Remove Balance Remove Point and Click Remove Prototyping
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Solo developer Voidmaw on creating Katanaut: “Done is better than perfect”

PreMortem.Games

His design process is highly iterative, starting with loose ideas and evolving through sketches, prototyping, and constant refinement. And of course, balancing everything like coding, art, marketing, and playtesting can be exhausting. At some point, you have to trust yourself, put your work out there, and learn from the process.

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How to Tell When Play-Testing Feedback is Useful or Not

Brand Game Development

Click here. Every opinion – however misinformed you may believe to be – is a data point. As in rigorous scientific experiments, data points are to be gathered accurately and then interpreted later. Choose something to pay extra close attention to, such as balance, communication, or accessibility.

Balance 130
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Enticing mix of genres in Ghibli-inspired The Brew Barons by Lifetap Studios

PreMortem.Games

As we were prototyping there was still a feeling the game needed more action. Thus I make an effort to use purchased art assets only as a starting point to then be modified into something more unique and fitting of the aesthetic.” “We built a prototype in our spare time and saw the potential. But that’s not all.

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How Many Blind Play-Tests Does Your Board Game *Really* Need?

Brand Game Development

Click here. After all, I’m checking to make sure there are no serious balance issues that come out of repeated plays. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had dozens of people blind play-test Highways & Byways , but there are diminishing returns once you hit a certain point. That’s a good thing!

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The Final 100 Play-Tests: How to Put Final Touches on a Board Game

Brand Game Development

Click here. To quote my good friend, Wikipedia: “ [i]n statistics, an outlier is an observation point that is distant from other observations. With enough games, outliers tend to balance each other out. This is a checklist I like to check off before I start final testing: Get the physical prototype ready.

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How To Play-Test the Rules of Your Board Game

Brand Game Development

Click this picture for some backstory! This is where most of the rules have been ironed out and are acceptable enough to use during a prototype either in person or online through something like Tabletopia or Tabletop simulator. This is to make sure the game is – on some fundamental level – balanced.

Mechanics 130
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My Elephant in the Room, Part 1

Designer Notes

Here are some screen’s from the game’s prototyping phase. Note that the point of the Energy system in Frontierville was to ration out progress (so you don’t burn out on the game) which creates friction and, thus, a potential microtransaction. This was an odd little moment in time, by the way.

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