I managed to screw up the simple objective of playing some games from last month. Things didn't go great. I did make a lot of progress on Danger Close, but everything else was stalled by scheduling issues. The SFB campaigns are set to resume next week, so that will be a plus. The rest of this is all about Danger Close. Danger CloseI played a campaign of the Farm Gate campaign and it was very revealing. While this game is still in the rough stage, I don't know if I ever produced more playtesting notes than I did for this. The game works pretty well, as the core concepts are quite functional, but it needs a lot of quality of life stuff. Most of that comes from making dedicated components like counters, which are currently all placeholders. But there were tons of other little revisions to be made that all have made playing the game after and easier. In general, the core game is quite fun. You fly around and try to locate and kill the enemy, save downed airmen, and disrupt enemy operations. The night missions are require you to use things like aerial flares and to keep an eye on enemy muzzle flashes. It feels like Thunderbolt Apache Leader but much harder, which is good: too often there you easily steamroll your opposition. Here, the risk is omnipresent and real. The Communists aren't idiots standing around waiting to get blasted, and every pass at the enemy carries significant risk. you can mitigate some of that risk by just blasting everything that moves, but that means you're probably going to spray some civilians and absolutely wreck your scores. Now, the biggest challenges are information compression. I'm working on the tokens for enemies and I'm debating how to present the information required for your own aircraft's weapons. I could use tokens, but that would need a lot of tokens and a lot of info on a tiny space. I'm considering just having a weapon reference sheet that's two-sided, and then a simple check-box method of tracking ammo consumption. I'll try both (though admittedly weapon tokens are looking pretty tough right now). The hostile tokens turned out ok in the prototype. I use a coloured band to represent their A.I. type, then simplified their weapon ranges from the previous method which was too granular. For speed of reference, their Ambush range is now highlighted in red. It's all simple stuff like that to make the game faster and easier that's needed. Already it's a huge amount smoother than my Farm Gate playthrough. Goals for August 2022Feeling pretty pathetic here, but the goals are:
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