Terrains have small bonuses or small negative effects. The terrains can be converted into real locations by the scouts (the sidekicks of the champions). This prevents the opponent from wallpapering the opponent's side with terrains.
What I noticed is that the quest cards work, but you need many more different ones of them. I think I will increase the number from 54 to 108... Too bad there are not that many Slayer songs... :D
READ MORE TECHNICAL BOOKS
I started reading a very good book. I should read a lot more... but my couch is so comfortable, I fall asleep right away, every time I lie down on it. Maybe I should spend a whole day or a day and a half a week just reading technical literature. Most of the time I make the mistake of reading only when I have a problem in the design process.
This is actually not a good idea. You can't prevent all mistakes and/or misjudgments and reading too much and thinking too much can distract you from creative "doing" and trying out, but even after 2 years I'm still a noob and have to accumulate more knowledge.
What I still want to read is "Building Blocks on Tabletop Game Design" by Geoffrey Engelstein and Isaac Shalev and "Players making decisions" by Zack Hiwiller. I've already read a lot of Jesse Schell's "The Art of Game Design", but I think I should start over and underline everything relevant with a pen.
"Relevant" is always a double-edged sword, though.
"Relevant" changes every day in game design and the human being has a selective brain.
RE-SCULPTING
The re-modeling phase is in full swing and I am in the process of creating a second version of each figure. Here you can see the second version of the level 3 angel "DOUMA".
He is the Heaven's Arms dealer and pays five different angel minions to go to war for him. As you can see on the miniature, one of the angels is integrated in his model.
I think that I will have to replace all angel wings later on, because they will probably be too hard to print. I am afraid of cutting and printing this model... What was I thinking?
