The Battle continues..

Our project is due this Wednesday and its great to see it all coming together at this stage. Today we put the game board together having got the map printed out. We stuck it on A1 board and then backed that with A1 board again so that we could cut out the centre part of the map and allow the hex pieces to sit down into the map. It turned out really well and we are very pleased with the result.

We spent the rest of the day putting all the hex pieces on to board and cutting those out so that we have a full set of hex for the resources and also for our upgrade cards. We also have 3 decks of resources cards done to go with these and its all looking great even if we do say so ourselves!

All thats left before the final playtest on Wednesday is to put the finishing touches to the box for our game and to print out a copy of the rule book. Pictures of the final product will follow on Wednesday after the play test!!

Final Board design

Just a quick update to showcase our final board! It's interesting to see how the board has evolved from the initial wireframe to this beauty! 

We took on board some comments that the colours in the beta board were a bit dull, so everything is brighter and more vibrant. We reduced the number of colours on the board at the start of the game to make it look less complicated; the idea is that as the game progresses and more peices come into play, the board gets more colourful. We are very close to completion now, as many of our assets are printed and ready to go. Now comes the home stretch!

Gametesting

Today marked the first official playtest by a third party of the newly titled 'Battle for Eden'. We decided a more dramatic name than just 'Species' was needed, as it was a bit more indicative of the type of game we'd be producing. Last week, we underwent some basic gametesting within our group just to iron out the last of the glitches in the gameplay.

As you can see, our board was still in the beta phase. We hadn't really done too much work on the design end of things; our resource cards were represented by random playing cards, we had no real resource hexagons on the board, and we had to use random lego pieces as our drones.


Today, we unveiled the final test board. This one represents what the actual completed board will look like after the coming weekend. Pictured is the board with some of the template resource cards, as well as an example of the collectable power-ups and drones in use.

It was a fitting time to unveil, because (as Basil mentioned in a previous post), today was the first time that people from outside our course got to play the game. Things began smoothly enough, following some initial confusion regarding the rules, the guys settled into play.

The players picked up the game fairly quickly, and soon they were playing at the same level as we who had been working on it since the initial idea was laid out. By the end of the test, they really didn't want to stop playing, as each participant had become properly invested in becoming the first ever victorious player. 


We took this as a great sign; if people can come to the table for the first time and grow to really enjoy and understand the game on their first playthrough, we must be doing SOMETHING right!

The origin of the species

Thanks to Basil, we've finally got our species finalised. We're all thrilled with the artwork, Basil's images have been drawing admiration from friends and classmates alike. Below is the final artwork for the species cards. I'd like to reiterate that: Basil did these drawing. From Scratch. How impressive is that?

The Verteid, a slow, lumbering race with powerful defensive properties

The Keit, a nimble but fragile race of agile sky-warriors

The Schrag, a vicious race bent on tearing their opponents limb from limb

The Chanis, an advanced super race dependant on technology

We also have a mockup of the box/rulebook cover art. It's only indicative of the final artwork, but if this rough sketch is anything to go for our packaging is going to look fantastic.

Building the Drones

Last night we finally got our Drones completed. We bought a knock-off version of Mastermind called 'Brain Master' which contained 19 of 4 different coloured pieces.

Unfortunately, these caps had little pegs protruding from the base which rendered them fairly useless for our purpose. I gathered my tools and set about removing the pegs. An initial attack with a small saw made very little headway actually cutting through the peg, and did a fair amount of damage to the lovely goose tray I was using as my lap workbench. A new approach was required.

The wire cutter was a much better tool for the job. It cut through the peg quickly and cleanly and with a minute amount of effort. Brilliant! This would be done in no time. Alas, this was not the case, as an unforseen issue now arose.

The wire cutter was too thick, and the clipped peg still did not sit flush with the base of the drone. This was fairly useless, as the drones were unbalanced and fell over regularly of their own accord. Clearly, a solution was needed. After a bit of tinkering, I came up with a rough fix: coarse sandpaper!

While this was by no means the ideal solution to the problem, it did at least make the drones stand upright. If I'd had a finer sandpaper I would have tidied them up a bit, as the result of the coarse paper was ugly and quite unprofessionally finished. However, at 1:30am the night before the first real external playtest, I wasn't in perfectionist mode. They stood, and that was good enough for me.

An hour and 75 drones later, our board pieces were complete. My fingers rubbed raw and my patience entirely shot, I laid out the proud drone armies for their inaugural group shot.

Then I went to bed.

The board evolves

Today marked the introduction of the new board for playtesting. The initial design was fairly basic; we started with a basic template and laid out markers to represent the resources that players will be gathering: food, metal and silicon. We decided on the number of spaces we'd need for an effective territory-capture mechanic, and threw together the alpha version of the board.

As you can see, 'rough' is overselling it! However, this board did allow us to play through the game initially and get a feel for how things would work, how many resource spaces we'd need and how well the resource gathering would work in terms of effectively upgrading your army.

We aimed to have a beta prototype of the board ready for our first playtest on Wednesday. Luckily we were a little ahead of schedule, and the Beta board was constructed in time for an early playtest this afternoon.

The Beta board is a huge step toward our goal for the final board design. We've yet to implement the movable resource tiles, but they're represented by the different coloured hexagons on the board. The beta design carries over a lot of what we came up with originally, but a lot more time was spent on the aesthetics and design elements of the background.


The next step will see the resource tiles and the evolution/upgrade area designed, and we'll have the placeable resource tiles ready to try out by the end of the week.