Recap of last week:
Split Second
Well... I finally finished some things. It's with a great deal of personal gratification and no fanfare that I can say I have finished work on Split Second: Solitaire Firefights Against The Clock. This has been by far my biggest and most ambitious undertaking as a game designer, involving tons of stuff I'd never really considered before; graphic design, art assets, presentation, and even publication. It was fraught with frustrations and lessons in all those fields. Ultimately, I think the product is extremely good and one of the best "build teams and guys and shoot bad guys" games on the market. It has comparatively advanced solitaire gameplay, varied mission structure, and a lot of content for a very modest price tag. If you're interested, you can check it out on Wargame Vault for free; if you like to see a guy stammer through a tutorial video, you can watch a small movie I've produced about it as well: Split Second started out as a game I was designing where you would play as a robot pilot who would jump into and out of the robot like Titanfall to meet various threats, and a timer would force the player to adapt to changing circumstances in the style of Space Alert. It transformed into something very different when I realized the mechanics seemed better suited to good ol' shootouts.
This was a complex undertaking and absorbed many hours of my time. It's a game made entirely by one person and in some realms, it shows. But I'm quite proud of the end product despite the faults I'm aware of. It's a full game with 208 cards, tokens, two books, and all kinds of other components; the player only needs to provide a timer and dice. However, I definitely took some lessons away from it that will transfer towards future games. Recap of last week's goals...
Split Second
This looked like a light week here, but it was not. I feel like I got a lot finished, though. Recap of last week's objectives:
Split Second
A review of last week:
Split Second
Review of last week:
Split Second
Checking in from last week:
Split Second
Wasn't a whole lot on paper but it did end up being a lot of work. Split Second
Wow, great week! I'm on the cusp of finishing three projects at once. I really want to get these done so I can move on to some new stuff (especially Split Second, which I've been grinding out for the last ten weeks trying to finish). Review of last week's goals:
Split Second
Pretty good stuff. I've been working a lot of Split Second lately. It's a solitaire card-driven wargame played using a clock to add pressure to players, meant to emulate action like the Air France 8969 raid, the Munich Crisis, or the Rainbow Six games (the early ones, anyway). Playing this game at all requires scenarios that give the player a layout of challenges that are presented to them, and each scenario presents different mechanical obstacles the player has to overcome with planning before and during the game. There's going to be twenty scenarios in the game. It's been a lot of work to test them, but also rewarding. It's also made me think back on some wargaming I've done, both design-wise and as a player, and made me reflect on the fact that scenario design is an under-discussed aspect of wargames but is, in fact, the beating heart that drives the whole experience. It also separates good games from bad games, and a quality scenario is responsible for the the highest points of my wargaming career in all instances.
In a sense, I think that designing scenarios is probably one of the best ways to get into game design altogether. |
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