Post #3- Let’s Play a Game
Play testing, it’s what most Game Designers live for and die trying to accomplish. My business partner, Cesar, and I started playing One Letter Better at work on our lunch break. He’s almost 20 years younger than I am but we’re pretty equally matched. He took the game home and played with his girlfriend who is another 10 years younger than him and their experience and enthusiasm sort of lead to getting the game where it is now. (I heard a rumor that she wins a LOT!) I pulled together a group of my son’s friends who are all late 20s or 30 years old and got them to play a couple of games also.
The good thing is that the concept of a card game where you spell words, steal words, etc. seems to transcend any generation gap. The bad news is our play testing has been a lot more limited than we would like it to be. I don’t know how it is where you are but here in Southern California you can hardly tell there was ever a pandemic. Oh sure, there are still people who wear masks and some places that would prefer you did or still insist that you do but as far as people grouping together, it would appear that it’s all systems go now.
That said, our biggest single challenge right now is being able to put together play testing groups. So to that end I am learning how to get our game on Tabletop Simulator. This falls under the “old dogs – new tricks“ category. Now I’ve been around computers for the better part of four decades, I write VBA code for work on a regular basis and I studied BASIC and FORTRAN programming in college. TTS is a slightly different animal all together. The upside is once I manage to get this going, hopefully I’ll be able to find play testers all over the world that can come in and play the game. Fingers are crossed that this solves one of our biggest problems.
To be honest, getting a deck of cards into TTS is pretty straightforward. There are a large number of videos on the subject, some of which were put out by Berserk games, the company that developed the platform.
In addition to the cards, I have to find a way to list the rules and for the players to keep score. Back to YouTube I go. When you think about it, it’s a lot of effort for something that is not my profession. Even if we do make any money from the game, it isn’t likely to be anything close to enough for us to quit our jobs. There’s something about Game Design, however, that makes us want to see it played.
We are also running trivia style contests on Instagram and Discord where the winners get a copy of the game and a personalized T-shirt. I’ll post the contact information down below in the event that you’re interested. Games usually go up on Thursday mornings around 8:30 AM PDT.
We have a party game we’re developing called 3 Somes (not what you’re thinking). Not going to be easy to play on TTS so we’re throwing a game night party. We’re supplying the food and snacks and it’s BYOB for everything else. We’ll have multiple copies of both OLB and 3 Somes, along with t-shirts and other swag as prizes. This will be a practice run for our demo at the Strategicon Gateway conference in September. The measures are a bit extreme, maybe, but we’re committed to making these games as good as they can be. You can read just about any blog by any Game Designer and they’ll tell you that play testing is the only way to do this effectively. As the creators, we are way too close to our babies to see their flaws. Trust me when I tell you, even with the limited experience we’ve had, players will do things to your games that you never thought would happen.
One Letter Better is pretty solid, we’ve had to make a few minor changes to the wording in the rules but the game itself we think isn’t going to require any real changes. However, players have a funny way of proving designers wrong. In the words of William Shakespeare (or Puck), “Oh Lord, what fools these mortals be.”
I’ve been alive long enough to know there’s a lot I don’t know. How my game will fare at the hands of players is very high on the list. We think OLB is a good game but there might be one or two changes that would make it a great game. At the end of the day, that’s a game designer’s Holy Grail, to make a game that players describe as “great”, “awesome” or “dude, this game rocks!” And one they will play over and over despite the other 467 games sitting on the shelves in their game room.
I don’t ever want to be that guy, you know, the one blowing up the Discord server trying to recruit play testers, but if you’re not busy, do you wanna play a game?
Follow us on Instagram @cruisemonkeygamesFind us on these Discord Servers:
Weird Raptor Games https://discord.gg/sNqD4FJF
The Game Crafter https://discord.gg/BGw2VAc6 Discords