A Beginning in the End.

WE DID IT! We made a whole board game in less than a month!

We handed it off to others to play today...it sounded like they enjoyed it.

50 points for whoever can recognize Phillip and Hannah in this pic!

But this isn't the end for our team, or for Iron Tyrant. Coming soon...find us on Kickstarter!

And the pieces fall in to place!

We met last night to paint, to refine, to finish. And so we did.

The rules were set and formatted for booklet printing. Buildings and tyrants were painted, repainted, detailed, and sealed.

The biggest beast to conquer was the assembly of the box. We discovered two things: paper cement doesn't work well for smooth card stock on cardboard, and everyone should own a hot glue gun. At one point we did have to send someone out to get another piece of cardboard because the top of the box was measured incorrectly.

Other than that, the night (and this morning) went smoothly. The board was set in, dividers placed, small bits separated to individual baggies, and over 200 building pieces were set, tangram style, into layers in the box.

We are now at about 30 minutes until turn in...wish us luck!

It's the final countdown...

Tomorrow it's due. And we're gonna make it.

The cards got done, they just need printing. The magnets are cut, and they look awesome. The rules are ready to go.

All that was left, was the 200something buildings, power cores, and tyrant characters.

It's a messy process...

Phillip and I saw another 5:00am, and we cast quite literally until the sun came up. Painting and box assembly coming up!

And then came the Crunch...

Here we are at the most nerve wracking, most stressful, most exhausting...and yet most exciting part of the game experience: Crunch time. We find ourselves in the last weekend before submission, and we have LOTS to do.

We all planned to meet at Phillip's house for construction. We still needed to finish designing, printing, and cutting cards and magnetic doll pieces. The board and box were designed and printed but needed assembly, rules still needed editing and formatting, and while models and molds were complete, we still needed to cast and paint over 200 plastic game bits.

We were in for a long night...but that was okay. We ordered pizza, put on some How I Met Your Mother, and worked. This team gets along well, so it was as much a party as it was work. Macauley even made a theme song: "Ain't no party like a board game party 'cause a board game party is...MANDATORY."

For the most part, everything went well...except. Our buildings were just too big. We cast a few sets of them, but soon realized it would take a prohibitive amount of material to finish!

We would need to redesign the buildings, and so we did, but it was disappointing. The big buildings we made looked great, and felt right on the board, but it just wasn't possible to follow through with the rest of them.

It was shortly after this revelation, and somewhere around 5:00am, that the night (or morning) devolved to scotch and brownies.

Cheers! To board games and crunch time!

We think we can, we think we can!

Today will be a short post because well...today was the day for pushing through the work. No discussion, and few words were exchanged today as we all hunkered down and pumped out progress.

I worked on the art for the board, Mariel designed the cards' front and back layouts, Macauley wrote flavor text, and Phillip refined rules.

The one screen may look like Facebook, but he swears he was being productive on the other!

The deadline for the final board approaches on Tuesday, so the coming weekend will see the start of our crunch period...wish us luck!

Revelations

 Today saw one ideas and two revelations!

Mariel has been slaving away making art for all of the weapons and utilities to use on our magnetic doll cards, but some how we all forgot about board and box art. Our first revelation...was that we needed these.

A sneak peek at the art for our favorite utility: the "Filching Falcon"

Since Mariel was pretty tied up, I decided to work on the art for the board. Obviously, we wanted it to represent the city your mechs were running around and destroying. Here's our second revelation: cities tend NOT to look like crossword puzzles, so making our current board look like a city was going to be difficult.

So, Phillip set to work on a new board that would be easier to lay a city theme on top of.

Check it:

That finger represents Phillip's blog photo debut.

The brilliant idea from today came for Professor Jack Mamais, who came into the room and announced that he had a title for our game! Are you ready for this?

IRON TYRANT

The plot thickens...

We had an evening meeting today to continue work on the physical aspects of the board.

Previously, we decided that instead of using wooden pieces to make buildings, we could instead model one of each type of building in clay, and then cast it in cheap plastic - just like the pros! Though potentially more expensive (instead of just wood blocks and glue, this process requires clay, acrylic, silicon mold material, and polyurethane material), we would be able to make buildings more consistent, sturdier, and ultimately more professional looking.

They be jealous of my clay modeling.

I began this process today, as  Macauley and Phillip started drafting the first version of the rule set, discussing missing details, refining vague points, and addressing differing understandings of mechanics.

Mariel brought in some of the artwork she's been working on for weapons and armors bit to use in the paper dolls - we were blown away by the amount of work she got done, and by the quality.

This was an interesting meeting for us. We had seen our gameplay in action, and gathered that others found the play engaging, and the right level of challenge. Now however, we are beginning to see how the game will LOOK.

The picture is coming together...and it is lookin' purdy.

Inform the Public!

Over the past few days we began outside focus testing of the game. We got a ton of fantastic feedback - most exciting of which was that everyone who played agreed that the game is fun!

A glipse of game developers in their natural habitat.

Good critiques came too. The board is a little big, a little confusing, and needed to be adjusted due to our previous changes to line-of-sight. We also got a little big critique that gave us a big little change: each player should get three mechs instead of one.

I saw it is a big little change because while it will not be difficult to implement - rules need only be altered, mechanics see no change, and visuals require only duplicates - the impact on player experience is huge...and awesome.

Now players will have a tiny army to control. It lets them specialize different mechs for an even wider range of play style. It increased player anxiety (in a good way!) and pushed the game further towards strategic decision making.

Our next steps are to implement some of these changes, and to playtest the new, 3 mech experience.

Topple problems...

Today we did a full playtest! We rolled out some chips to use as representations of the buildings and finished up ideas for utilities. This was a vital stage in the process. We were able to test major mechanic number two (the buildings) as well as the merging of all mechanics at once.

Having the buildings around, we picked up on major confusion about line-of-sight and fake building physics. We had been operating under the assumption that if you shot a building from say, the north side, it would topple towards the south...or at least thats how physics works in our little board game world.

BUT! Because of the way our line of sight worked, it was possible to shoot a building on a diagonal...so would it topple diagonally? That was stretching the rules of physics a bit too far.

We brainstormed and argued about this for awhile...

The debate ensues...

Eventually, we decided to err on the side of simplicity: You can't shoot buildings on a diagonal. 

We also sorted out issues with over and under powered gear, line-of-sight issues involving being atop buildings, and others. 

Design and balancing wise, this was probably the most productive day we've had so far.  

Let the games begin!

Today we conducted our first playtest! For this round, we left out buildings and utilities. First, we didn't yet have pieces with which to simulate the toppling of buildings, and not all of the utilities were decided upon. Since combat is such a huge part of the game at this point, we felt it would be wise to jump into playtesting it right off the bat.

This, we found, was a good decision. We found plenty of small issues that would be relatively simple to fix. Chief among them was that there wasn't quite enough anxiety in terms of player death. We fixed this by cutting player health in half. We also came across a few rules that needed more explanation, a few skills we might need to nerf (weaken) - like when someone stacks a ton of movement upgrades and could sprint across the board and never be caught.

Roll off!

We also found out a few things we were doing really well. We all tried to specialize in different areas and make diverse types of mechs to play with. This was easily accomplished, and played well into our individual preferences. Upgrades came at a reasonable pace (except for Phillip who has the worst die rolls known to gamer-kind). And, best of all, the group was laughing and getting excited, and screaming happy screams of pleasant frustration often and loudly enough that we were asked twice to tone it down a bit.

We take this as a good sign.

I said a board board board, a board is the word...

After we got more of the actual playable rules figured out, Macauley set to creating the first iteration of combat specs and skills. Philip set to making our first board, Mariel began drawing armor concepts, and I started organizing simple cards to playtest with.

We got a LOT done! check out the board so far:

We know, it looks like a crossword.

But here's the deal:

     - Red is a player spawn point

     - Green is a base

     - Yellow is the flag start point

     - Blue is a subsequent flag spawn

     - Each square is 1 inch

Unfortunately, Philip and I spent most of our work time today coloring in each of the 132 squares that needed it...those black squares ate up two whole sharpies. However, Macauley continued making ideas for upgrades, reworking, and refining them to get ready for our first playtest. Mariel...was just awesome.

Playest coming in 3...2...1...

Combat Incoming!

We figured it out. We knew previously that we wanted our game to have mechs. We wanted it to have destructible buildings, and we wanted players to be able to beat the snot out of each other ..or...well grease or something if they are giant robots. And we finally decided: what a better way to beat each other up and break things than in a deathmatch or capture the flag type area?

After some refinement we settled on the combo: king of the hill plus capture the flag = awesome. Four players will compete to capture a single flag that starts off in the center of the board. However, there are only 2 bases and a base must be captured before a flag can be claimed at it. Players draw 1 event card at the start of their turn. Event cards provide upgrades, damage players, or create havoc in general. After the event card is drawn, and their affects applied, players may use up to 2 "actions" which allow them to move, attack, or capture a something.

With this in mind we knew our weapons, armor, and utilities would have to allow players to:

- customize their mechs to suit various play styles

- have epic player versus player battles

- gain varying advantages (ie: hit harder, heal better, run faster, and be stronger...see what I did there?) 

- and, in the case of utilities, be generally obnoxious and create board-wide chaos

At this point we had also decided that goofy was indeed the feeling we were going for. Our team does goofy well. So with the silly also in mind we came up with a few fun upgrades. Here's a sample:

- Man of Steel Boots: They let you leap tall buildings in a single bound. No really, usually it takes 2 actions to  climb to the top of a building, 

- Beamsaber: Its a beam saber. Let's be real.

- Frickin' Filching Falcon - He's a utility that let's you steal another player's armor and replace it with one of your own.

Now we continue to work on these details. Stay tuned for the first board design, and playtest number 1!

If we build it, we will play.

The next stage in our process, of course, involved fleshing out the idea. We needed to talk more in depth about gameplay and rules. We needed a basic understanding of how to build the physical pieces and present information to players.

If there is one thing our group does well, it's arguing with purpose. If someone presents an idea that someone else doesn't like, we tell them so, and we tell them why. We also get excited about each other's ideas, and we build on them. And so, after much ideating, arguing, revision, and excitement, here is our basic idea:

Four players control mech suits attempting to over take a city. They can attack buildings and other players. Toppling a building allows players to kill others within its crash zone, or to block paths. Certain events would allow players to upgrade their mechs with new armor, abilities, or weapons. Other events allowed for a few chaos inciting incidents such as the city's inhabitants suddenly rebelling and attempting to protect their buildings. Details such as exact win condition, or how players find upgrades are as yet undetermined. But the fun is coming. We can feel it.

In terms of visualization, we considered what players might expect from mechs and city destruction. Painted wooden blocks would allow us to make buildings that would be taken apart and littered around the city. Debris is your friend.

Upgrades would allow for player customization, and we wanted players to be able to see the changes they were making to their characters. Paper dolls came first to mind and we talked about different ways we could approach this. Finally, we decided player pieces would be basic mechs, but a large magnetic sheet could hold magnetic armor parts. Each would have different colors and shapes, and stats would be printed on tabs to the sides. We had a few concerns about the strength of the magnets or the rigidity of the main body piece.

Michael's gave us some ideas though. We could strengthen the magnetic paper by backing armor pieces with small but strong circular magnets. The body piece could be thick card-stock with the magnetic paper adhered to it.

Did you know you can get magnetic paper for use with laser jet printers? You can. And it's awesome.

It begins...

Today the crew met up at Panera Bread (like all the cool kids do) to talk about the first things first. What kind of game do we want to make? Do we want it to be serious? Goofy? What's our story? What mechanics should we focus on? What's our genre?

Previously, in class, we tossed around a few ideas. We quickly decided however, that we could better decide if there was food present. So, towards soup and salad and paninis we went.

The first (and most thought-out) idea was a thief game. The objective could vary: steal the most treasure, be the most famous, get caught the least. Players could pay off guards or sic them on other players. They could gain fame (or infamy) within different factions in the city.

The second idea was similar, but with a twist. The players were time travelers who stole famous artifacts from throughout history and the future.

The third idea: redheads attempting to take over a post apocalyptic world. Some of us are partial to red hair...

The fourth idea was a mech game with destructible buildings. We argued over this one for awhile. We weren't sure if it was feasible or if it would be too complicated to explain to players. Would we be able to manufacture quality pieces for it? (We can't use pre-made game bits.) Would it be easier just to make the thief one we already liked and had plans for?

We had some concerns about the thief game too. Was the concept original enough or did it sound too much like Ubisoft's Assasin's Creed? Then, we thought we might do a little work on both ideas, bring them to our next class, and ask for feedback. As we continued however, all four of us got more and more excited about the mech game.

We settled on mechs.

Up next: planning for feasibility and polishing the idea.

Setting the Stage...

Let's start by introducing the cast: 2 game designers, an artist, and a producer. For the past 9 weeks, the four of us have been taking a class about games, both digital and non, and how to formally critique them. To practice design and critique, small teams create board games in class under various constraints (must be a four player game, must be cooperative, must take so long to play, etc).

Here we find ourselves at the final board game, approaching the final lesson in critique.

The Team:

Phillip - Designer. Photographer...which is why you'll never see him in pictures.
Macauley - Yes, like Macaulay Culken. Designer.
Mariel - Artist extraordinaire.
Hannah - Producer. Blogger (apparently).

Our Mission:

Create a board game with an original IP (or intellectual property, meaning a new story, characters, theme, artwork, etc.) with a board, rule set, and game bits that are polished enough to be publishing quality.

Our Constraints:

None.

This Blog:

Will chronicle our process, blood, sweat, tears, and the growth of the game itself.



Here goes...