Welp, we’re into the new year, and that means it’s time for a sitrep on what’s afoot. In my last post I talked about some of my goals for the coming year. The scaling up is actually pretty boring to talk about – it’s mainly a set of emails, online conversations, and so on – so unless and until I have something substantive to report about that, I won’t bore you with it. Instead, let’s talk about the two main strands of development work that are going on.
Heavy Weapons
The Heavy Weapons expansion is in a good state. For now, the rules/mechanics aspects of it are frozen. There are a new set of missions that go with it, and that’s where the development and playtesting focus is. Once I’m happy with them, I’ll start writing up the rulebooks and story text. That’s the boring bit, really, but at least I get the chance to play with the cool new stuff on the way there!
Currently, playtesting isn’t showing any significant problems (which is good, because this has been in testing for a while, and you’d hope major issues would have revealed themselves by now). There’s also some unintended bonuses showing up. For example, Close Encounters is a game which can require a fair bit of cognitive load. It turns out that some of the expansion content – some of the bug and weapon types- minimise any additional load because they’re conceptually similar to things which already exist. This means that people who don’t want to deal with too much additional complexity can use the less complex options, and still have things which make a valuable contribution and (no less important) feel cool and satisfying to use. That was an unintentional product of the development process, but I’ll take the wins where I can!
Bug Unifying Generalisations
Back in December, I talked about how I felt I needed a more integrated concept for how things for the bugs would develop across the expansions. I’m pleased to report that I’m making some progress there! It’s still a bit rough and of course subject to change, but even now it’s feeling a lot more satisfying than the previous state.
Just like the troopers have different types of squad, the bugs have different types of swarms. Each swarm grants a special ability, and making the most of that ability encourages the bug player to play differently depending on what swarm they’re controlling. This feels intrinsically satisfying – you’d expect a hunting swarm to behave differently to a lurking swarm, for example, and having systems which reward that feels much better than mandating it via rules.
There are clear differences coming through in terms of what behaviours the bug player will want to employ, and in what the best way is to benefit from them. I’m happy about that – I want there to be multiple good options, not one which is unequivocally best, so a situation where people can come to different conclusions and make them work feels like a good place to be.
There’s still some conceptual work to be done on this, and of course it needs a lot of playtesting. It’s also lower priority than getting the heavy weapons stuff finalised. Nonetheless, it feels good to have made some progress on this.
Encounter Table Games 