a Quick post for the sake of consistency

Been busy as heck because of that damn X-mas is coming up.
Zero progress on Treeman.
Minimal progress on Car game.
Some progress on Zombie game.

Now that I've been neglecting Zombie game for a long time, and just recently come back to it, I really like what I've had going on.
I've now polished some of the new stuff set afoot long time ago, and only thing now is to play test them.

Some progress

So we had out game night, and I got to test my stuff again. I really do love these sessions with friends since my regular game-happenings happen no more.
In addition to my Zombie game we played my new Terra Mystica which is this fantasy themed resource management game with some Catan in it. I'm super glad I bought it!
Then was King of Tokyo. Really fast and really fun competitive custom dice game with this Godzilla/King Kong theme.
Pandemic was up next. It's funny how I'm constantly thinking about Arkham Horror (which might be my all time favorite board game). It has many of its elements but condensed, and therefor a lot quicker to finish.
The evening's main game would've been X-Wing (I guess this one), which I've been dying to try out for so long, but again was foiled by us somehow losing the main game box.

Managed to remember to take a pic during the game.
My dude and a friend are storming a house at the left side, pretty much full of zombies, in wake of a fire bottle burning in the middle there. While others are tackling the right side of the map, or what's left of it.

What has been learned so far

This first real test of the summoning mechanic was good, I think. It ended up really unreliable, but that's how it was designed. We had almost no activity in the first half, and after that a couple creatures managed to come through. Although we had amassed so much weapons at that point they were no match for us.
I also need to think about the ratio of zombies to special creatures more, but I feel that's only doable through more play testings.

The curses, that are essentially players' HP, were almost nonexistent. Some played it safe, and others were just too quickly dispatching the foes to get hurt. This will be my next big thing I need to tackle.
I do want to reward players for playing safe and good, so inverting the mechanic I don't think is the answer. Long ago I thought about just piling the curses on the players as time progresses, but deemed it too hard for the players to manage. Maybe I'll revisit that concept.

Skills (and therefor Stamina) are still in pretty bad-ish place (still!). Players did use them, but I felt that they needed to depend on them more.

Some other small adjustments are needed for the mission I had. Like ending it sooner after the objective has been found, or pile something interesting atop of that. I thought the length was pretty good until the point we found the missing person (although we had to go through all of the rooms before finding him). I had it so that the players needed to escort him back, but I called it after finding him because I felt that it was dumb without any extra twists.

After all these I felt that the game still had improved MASSIVELY. Its flow was so much better with the new dice mechanic and how players can move more in each turn.

a Space-teaser

Here's a bit of fiction I've created for my space game, I couldn't keep myself from not sharing this stuff.
So if I've made stuff right this should be viewable in Google Docs:

Nu-Delta (race)

So there's a bit of dumb fiction to whomever might be interested in such stuff.

Oh, also, I do not speak English natively so bear that in mind, and please do point out any stupidities in that text if you will.

Zambies...

My friend has arranged a board game weekend (in two weeks) with a handful of other friends, and I have to take my zombie game there to have a real play test, with all that new content which just might be some of the final stuff for it.

Not dead yet!

The way I seem to enjoy my hobbies is in cycles, some longer ones and some shorter. Friends I know seem to force themselves to work on their projects even if the inspiration isn't there, but I don't work that way. I embrace the the lack on inspiration, and have the time for myself to dust off my brain.

Zombie game is still shuffling

One aspect of the zombie game has always been absent from my test builds, and this is purely because though I've had numerous different versions of it, none of them have been quite the thing I need for the game - the random enemy spawns.

What revitalized this blog now, was the breakthrough on that system. I might just now have the starting grounds of the final version of it.
It goes like this: Every player roll a Misfortune dice (1D6) at the end of their turn. If they roll under (a certain threshold, TBD), nothing happens but they put the die in the Misfortune pool. If they roll over, they take all the dice in the Misfortune pool and roll them together - more dice equals more bad things to happen.

So the systems before this have been too random, required turn tracking or weren't balanced enough to the player amount etc.
How I see this system now: it balances itself out by having all players contributing to the pool, it's random enough because of the threshold checks and the enemies come in "waves" without having a specific tracking system.

Minor update

It's been some while since the last update. I've meant to do stuff for the Car game, but my local hardware store didn't have everything I needed (mainly 2 cm thick foam board), and my yellow paint exploded on me while I tried to revive it from drying up.
Something's up with yellow acrylics... They were the only ones that had dried in my collection, and I've read about them plugging up paint guns more than other colors.

Well, I now have the board and the paints, so expect to see a new car painted up soon (tm). The board will be a ways off, as I need to think about how I'll carve it in the foam without making a mess.

Slow development is slow

I've been slowly updating my Zombie game too. I now have what I consider a first real scenario, with multiple objectives. This is a big thing for the game as it now has some structure in it.
I now have almost all aspects remade (Skills, Curses, Equipment) to reflect the new dice mechanic. Now I only need to go over my monster creatures, I think I need a few more types too...

I now have two different difficulty levels of special monsters, the easier ones are:
Black Flame - a weak, quick and numerous creature that you really can not outrun, you'll need to get rid of these until there's too many of them to handle.
Shepherd - a buffed up zombie, that also buffs the nearest zombies around it, also comes with additional zombies.
Refuse - a slow multi-HP creature. A basic enemy fighter.

The more difficult ones are:
Armor - single HP creature with really high defense. You'll need really good weapon to get rid of one.
Essence - a buffed up version of the Refuse. More HP and more damage.
Shade - the heavy hitter of the enemy force. Its movement is eccentric, so players can try to fool it away, but when in contact it is the biggest threat of all.

I also had an immovable Monolith enemy that just spawned more zombies, and a friend suggested an enemy type that charms players that I kinda like to incorporate.
I found that the Monolith was redundant as I can make zombie spawn in many other ways. The charmer enemy can also be done via curses, but there's this basic design point that makes me want not to take control out of players hand,s as one of the main attractions of games is decision making. Though that would also work for me as the players would learn to dread the enemy that makes you lose control.

If any of the random readers made it this far, I'd really like to hear more your favorite enemy archetypes for me to incorporate.

Print and play stuff goes here

This post will include the stuff needed to play the game, whenever I get it up to shape.

Skill cards - Updated Oct.10.-14
Cards with art at the front, printer friendly ones at the back.

Skills of the trade

Got rid of the script font due feedback, it's much more readable now.

I got my skill cards rewritten now and only had to remove a few that were now obsolete. Leaving me at 27 skill cards, and I need a few more specific ones for the more powerful weapon types.

The new skills are pretty much in the format as shown on the new Booze Hound. Almost every card has a passive and active skills which the other makes your character generally better in something (in this case you find more booze, which is a rare and powerful loot), and the other better with a specific stuff (the booze affects you better than others). The Booze Hound is actually pretty bad at showcasing my new skills, but that was one of the few I bothered to rewrite the fluff text at the bottom.

The card art is a placeholder and a stark contrast to the enemy cards at my previous post, both in overall color and the quality. Now that I've shuffled all of the cards, soaking it in, I kinda like the mismatch of the arts. You absolutely can not mistake the enemy cards as something beneficial to your character.

Speaking of the enemy cards. I've rewritten a whole bunch of them too to reflect the latest mechanical changes. Though they are not yet in a state to be shared as their "purify" options are not given that much thought yet.
The basic format for them is "effect" and "purify". Effect is of course the thing your character is afflicted with, like decrepify which slows your character down, and purify has the things need to be done to get rid of the curse, something like "receive a healing action", "loot 3 Zombie corpses", "use Booze or Snake Oil".

For now I consider the skill cards "ready to play", though almost all of them are missing fluff texts and I haven't gone over them to fix the wording to be consistent (as I do not yet know should I say "+1 ROF" or "gain 1 additional attack") so it does correspond to intent behind it.

Art, motherfuckers!

Push button, receive artwork. Thanks Tony! (of the Bunker game fame http://www.bunkerthegame.com)

Art is not mine, a friend of mine made it. Though I take credit for fucking up the layers and misaligning the slime drips in process. Oops...

Somewhat more realized Zombie game

Game's creeping along out of sight

I've been forced to playtest my game solitaire now, and it has actually been more revealing to me than testing with a group. Shit gets boring alone. Game's all but killing the same stuff without any twists. That's something I need to address.
Granted the previous testing have been only for different mechanics, and not the "game" itself. The picture shows the situation in which I said fuck it, and left it there - half of the objectives done.

Regarding the picture. Not much has changed since anyone has seen it last time, and theres not many of you. But dissecting some details (that you can make out from the shitty phone camera), you'll have the following:
- The mat's cut. It does not actually go any further from the edge as is shown. So it won't overwhelm the players. Don't know if it's enough or too much, but it had to be done for my sanity.
- New numbers on weapon cards, just a new dice mechanic. It's now just a simple exploding dice pool seen in many other games instead of fucking math! Hopefully makes the game faster.
- Creature behaviour. The game's now actually fully cooperative without a need of a GM. If you look closely at the creature cards, there's Retaliate (when they get hit), Opportunity (when a player tries to escape them in melee), Action (made after each turn), and Special (will have reminders for anything special the creature has).
- Some WIP enemy models at the bottom right, made from hot glue and random tentacle bits.

Gotta go fast

A lot of tiny tweaks has been made to try to make the game just faster, and as such it has changed more to a gore-fest rather than survival what I first imagined. Though the main two sources on inspiration were definitely more on the gore side than survival (Left 4 Dead and Doom the board game).

The following tweaks have been made:
- Player now can attack with more weapons. I'm still spitballing the specifics, but the more players can attack, the more they get done.
- New dice system as mentioned above, hopefully makes the game go faster.
- I've been all over the place on how the looting system works. Last time players only could loot one corpse as their movement stopped at the first loot. Now I think they can loot as many corpses they can run over. Again because the players have places to be.
- No more player health to be tracked (a new system I'm somewhat excited about, more details below).
- Stamina management is somewhat more streamlined. It's now a valuable resource to be used when you need the most bang for the buck rather than the "other health bar" that the enemies gnawed away. It now has a real meaning.
- The basic zombie fodder has been simplified. No more scaling defense values or moving every turn.
- Some other things I've forgotten.

The picture above is the player aid character sheet mockup I slapped together last evening.
EDIT: The pic is actually much newer sheet, the original picture got destroyed.
The interesting part of it is those gray slots at the top. They are the slots where curse (and maybe creature) cards go. It also shows how aggressive the Zombies are towards you (the numbers in picture are just copypasta, and not real values), AND it acts as you health, when you fill all the five bars you're out of action.

This hopefully acts as one of the "twists" mentioned at the start of this post, where players need to have something to do besides killing, in this case they need to try to cleanse themselves of the corruption that's building on their character and weakening them.

Many changes still to be done

So I now got new dice system, health system and more refined stamina system. After that I need to fully revamp the skill cards to reflect all of the changes; make the curses more interesting and above all make the purifying options much more interesting, more "twists" if you will; make the enemy spawn more coherent, something I've been struggling with, and I bet continue to do so; and finally make some interesting missions, again something I've failed to come up with.

So most of the game elements have had a complete overhaul, even before the game around them had fully formed. This game was always meant to be the babbys first game for me as a designer, and continues to be so as far as all the testing and changes going on. Hopefully I can get the game to a point that I'm satisfied with.

Hello and welcome

This blog withholds stuff that I enjoy, and like to share to the rest of the Internet.

I like making up board games

Not to make, but make up, as I'm not published and have no aspirations of doing so at the foreseeable future.

So I have three games rotating in my head, each one a tad different and very much in different states of "completion":

a Zombie game - which will be the main focus for my blog at the time, since it is the one I'm mainly focusing, with everything done from the scratch.

a Car game - Based heavily on the Formula Dé by Asmodee. The core of the game is shamelessly ripped, that's why it is on solid grounds and will not require as much attention. It is a rally game with post-apocalyptic twist and has been played a handful of times. Will add stuff to it as it is suggested by the players.

a Space game - Very much a nonexistent game as of now. I greatly enjoy character building in RPG's (and the interaction between class mechanics that follows), and the weird and wacky alien races that a certain Star Controll game had. I'd like to marry these two core concepts and also make it as visual as I can (with miniature space ships on a painted Hex space board with planets and moons and meteorites and stuff).
If you haven't heard of the Star Controll series, you can try it out by downloading SC2 open source project for free from: http://sc2.sourceforge.net


So this was my hasty first post as of now.
I try to have more of the Zombie game posts in a couple of days since it now is again in active developement.