The Thrust of the Matter

March has been a busy month and April is going to be moreso between birthdays (mine!), speech competitions, and basketball tournaments. But, right here at the beginning of the month, I was able to sit down with my game co-designer, Aaron, and play with our game. We have the first mission basically complete, just need to finish some balancing and still working on the XP system.

Here is Aaron, picking off the enemies he's killed this round. He was able to "purchase" the Fire Wall card which blasts a wall of fire on all adjacent enemies. I think both times he was able to use it, he took out 10+ enemies. This is one of those cards that is a high cost, but is it still too over powered? Does it need to have a higher cost? Does it need to have less attack power? So many questions...

We managed to escape! We got to our checkpoints, blasted a bunch of baddies, and got back out. In this scenario, you don't need to kill everything, just get out alive. You can see that we did just that and left many bad guys behind. The balancing of one player (which I've mostly played) and two players seemed pretty good. This mission was perhaps on the slightly too easy side of things, although we did take some damage and there were some times we were in tight spots and couldn't get moving. I'd like to make it a little more challenging, but I still want most people to win this first mission. It's basically the tutorial.

Cards also control your movement and while some cards give specific movement amounts, if you don't have any of these in your hand you can also discard any card to move one space. Well, being the mature, grown-up men that we are, we didn't laugh or chortle or giggle at all when Aaron "thrusted himself to victory" at the end of the map. I apologize. We're sleep deprived parents/teachers and need to laugh at awful, inappropriate jokes on occasion.

I can see why some people who don't do this full time work on games for years and years. The seed of this game is already two years old and this particular game is already almost a year in the works. Even if this game goes nowhere, it's a lot of fun and a good challenge making it. Maybe someday it'll be on Kickstarter or something though. That's the plan!