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Chamale posted:I like this idea a lot. RoboRally is a great game because of the funny things that can happen as your badly damaged robots flounder around. I have fond memories of completely immobilizing my friend's robots and then pushing them into inevitable deathtraps. The game definitely needs malfunctions included somehow, be it permanent effects that can happen when certain components get damaged, or one-shot effects opponents can play on you with a success rate that depends on your level of damage. E.g. "Oops, you meant to attack me, but it looks like your navigation computer is on the fritz and you're going after Tim instead!" or "Oh, you just installed high explosive ammunition did you? I sure hope that engine of yours doesn't overheat, heh heh."
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Nov 28, 2012 19:42
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Railing Kill posted:Also: smaller publishers are probably more willing and able to look at unsolicited submissions, so has anyone had good luck with that? This is what I was going to say. It's like anything - big publishers work with big designers, small publishers work with small designers, unknown publishers work with unknown designers. I mean, you can maybe get a deal with a big publisher if you've really, honestly got the Next Big Thing on your hands, like Dominion... but usually you don't. If you don't have any published games under your belt, and your design is merely good, not earth-shatteringly awesome, then look for a small publisher. If you do think you have a shot with a big publisher, like Mayfair or Rio Grande or whoever, then yeah, you have to try to corner the relevant people at a game show and show them your prototype directly. Even a company like ZMan, which theoretically is open to submissions, typically won't respond to your emails at all. My "success," such as it is, came about because my current publisher (a one-man operation publishing under the name MJ Games... the guy's name is Mounir) saw my games while working for another publisher (FoxMind, based here in Montreal). My games weren't exactly the sort of stuff FoxMind is interested in, but Mounir really liked my stuff, so when he split off to start his own thing, he called me up and asked if I'd found a publisher for Insidious Sevens yet. I hadn't, so off we went... But the great thing for us there is that we got our start together, so there is loyalty between us... he likes my work, and I can come up with good games faster than he can publish them, so he doesn't solicit submissions from other designers, because I can give him everything he needs. And I'm loyal to him, and will always give him the right of first refusal for anything I come up with. He has one other designer for younger kids' games, but for games for older kids and adults, we're pretty well "monogamous." Of course, to get into that sort of business relationship requires a certain amount of luck... there's no way I can think of that you could deliberately go out there and find someone who is serious about wanting to go into publishing, but doesn't have any games out yet. Maybe we need to make the equivalent of a dating site for would-be publishers and would-be designers to hook up.  Outside of that, my best guess would be to hang out at game shows and talk to as many people as possible.In terms of finding an existing publisher, I'd recommend looking for newish publishers that have maybe 3-8 games out, which have been fairly well-received. If those first games have sold well, they've probably got the cash flow to be looking to expand their line, but aren't so big that they're being harassed constantly with submissions, or so well-established that they've got a stable of regular designers who they work with exclusively. xopods fucked around with this message at 19:26 on Nov 29, 2012 |
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Nov 29, 2012 19:20
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Railing Kill posted:I just found ZMan's open submissions policy, but I'll probably not bother sending them an e-mail. If they're not likely to reply, I don't want to waste my time waiting for them if a smaller outfit is much more likely to give me the time of day. If you've got a sell sheet prepared, it's probably worth firing off to them anyway just to see. They do publish an absurd number of games each year, so your odds aren't that slim, even if they're receiving a lot of submissions from others. I wouldn't wait around for them, though... send it off and submit elsewhere at the same time, unless you're looking at a publisher who clearly states that they won't consider simultaneous submissions. The 20+ weeks they're talking about is once you've reached the point of sending them a prototype. I doubt you'd have to wait that long to hear back if you sent them a sell sheet that they found interesting. So even if you wanted to submit to someone else who doesn't consider simultaneous submissions, I think you could send Z-Man your sell sheet and just wait like two weeks. Worst case scenario, you get a bite from the other publisher, Z-Man finally gets back to you several weeks later... in a way that's a good problem to have; you can tell Z-Man you honestly thought they weren't going to get back to you and you're now in negotiations with someone else. They may then be a little more eager to get back to you next time you send them a pitch. It's the same thing with my publisher and foreign publishers... he showed Sultans of Karaya to one guy for some region for possible licensing of the translation rights. The guy said he had to think about it, came back to Mounir a few days later, but in the meantime Mounir had signed with someone else. He said he could see the guy really regretted the missed opportunity, so presumably when Mounir shows him my next game, he's not going to drag his feet as much.
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Nov 29, 2012 20:14
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Nemesis Of Moles posted:If anyone finds any more Small Time Publishers, please post them, I'm looking for people now and I'm not entirely sure my massive contact list of 4 is going to do the trick. I don't think Minion Games was on your list... I have something I keep wanting to pitch to them but never get around to it: http://www.miniongames.com/about-our-company.html
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Nov 29, 2012 20:15
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You could use something on the board (commanding officers, or HQs or something) to determine the number of cards you get to draw each turn... or, to make it more strategic, make them grant "command points" or some such thing, which can be used for a number of purposes, including drawing cards and playing cards (maybe different cards cost e.g. 0, 1 or 2 command points to play, or maybe your first card per turn is free to play, your second costs 1, and subsequent cards cost 2 each). That way, you're combining a game mechanic (how you get and use cards) with an objective (capture/destroy all the opponent's officers/HQs).
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Dec 3, 2012 03:18
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I like the theme, but the mechanics sound awfully dry at the moment, TBH. It sounds a bit like you're trying to go completely top-down for this game, but I think you'll get better results if you work bottom-up for at least part of the design process. By this I mean, instead of asking yourself "how do players get parts off the car?" ask yourself "what are the key decisions players will be making?" This can be directly influenced by the theme or not - if not, you can usually invent some thematic excuse later to make it fit. The worst Ameritrash games come about because of a purely top-down approach to design... if you start with the narrative and work down to the mechanics, you tend to come up with solutions that always involve just rolling dice or drawing cards from decks, because those are one-size-fits-all solutions that can be used to model basically any action you want. The problem is that they displace agency from the actual player to the fictitious game-world character, leaving the player nothing to do but roll dice or draw a card and see if "their guy" succeeds or not. If you ask ten people how players in a game might get past a locked door, you'll get a lot of people saying "draw a key from an Item deck" or "make a die roll to pick the lock," but if you ask what sort of mechanics could could be included in a game about exploring a haunted house, you'll probably get more interesting answers. Given your theme, the mechanics that first spring to my mind are an action point system and hand management. Going from there, you could, for instance, come up with something like:
Then, you start looking at how your mechanics can interrelate:
------ Anyway, you don't have to take any of those suggestions literally, I'm just illustrating how you go about designing from the bottom up; ask yourself what types of decisions you want the players making and what general mechanics could be useful for producing those decisions, and work your way up from there. xopods fucked around with this message at 13:10 on Dec 3, 2012 |
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Dec 3, 2012 13:07
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Better terms are definitely needed, but the BGG monikers of "thematic" games and "strategy" games are not adequate, because when we talk about American-style games and Euro-style games, we're talking about a lot of different things. As for geography, "Eurogame" and "Ameritrash" are historically accurate, even if now you find American companies making Euro-style games and vice versa. "(Continental) European" Design Philosophy
"(Anglo-)American" Design Philosophy
It's understood that most games don't fall 100% into one slot or the other, but it's a definite spectrum, and the distribution of designers and fans is definitely bimodal - more people fall into one camp or the other than enjoy both equally, and more designers lean one way or the other than land right in between. EDIT: Some suggestions... "Loud" games vs. "Quiet" games "Blockbuster" games vs. "Arthouse" games "Maximalist" games vs. "Minimalist" games "Extroverted" games vs. "Introverted" games "Chaos" games vs. "Order" games xopods fucked around with this message at 18:33 on Dec 3, 2012 |
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Dec 3, 2012 18:08
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Crackbone posted:They were never small enough to do so, it's just a convenient shorthand. This. If designers and fans showed a normal distribution, or if choices regarding high- or low-concept theme tended to be made independently of choices regarding explicit or implicit complexity, then yeah, it would be a meaningless distinction. But they're not, and if there's a real distinction, then we need words to talk about it. There are a whole bunch of design decisions that tend to correlate with one another, and most designers and fans are more towards one end of the spectrum than the other. Therefore it's normal and natural to classify games in those categories* and, if a game really is somewhere in the middle, to talk about it as a "hybrid." Anyway, I'm fond of "Arthouse" and "Blockbuster" as terms too. If we can start using those terms in this thread, that's more than fine with me, though it means that newcomers might be confused by them and need to be told that they're our new, politically correct versions of "Euro" and "Ameritrash." *: There are of course other categories of games that don't quite fall on that axis, like party games which have minimal rulesets but high production values, or wargames which have maximal rulesets and low production values... but those are very specific types of games for very specific markets, and particular reasons they don't fall on the "main sequence" of board games. xopods fucked around with this message at 18:46 on Dec 3, 2012 |
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Dec 3, 2012 18:41
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(a) They're not descriptive terms at all, even if they're accurate in terms of where the design philosophies originated. To a non-gamer, they say nothing about what a game is like, whereas Arthouse and Blockbuster refer to something most people know more about, i.e. movies. (b) NoM isn't the only person I've encountered who takes offense at the "-trash" part of "Ameritrash." Arguing about whether something is or isn't derogatory leaves the original point lost by the wayside. That said, I realize that it's far too late for other terms to gain widespread use, so I don't know. We need to be able to talk about design philosophy, but we also need to be able to do it without ruffling people's feathers, but also while being understood. Maybe it's best to just say "American," which is what I usually do. In the post that started this, I included the "-trash" in the phrase "the worst Ameritrash," because the implication was meant to be "what happens when American-style top-down design goes horribly wrong." There are plenty of good American-style games, but most of them show signs that the designer did do some bottom-up thinking here and there. (And conversely, some terrible Euro-style games where a designer was so obsessed with elegance and balance that they forgot to put any fun or variety into their design.) xopods fucked around with this message at 20:31 on Dec 3, 2012 |
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Dec 3, 2012 20:25
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Regarding geographical terms, there's plenty of precedent for this outside of gaming... if you tell me, for instance, that you're going out for Chinese food, I don't assume you're flying to Shanghai to get it. The reason I like arthouse and blockbuster, though, is that I do think they convey the essence of the design philosophy: less is more vs. more is more. But if that's really all I'm shooting at, maybe minimalist and maximalist are more direct and obvious. quote:Hey, what do the Germans call the two kinds? (this isn't the setup for a joke) I don't know, but I'm willing to bet they're both at least 25 letters long and end in -spiel.
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Dec 3, 2012 22:52
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signalnoise posted:Thoughts on this system as opposed to using cards as hit points? Sounds like a game I'd play! I like the idea of making it chess-like, where there's a step in between threatening the attack and executing it, so the opposing piece has to retreat or die. You could also have cover squares, where a suppressed figure doesn't actually have to retreat, but it still gets pinned down and unable to do anything until the suppressing figure moves (or is suppressed/killed itself). Your main danger in positional games is stalemates, where both players have an effective defensive formation and neither player wants to be the first to take an aggressive action... but in your system, the card deck should provide an effective tool for dealing with that. Stalemates might actually become interesting positions, where the action on the board slows down for a moment while the players focus on hand management to try to build up the right combo to crack the opponent's nut. xopods fucked around with this message at 00:06 on Dec 4, 2012 |
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Dec 4, 2012 00:03
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Crackbone posted:Amerikanerdummregel sounds right. Roboterdrachenzombiespiel?
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Dec 4, 2012 03:11
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A positional game where your position along an axis acts as your effective hit points is effectively a pushing game, is it not? I mean, if you're "shooting" and forcing a "retreat," you're working at a distance, rather than literally pushing as in something like Abalone, but it would seem to fall in the same general category.
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Dec 4, 2012 04:30
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I think it sounds too chaotic. It's hard enough to identify the spies in The Resistance, where even a single fail indicates the presence of a spy... for all the added complications to have any real game effect, the possibility has to exist for the good guys to fail a mission by accident because they don't have the right cards, or for the spies to be unable to thwart a mission for the same reason. But if that's the case, the core deduction mechanic is undermined... I like the idea, but maybe you're better off starting from the BSG mechanic rather than the Resistance one, and making a more elaborate version of that (but minus the board and all the other stuff BSG has).
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Dec 4, 2012 05:04
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hito posted:Are pushing games a thing? I've never heard the term before. If there's a canonical "pushing game" or general axioms for them, I'd love some reference stuff. Well, Abalone would be the classic. There's also Push Fight, which I heard about in the Board Games thread. I'm sure there are others that I don't know about... it seems like a somewhat obvious mechanic for abstract strategy games, though it's certainly not done as much as e.g. jump over or land on a piece to capture. As far as non-abstracts go, the only one I can think of offhand to include a pushing mechanic is Robo Rally, although there you're not trying to push someone off the board, but rather into pits and lasers and stuff, which are placed erratically around the board, so there isn't this sense of "distance from the edge = hit points." A lot of strategic-scale wargames also sort of include "pushing" in that the loser of a battle is more often required to retreat (possibly suffering loses) rather than being destroyed outright. So the goal is often to push the enemy's front lines back, or better yet, push through them and create an opening for your forces to get through to the other side. So anyway, it's definitely a thing, but probably an underexplored thing. There's definitely room for a good tactical non-abstract with a focus on a pushing mechanic.
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Dec 4, 2012 15:52
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What if there are three, or four, or five time zones or eras or decades or whatever you want to call them? With an action, you can travel forwards or backwards in time one zone, or do something in your current time period, which might include playing a card into your own field for the era, or playing a card to sabotage something someone else has in their field for that era... maybe by default you move forward one era at the end of each turn to represent the natural passage of time. You can only play a card in an era if its required "inputs" are covered by the previous era's "output" (or perhaps any previous era's output?). If the past cards required to support a given future card are later sabotaged by another player, the future cards are lost to Time Paradox, possibly causing a chain reaction - i.e. an opponent sabotages your Era I recruitment action, which means the Bank Heist in Era II never happened, which means the money wasn't there to buy the Giga-Laser in Era III, so both the heist and laser are lost to a paradox. To maintain balance, cards lost to paradox probably shouldn't just be discarded without compensation... maybe they go back to your hand, or maybe you can come up with some very clever mechanic where they go in a separate Paradox Pile that you can later do something else with, like discarding them for free time travel actions, as being involved in paradoxes slowly makes you become unstuck in time. Or something. EDIT: Or maybe losing cards to paradox gives you Paradox Tokens which allow you to gently caress with causality later... decoupling a card from its origins so that it can survive the sabotage of its precursors, or eventually even bringing future things back in time; once you build up to that Giga-Laser in Era IV, you burn 5 Paradox Tokens to allow you to decouple it from everything needed to build it, so you can bring it all the way back to Era II, giving you the required Destruction to play Hold Europe Hostage in Era III. xopods fucked around with this message at 21:38 on Dec 5, 2012 |
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Dec 5, 2012 21:33
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That's a cool idea too.hito posted:(elimination is thematic, but depending on game length could be unwanted). You could just be pushed forward in time and forced to discard cards from your hand... something about "potential realities that failed to become anchored in time."
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Dec 5, 2012 22:04
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Nemesis Of Moles posted:I'm like, a week away from doing some sellsheet drafts for the thread, Parlay I think might actually be a good, viable game. What sort of response should I expect from the emails I send out? I've been job hunting for 5 months now so I'm used to not hearing a word from anyone, but should I expect at least a 'No Thanks' email? Totally depends on the publisher. Generally, the smaller the operation, the more likely you'll be to receive a response explaining why it's not what they're looking for and what they actually are looking for. The bigger the publisher, the more submissions they're receiving, and the less likely they are to make time to respond to you personally. quote:On that note, how many games do you guys crank out? When I get to work, my process is pretty rapid. Get to Prototype within 2 weeks or so, change up the prototype every other playtest. My prototypes are hodgepodge, full of stolen artwork, temporary lovely art, etc. Is this about right? I probably come up with a game every couple of months, but reject 2/3 of them, so I end up with about two a year that I think my publisher will want. I could probably come up with them a lot faster if I tried, but I've got such a backlog of stuff my publisher wants to put out but hasn't gotten to yet that there's not much point. Hodgepodge prototypes are good, but the mechanics should be nailed down, with nothing left that you're thinking you might want to change. If you're still changing things every second playtest, the game's not ready to show a publisher... try to get to the point where you play it at least a half dozen times in a row without feeling like you want to change anything (possibly a lot more than that if it's a complicated game with lots of potential hidden balance issues).
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Dec 5, 2012 22:12
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Crackbone posted:Xopods, you need to charge for your help! I wish "game design consultant" was a thing! I'll settle for a mention in the "thanks" section of the rulebook if anyone takes my suggestions and ends up getting published. 
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Dec 5, 2012 22:14
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@hito: Sounds good. Only thing I'd say is that a die roll is kind of a cop-out when you want to add uncertainty to something... maybe certain Opportunities give you Timeflow tokens. When you travel back in time, you can pay two Timeflow tokens to guarantee that you end up in the right time. If you don't, then other players have the opportunity to play one token to cause you to end up one era earlier or later. (That mechanic of "pay one to gently caress with your opponent or two to preemptively prevent others from loving with you" is lifted from 1960: Making of the President) @Mt.Trifecta: Multiple locations with decks of 60 cards per location is way too many cards. Beginning game designers (myself included when I was starting out) often try to solve problems by throwing more components in - more cards, more different types of cards, extra tokens and tracks and tiles and and and... Try to find a way to less with more. To tweak your mechanic so either there's just a single deck, or that there are only a small pile of cards for each location, rather than a whole deck.
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Dec 6, 2012 17:27
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hito posted:There's also the issue that, unless I keep this 2p, directly griefing someone is going to pretty rarely benefit you vs. always being defensive. Well, there's a self-balancing thing there. If no one thinks it's worth loving with someone else, then there's equally no point in paying two tokens to protect yourself from being hosed with, right? I guess it would work better if you were using my "sabotaging other players in the past" idea, though... then you'd totally have an incentive to screw with someone's arrival time if you thought they were going to try to sabotage the weak point in your machine while they were there.
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Dec 6, 2012 19:52
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Whatever you do, don't add a bunch of small stuff to your game. Good design is about subtraction, not addition. Usually, if I feel a game is too straightforward after a few plays, I just scrap it entirely and come up with something else... if you are going to add something, though, make it one large thing. Like a whole new layer to the game... and make sure it interconnects with the existing mechanics in multiple ways. The problem with throwing in a bunch of small additions is that they tend to connect with only one prior mechanic, meaning they add explicit complexity while only achieving a linear increase in depth... whereas a good addition is one which multiplies the game's depth with only a small increase in complexity. Good questions to ask... that's a tough one. I'd try to observe the players; if they seemed unsure what to do at a certain point, or made a weird move you hadn't considered, try asking them what they were thinking about. Maybe ask people what they feel they learned about the strategy in one play and what they might do differently the next time... maybe ask if there was anything they found confusing or unnecessarily complicated, or if there was one part of the game that dragged on too long. Maybe ask if there were any decisions where they felt one choice was obviously right and they're not sure why anyone would ever choose something different... xopods fucked around with this message at 03:12 on Dec 7, 2012 |
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Dec 7, 2012 03:04
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Don't have a separate roll for the piloting check. Do the check based on the actual speed roll, and if it's under the piloting skill, offer the choice of turning OR having a speed boost, perhaps of 1/2 the die size. I.e. you're rolling a d10, and your piloting skill is 4. You roll a 2. You have the choice of either turning and moving 2", or moving straight ahead 2+5 = 7". If you roll a 5, tough titties, you're moving straight ahead 5". Do you have a rule in place to make sure people don't skip portions of the track? At a certain point you can trust players to apply some common sense (i.e. no simply doing a little loop around the start line and pretending that amounts to "finishing" the race), but if the track ever doubles back close enough to itself, it sounds like it might be worth just cutting across the gap even at d4 a turn instead of going the whole way around. Maybe if you're more than 8" from the track, the Mario Kart thing happens where you're removed from the board and next turn you're put back on the track at the place you left it and your speed reset to d4. Same thing could also apply if you reenter the track more than like 14" (as the wolf runs) from the place you left it; you're moved back to the place you went off the track as a penalty for illegal shortcutting. xopods fucked around with this message at 14:09 on Dec 7, 2012 |
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Dec 7, 2012 13:58
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That's a fine system too, though either way I think the piloting skill check and the speed roll should be one and the same. Less rolling = faster game, and it makes sense that the faster you go, the harder it is to control your vehicle.
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Dec 7, 2012 16:15
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I think some randomness in the speed is needed, since this is kind of a press-your-luck kind of game. Like Forumla D, the main strategic decision seems to be whether you take N+1 turns to navigate a given bit of track, or try to do it in N and risk overshooting via a bad roll. The piloting check does add another layer of risk-reward, but I don't think it would be enough on its own; the probabilities would be just too easy to calculate so the game would likely be very simple and very dry.
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Dec 7, 2012 16:52
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Fix posted:The single roll idea is pretty good, though I don't think it will really speed things along too much. Won't it shorten the actual distances moved, leaving players to take extra turns to go the same distance on the track? If you're rolling a D4 you're basically choosing turn or move, yeah? As much as rolling only 1" makes the ship feel slow, not going anywhere could be worse. No, that's not what I meant. I mean using the same roll for both, not choosing one or the other. Option 1: Under your current system, let's say you have a Pilot Skill of 5, you're rolling a D10, and you roll a 4. You can either move 4" straight, or turn and move 4". If you roll an 8, you just move 8" straight, no choice. Option 2: With my suggested "speed boost" option, it's the same thing, but if you roll under your Pilot Skill, you have a third option, which is to move straight ahead but with an optional speed boost equal to half the die size. So using the same number as the above example, you roll your D10 and get a 4. You still have the same two options, namely turn and move 4" or move 4" straight, but you also have a third choice, which is to take a 5" boost (10 / 2) and move 9" straight. (You can't take the boost AND turn, but you can choose to do neither and just move the 4") Why I think the latter is a good idea is that it gives the player a lot of control in the lower gears. For instance, if your piloting skill is 4+, then when you're in first gear, you'll always be succeeding, and thus always have the choice of moving d4+2, d4, or turn then d4 (and you get to choose after seeing the die roll, so you've got a huge amount of control, as you should when you're moving slowly). In the high gears, your optimal roll is to hit your piloting skill dead on, while the slowest possible result is to roll one higher. For instance, if you're rolling that D20 and you roll a 5 (with a Piloting skill of 5), you can choose between 5" ahead, 15" ahead, or turn and 5". Again, very high degree of control. But if you just roll a 13" or something, you're speeding ahead out of control, which might be okay or not depending on if you're in a straightaway. EDIT: You can also try making the amount of speed boost at the player's discretion, UP TO half the die size. I.e. if you roll the d20 and get a 5, if you opt not to turn, you can move anywhere between 5" and 15". But that might be too much control, too much incentive to stay in lower gears. SECOND EDIT: You might also think about allowing the player the choice of making the turn before or after the move to set up the next move. So four choices: move straight, move straight + boost, turn and move (no boost) or move and then turn (also no boost). That would make it less of a no brainer whether or not to take the boost on a straightaway... do you blast straight ahead this turn and brake next turn for the curve, or do you make a smaller move, and then adjust your angle so you can try to make it through the curve without gearing down? xopods fucked around with this message at 18:51 on Dec 7, 2012 |
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Dec 7, 2012 18:37
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Yeah, it's hard to know without trying it. I think there's still risk, but it's pushed one extra move into the future; if you managed to orient yourself the right way on the previous turn, gearing up doesn't risk flying off the track, but it risks not getting to reorient yourself at the end of this turn, and thus having to gear back down the next turn or else double down and risk flying off the track then. I would guess that it just makes the game more subtle... less about whether you actually fly of the track or not (except when someone is really pushing their luck in the last few corners to try to make a miracle comeback) and more about whether you have to slow down to avoid doing so. From the sounds of it, you want a somewhat chaotic, swingy game, so maybe the move-and-turn option is no good from that perspective.
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Dec 7, 2012 19:27
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Fix posted:Heh. I do like me some swingy chaos, but I'm partial to having other people enjoy themselves, too. That makes sense. Another possibility is just that you can't gear down the turn after you boost. So if you roll d8 and boost, you can stay in d8 next turn or go up to d10, but you can't drop down to d6. That's a good way of forcing players to gamble some more. A third possibility is that boosting allows people behind you to draft - anyone within say a 30 degree arc behind you and within your boost distance can choose to take a free forward move equal to that same boost distance. I.e. if you're rolling a d12 and boost for 6", anyone who was within 6" behind you (before your move) can take a free move of 6" if they want (after you've moved, obviously, so they're not crashing into your rear end). But of course you also have to roll under your Piloting to be able to use the boost, so people won't be boosting every turn anyway unless they're in low gear... for big enough dice, if you just wanted to go straight, you'd be better off rolling very high than rolling low and boosting. The reason I suggested it was as a way of eliminating the 'rolling 1 on a d20 and only moving 1" despite being in top gear' problem you were complaining about. With 5 piloting, it means your distances (if you choose to boost) for a d20 go: 11,12,13,14,15,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20 So it means you have a median and a mean of 13 rather than 10.5, but more importantly your lowest result is just under 1/3 of the maximum, instead of 1/20th. Oh, as an aside, if you find that the boost is too big, another option other than 1/2 the die size is make the boost equal to the gear number. So 1st gear is d4 and your boost is +1, 2nd gear is d6 and your boost is +2, 3rd gear is d8 and your boost is +3, etc. xopods fucked around with this message at 20:15 on Dec 7, 2012 |
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Dec 7, 2012 20:08
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Yeah, The Game Crafter's really only good if you've given up on getting published legitimately but want a few copies of your game for you and your friends, or as an alternative to Print-and-Play if you want to allow people to order a copy of your game but don't really care about making any profit. The cost to print a game through them is basically what a similar game would cost at retail. Whereas to be commercially viable you really need your production costs to be around 1/8th of the shelf price.
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Dec 8, 2012 00:16
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Mr.Trifecta posted:I was thinking more of using that version to display on Kickstarter, then going overseas to do that actual official publishing of it. So I guess what I am trying to say, is the quality nice enough to get the concept across on Kickstarter? Unless you are or know a talented and well set-up photographer, a Photoshop fake using the source artwork will look better and cleaner than a photograph of actual printed materials. If you don't have the technical expertise, you can hire someone pretty cheaply. I can do it for instance, and wouldn't charge much. Here's a digital fake of my upcoming game, for instance. (I know the size and perspective of the cards isn't entirely consistent, but I wanted to give more emphasis to the face-up ones in the foreground... another advantage of faking things, not needing to be constrained by reality. That 1-Gold in the back is really much too big mind you, that's really bugging me now.  ).
xopods fucked around with this message at 07:52 on Dec 8, 2012 |
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Dec 8, 2012 07:32
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I've often thought about doing a martial arts fighting card game where players are playing cards into a queue of moves (a "flurry") and using some sort of mechanic to add, remove and rearrange cards from their queue, until some trigger is hit (could just be someone playing an "Action!" card, though I don't like how that worked in Neuroshima Hex! so maybe something more clever is in order), whereupon the flurries are executed and, unless someone is KOed, a new flurry is begun. Resolution would be a little like my boxing dice game, where if an attack is paired up against an opponent's block or dodge, the damage would either be reduced or prevented, and if it's stopped entirely, the defender gets a "counterattack" bonus to the next card in the queue... if attack is paired against attack, the faster (generally) weaker attack takes priority and goes through. You can borrow that idea if you like, though I may still try it myself somewhere down the line. I feel like it's still missing the catalytic bit of inspiration (probably something to do with how the cards are added and rearranged, and what triggers the resolution phase) to really come together.
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Dec 11, 2012 16:00
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Railing Kill posted:-How can I keep defense a secret? I thought of players having cups to place defenses under until they're used. I'm not sure how clunky that'll be, not to mention I wanted to make this game as streamlined as possible (other than being a huge pile of dice in the first place). You could have defense counters, mixed up face down at the beginning of the game, each with say, 0, 1 or 2 shields on it. Rolling defense results lets you draw defense counters, maybe up to some maximum that you can stockpile at once (to help with the gang-up-on-the-leader problem). Then make attacking a bit of a bluffing game. Attacker commits one or more dice to the attack; defender can then pass or commit one or more defense counters face down, then attacker can commit more dice if he wants and has them available and so on, until someone passes. Then the defense counters are revealed and if the shields are >= the attack dice value, the attack is thwarted. There's a neat advantage to the defender in that he knows the attacker's current strength, but not vice versa. Your zero-value counters aren't totally useless, then, as you can use them to bluff, forcing the opponent to commit more dice to a single attack, thereby denying himself the opportunity for a second attack on someone else. For instance, you attack me with 1 die. I play a counter. If you think I put a zero, you should pass and just win with your one die. If you think I put a 1 in, you should add 1 more die... but if I actually put a two, then if you only add one more die, I can pass and successfully defend myself. You could put two more dice in to be sure you're ahead, but if I put a zero, then I've tricked you into wasting 3 dice on an attack that would have succeeded with just one.
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Dec 11, 2012 18:19
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DirkGently posted:That is very clever -- for some reason I am picturing the Space Alert action queue except with martial arts. Thanks for the idea. I will play around with an action queue to see whether or not anything cool develops from it (while trying to avoid just "borrowing" your description wholesale *grin*). Yeah. Shamefully, I still haven't played Space Alert, so I don't know exactly how the action queue works, but from what I've heard it sounds like an idea along the same lines... although I wasn't imagining the action queue being established in real-time, but rather by some sort of mechanic for playing and switching around cards within it. Maybe even hiding and revealing them; e.g. on each player's turn they have a certain number of action points to spend, which could be used for: Drawing a card Playing a card into one's action queue face up Playing a card into one's action queue face down (costs more AP) Revealing an opponent's face-down card (costs more AP than the extra cost the opponent had to pay to hide it) Peeking at the opponent's hand Switching two adjacent cards in one's action queue Moving a card from the front to the back of the queue or vice versa Etc.
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Dec 11, 2012 18:39
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Railing Kill posted:On a related note: does anyone have any tips for making custom dice? I'm going to have a ton of dice ot buy and print faces for, so before I get in on that, does anyone have do's and don'ts for making your own die faces? I bought 200 blank dice from a bulk game components distributor. The dice themselves only cost like $20, but shipping was like $45 for some reason... but still, $65 for 200 dice isn't bad, and now I have more than I'll probably ever need. I also use them as generic markers/counters/game pieces sometimes. I laser print my die faces on cardstock, cut them out and affix them with two-coat rubber cement, and then spray the dice with a fine art fixative so the toner doesn't wear off on people's fingers. The results are pretty durable. You can also just draw directly on them. Don't use a normal permanent marker, though, as it will smudge. What you want are the special markers for labeling CDs and DVDs; those are designed not to smudge when used on a plastic surface. xopods fucked around with this message at 18:45 on Dec 11, 2012 |
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Dec 11, 2012 18:42
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Railing Kill posted:I'm going to have about 100 dice to make, so printing is going to be the way to go. Cutting and rubber cementing faces on 100 dice is going to take foreeeeeever. Keep in mind that to make a strong bond you need to coat both surfaces and allow them both to dry before pressing them together. Which is a pain because you need to coat the die on all 6 sides, and you can't do them all at once since it has to be sitting on one side and obviously that side can't be wet. Fastest order to do things is probably this:
I don't envy you at all. Just doing the 18 dice for my boxing game was a pain. Drawing on them with a marker would be a lot faster, as long as you keep your icons simple, but of course the printed ones look a lot nicer.
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Dec 11, 2012 19:21
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I'm guessing it doesn't have the feature set required to support a dice-building game though.
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Dec 11, 2012 19:41
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I've never played Quarriors or its ilk, but don't you start each turn by pulling some dice from a bag and then rolling them? If you're rolling all your dice each turn, that app would work fine, but if it's two-stage randomization where you take some random dice and then roll them, you'd still need something like a physical deck of cards to decide which dice to roll using the app. At which point you might as well just make dice. Still a cool app though and useful for other sorts of games.
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Dec 11, 2012 21:10
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That sounds like a pretty sensible approach too. Didn't think about puzzle saver.
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Dec 11, 2012 21:37
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Yeah, I think that's exactly the same company I ordered for, except their shipping charges to Canada were considerably less reasonable.
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Dec 12, 2012 06:17
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You're mixing up your submissions letter with your sell sheet. Think of them like your cover letter and your resume when applying for a job... the sell sheet is more of a point form general explanation of the game, but you should submit it attached to an email which introduces yourself and explains why you think the game is a good fit for that specific company. Here's what my sell sheet for Duck & Cover looks like, for instance... obviously, I'm a graphic designer so I was able to pretty it up a lot, which isn't super-essential, but the content will give you a general idea of what goes on one: Duck & Cover sellsheet
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Dec 13, 2012 18:39
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