Minor update

I haven't posted here in quite a while - about a month now. I'm not too happy about that, but my work schedule and my writing for Post-Launch Reviews hasn't allowed me much spare time to work on this project.

After receiving a lot of helpful feedback on the logo designs I posted last month, I've decided to go with the third logo (to the right), as it's the most visually representative of the game's themes. I'd like to have it altered slightly so that it looks more icy or frosty, with a texture more like that of frost on glass.

Hopefully with work winding down a bit, I'll be more able to get some playtests going. The very brief one I ran earlier illustrated the need for a physical rulebook to have on hand for testers to refer to (and to ensure that I don't forget to explain any rules!) so I'm slowly putting a basic one together. No fancy design yet, just a working draft.

That's it for this update!

Logos! (aka tough decision time)

I think I mentioned some time ago that I was getting a logo for the game/site. I spoke to my brother Jacob (whose work you can see here) to see if he could whip something up for me. My original request was for a compass pointing north, with ice on the lower half. I'm not a designer and I've seen Jacob's work before, so I trusted that whatever he'd come up with would be better than what I was picturing, even if it was very different.

Not only was I right, Jacob sent me three potential logos to choose from!

That means I have a problem now: I like them all! I'm going to have a hard time deciding, so I'd love to get some thoughts on which one people prefer. For the overall aesthetic I'm thinking of a stark modern design with lots of white space to convey a sense of cold and danger.

With that in mind, here are the three designs:

Rule Variants

I haven't done much playtesting yet - and by "not much" I mean half an hour in the last month - but already I'm considering some potential changes to core rules and functionality of the game. Much of this stems from onewayout's excellent response to my reddit post in the tabletop game design subreddit.

First variant: movement. Initial plan was to give everyone a move speed of 1 - in other words you can move 1 space per turn by default, and that can potentially be added to via items or encounters. onewayout suggested separating the heat / endurance /health resources into completely separate economies with different methods of recovery and different penalties for running out. I really liked the suggestions for how to handle heat and endurance in that system, but I'm kind of leaning away from that right now because I still like how the resources are tied together. I will for sure test endurance as actions (like in Pandemic), and I'll probably give the separate economies a shot as well.

The other big suggestion is to have the missing loved ones actually on the board, moving north 1 space each turn, instead of trapped in fixed locations in the black zone. I love this idea but it'll be tricky to balance, especially if I end up going with the endurance = actions mechanic - I don't want the players to catch up in 1 or 2 turns, but I also don't want it to be too difficult.

A friend suggested that if I do go with actions, some types of terrain should cost more actions to move through. This is potentially a great counter to the players heading straight for victims on the board, because it'll slow them down - if a player has 3 actions per turn, and some tiles cost 2 actions to move into, they'll want to spend that spare action on an encounter, which could potentially set them back, or help to ensure that they actually get some items even if that's not their current focus. But most importantly it prevents the player from moving 3 spaces per turn every turn and ending the game after only a handful of rounds.

 The downside of having the loved ones on the board is that I lose an easy excuse for a big finale, and a faster game would drastically reduce the motivation to close off the coldbringer lairs. I'll have to think about that.

I'll be trying out my original mechanics as well as these variants in my initial round of playtesting. I'll keep you posted.

First Playtest Notes

Ran a very brief play today with a friend. VERY brief. Like, it took longer to set up than we spent playing - and this game doesn't even require a long setup.

Anyway, here are some quick observations from this test.

• Setup took a while because I had to shuffle all my cards for the first time. Fortunately this will not be a problem again. At least, unless/until I make drastic changes and toss out everything I currently  have for new stuff.
• I was already planning for one, but: a board setup diagram is extremely important. There are two obvious ways to set up hexagons - pointy end up or flat end up - and one of those is wrong for North. I was all confused because I didn't have enough bridge tiles, but once I realized that I set up the board wrong, I totally did have enough bridge tiles. Considering that I designed the game and I set up the board the wrong... yeah, I should probably have a diagram on hand when I get others to test the game without my direction.
• Tokens. I really should actually have some tokens to represent players, bandits, and monsters if I'm having people test my game. We just used spare coins and dice. Maybe I'll grab some of my D&D character tokens to use during tests.
• Test in an area without wind. My crappy playtest prototype cards and tiles are printed on standard card stock, and pieces fly all over the place with even so much as a light breeze. Ideally the final version will use heavy card with a border, like Settlers of Catan, so the tiles are solidly together and don't move around.
• I'll need to come up with a good way for each player to track heat, endurance, and health. For this test we just wrote down our totals on cards, crossing it out and writing the new total when something changed, but that's not optimal for the final game. Tokens would be easiest, but I don't want to have too many little fiddly things to deal with.
• I need better icons and labels. Oddly enough I think this is more important for the playtest than for the actual finished game - when my art is just hurried scribbles it's easier to figure out which is the snowfield tile by process of elimination than by having the tile actually look like a snowfield. Obviously clarity and readability are very important for a finished product, but it'll be less of an issue with good art and design than with the hand-drawn Sharpie "art" I have now.
• It's too hard to get items. The distribution is much too random. I've got 28 kinds of items so far, with 9 of each item. That means the item deck is just a big stack of 252 cards. Before I start tinkering with how many cards there are for each item, I think I'll split the items up into 3 tiers to match the 3 board zones, with item acquisition tied to the zone you're in. Tier 1 (green) will be the lower quality items, mostly weak single-use stuff; tier 2 (blue) will be better stuff; and tier 3 (black) will be mostly the best items. There'll be a few strong items mixed into tier 1 and a few weak items mixed into tier 3, to keep it from being too predictable or exploitable.  Not sure what I'll call the tiers yet, but for now colour coding is enough.
• If I'm splitting items into tiers, I'll need to change how the survivor camp works. Instead of drawing 3 items and buying 1, you'll draw 1 of each tier and buy 1.
• I may have to adjust heat loss - I was already out of heat after only 3 turns. But I'll hold off on making this change until I see the effects of tiering items, because the tiering will make consumable heat loss prevention items more common in the green zone, and permanent heat protection items more reliably obtainable in the blue and black zones.

You might notice that a couple of these points were kind of silly - like not playing in the wind with crappy paper, and actually having all the pieces I need. Yes, these are dumb problems, but they're easily corrected and will never really come up ever again, and with this stuff already out of the way, I'll be better able to focus on the actual game mechanics and the fine tuning thereof.

I'm planning to playtest with friends and family to start, and I really hope they'll be totally honest with me. It's pretty easy for me to find a stupid obvious flaw like not having player/monster tokens, but with less obvious flaws or balance issues, I want to know every problem there is with my game so that I can address it.

Stay tuned for future playtest notes!

Really need to start that playtest

I keep coming up with excuses to not start that solo playtest I've been planning. Oh, I still need to print a few more things. Well, I haven't finished my video game review this week. This location doesn't have a big enough play area for me to test. And so on.

I think I should just skip the solo playtest and play it with friends. It'll be easier to get it done if I set dates and have to follow through with people, rather than being accountable only to myself when I have lots of other things on the go.

Hopefully this means I'll actually get working on refinement and balance soon.

Oh, also, I've got a designer working on a logo. First option I've seen is really cool, and apparently there will be a second option.

Playtest Delay

I've been trying to find time to do my solo playtest, but between work and maintaining Post-Launch Reviews, I haven't had much spare time recently. Maybe I'll see if I can get something done tomorrow.

Game Mechanics Overview

I've finally finished my first run of posts on the game design. To wrap it all up (and provide a TLDR version) here's a quick summary of each game mechanic with links to the full articles. These summaries are quite brief - if you have a question or want a more in-depth writeup, click the links for the full versions. And if you're new to the blog, click the Introduction and Overview links above for more information.

• Heat, Endurance, Health: your three core resources. You lose heat every night in the cold; you lose endurance if you have no heat left, and you can also spend it to move more or to re-roll; and you lose health if you have no heat or endurance left. There are other ways to lose endurance and health directly. If you run out of health, you fall unconscious and return to town.
• The Board: divided into three zones - green, blue, and black - with the spaces of each zone randomized at the start of the game. The black zone is the north end, and the zones get progressively more dangerous as you move north. There are a few unique locations in each zone with special encounters and rules.
• Enemies: hostile bandits and monsters (called coldbringers) wander the board - bandits move randomly, coldbringers move towards town. If you lose a fight with a bandit you discard items; if you lose a fight with a coldbringer you lose heat.
• Skills: the conflict resolution mechanic. Roll a 20-sided die and add your skill modifier. If the result is equal to or higher than the difficulty score, you succeed. There are 5 skills, each of which can be added to with items or other bonuses: combat, evasion, perception, stealth, and survival.
• Encounters: when you end your movement on a board space, you draw an encounter card and do what it says. Usually this means rolling a skill check. Some encounters give you a benefit on success, some a penalty on failure, and some provide both.
• Items: give you various types of bonuses - increase a skill modifier, resistance to a damage type, special abilities, etc. Obtained in encounters or by buying from traders.
• Winning and Losing: you win by rescuing all the people from the coldbringer lairs by working together on difficult skill checks. You lose if everyone dies (permanent death occurs if coldbringers have destroyed the town and you hit 0 health).

And that's all for now. I'll try to work on playtesting, and I should have news on a logo very soon. Exciting!

Design & Inspiration: Winning, Losing, and Player Interaction

To close out my posts on game mechanics, now I'll finally talk about how you win and how you lose!

Design & Inspiration: Items

I've mentioned items in the last two posts with the basics on how they interact with skill checks and one of the ways to get them. Here's the full treatment.

Design & Inspiration: Encounters

Now that I've posted a quick overview of the board concept, it's time to talk about what'll happen on that board.

Um

So uh... maybe I have too many item cards.

I never gave any thought to the number of item cards I should have. I can probably cut it down a lot when I work on balancing the frequency of the various items. On the other hand, I already see gaps that I'll need to fill with new items (for example, there currently aren't any that grant a stealth bonus).

I wonder what other important stuff I haven't thought about yet. This is what revisions and playtesting are for.

Design & Inspiration: Skills

Continuing the introduction to game mechanics, today I'll talk about skills!

Design & Inspiration: Enemies

North is a cooperative game - the players work together to attain their goal. To make the game dramatic, I need something to get in the players' way. The players won't be the only ones moving around the board! I have two enemy types in mind: bandits and coldbringers. 

Design & Inspiration: Heat, Endurance, Health

Heat, endurance, and health are the core representations of a player's vitality in North. I've already mentioned these in an earlier post, but I figure I should make sure everything is explicit, since most of the other game mechanics key off of these attributes.

Design & Inspiration: The Board

If I'm making a board game, I'll need a board!

The Plan

I don't want to get ahead of myself here and dive right into the details without a plan. So here is THE PLAN:

Step 1: basic concept.

Already done, since this is an idea I've had since forever. In fact, I've already posted about it. Hooray, I'm making progress!

Premise & Overview

So yeah, I'm making a board game. Of course, I can't just dive right in and start talking mechanics - a game needs a reason to play, some kind of context or story for what you're doing and why you're doing it. As I continue to work on the game I'm sure this description will evolve, but this is the core I'm starting with. 

In North, the world is facing an ice age which is slowly descending from (you guessed it) the north. As the cold and snow creep south, contact is being lost with the people and cities enveloped by the ice.

A lot of people have disappeared. At first it was thought they stayed behind and were buried in the snow or froze to death, but now reports are coming in that people are simply getting up and walking north, into the darkness. There are also rumours of chilling monsters moving south, but that's ridiculous... isn't it?

Introduction

North is a game concept I've been kicking around for quite a while now.

The idea started life as a video game concept, since I'm a huge fan of video games (I've been reviewing a game per week for almost two years over at Post-Launch Reviews). I thought up all the game mechanics, the setting, and even started on some basic concept art to establish the tone of the setting and the appearance of the playable character and the enemies. 

When I tried to get started on the project, I came to a very important realization: I don't know how to make a video game. 

That's a pretty big obstacle, considering that I was picturing something fairly complex. I have thousands of hours of play time across hundreds of games, so I think I have a pretty good picture of what kind of mechanics I could use to build a fun game. The problem is that none of that knowledge or experience tells me anything about programming.

So I reconsidered. There are other kinds of games. Board games, for example.

I don't have nearly as much experience with board games as I do with video games. I've played Dungeons & Dragons for 10 years, but that's a very different kind of thing (which I also write about somewhat infrequently at D4sign). It's only relatively recently - the last couple of years - that I've been introduced to "good" games, the kind the enthusiasts play and talk about. Big names like Settlers of Catan and Dominion (my personal favourite), co-op games like Pandemic and Arkham Horror, and sillier but well thought out games like Munchkin. But I really love these games, and I thought maybe North could work as a board game.

As I said, I don't know that much about board games, but the change of type gives me a distinct advantage: I don't need to know programming or use special software to build a board game. I can simply start writing rules and cutting out a board and game pieces to experiment with. I can share the material, run playtests, collect feedback, and refine the design until I have something that works.

With this blog I'll be documenting my foray into board game design. I'm not going into this with any expectations - I know that it's very hard for board games to make a profit, and that there are an awful lot of them already. I just want to make something cool that works, and actually do something with one of these concepts I've been kicking around since forever.  If things go really well maybe I'll look into a Kickstarter campaign, but that's crossing over into marketing and publicity and production, which, like game programming, are topics I know nothing about. So as of now, that's just a far-off maybe, to be ignored until I already have a solid game.

As I write this I'm taking a break from writing out game cards for a... I don't know, pre-pre-pre alpha. I'm not completely settled on anything yet, I'm still conceptualizing and playing with ideas. I'm starting with a simple base and I plan to add complexity and variety when I have the core somewhat stable.

So, early posts on this blog will talk about basic design goals: the story, basic core mechanics, the board, sources of inspiration, and stuff like that. As I start to nail things down I'll go into more detail about how things work specifically, and I'll start solo playtesting and put down some thoughts on how things are going.

Whether or not anything ever comes out of this, it'll be a  fun project that will teach me more about board games, game design, and the development and testing processes. Follow along as I explore the process!