In an earlier post I spent a bunch of time bitching about games I used to like. These are all games made by larger companies, not independent game producers, so I don't feel compelled to protect them with any kind of caveat. But to keep things more positive--and because it rolled in nicely with stuff I'm going right now, anyway--I also wanted to show the reverse of games in decline. Instead, these are games being rescued by content produced by fans of the game and available for the public for zero dollars.
These are all very impressive accomplishments in their own right. As I discussed in a previous article, sometimes you're better off making changes to an existing game that trying to build your own thing. These are highlights of that philosophy, and all happen to line up with the four games I discussed last week: Heavy Gear, X-Wing, Warmachine and Infinity. I forgot to schedule this, pretty slick work. Anyway, last week's goals...
Afterglow
However, new projects are now getting some time in rotation... I haven't played Heavy Gear for a few years and picked up some models to use in a project I'll hopefully be getting around to soon. I was surprised by how... not good the state of the game appears to be externally, with the very old-looking website and clunky rules I'm not even sure are the latest edition only available form a third-party download source. Strange stuff indeed. While browsing, I was also struck by the fact that there are roughly one hundred billion list options in all factions now. This of course set off my instincts to run away, as well as making me think of the tragedy of the infinitely "open" game. This got me to thinking of the number of games I've essentially been driven out of by constant expansion over a few years, bloating a game until it became a very sloppy mire of list choices:
Review of the week's goals...
Afterglow
I received the game Interceptor Ace as a gift recently. I'm not knowledgeable about the subject matter and didn't know anything about the game, but I like airplanes and wargames. I'm also a loser with no friends so I like solitaire gaming. I fired the game up, played it a bit, and don't like it for a variety of reasons. But the main takeaway I got from it is the importance of well laid-out player aids. Interceptor Ace is not a particularly complex game but it's heavily reliant on referencing charts. Unfortunately, the way the charts are placed on the player aids is done in an irritating manner, requiring constant flipping, searching and general manipulation. I didn't end up digging this game much, but it did impress on my some principles I'd like to try to adhere to in the design of player aids from here on, though. Last week's goals:
Afterglow
Afterglow is close to completion now. Both the "primary" game and the solitaire/coop expansion Outer Dark are in the last phases of testing and refinement, and I'm working on cleaning up the graphical assets so they're printer-friendly, size-limited, and easy to use. The new card format for Systems, the token sheets, all kinds of stuff.
As I've been reviewing the documents, I've also been thinking back on the various things that I wanted to put into the game but have left out at some point, or ideas I wanted to use but couldn't. I'm consolidating that into a post here so that I can go back and reference the ideas, and do a bit of a post-mortem on them: why they got cut, how the decision came about, and the consequences. Last week's goals:
Outer Dark
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