Work in Progress – April 2022

Another day, another update! Gather round, and I’ll tell you how things are shaping up. Short version? Not badly, but not as well as I’d like.

Playtesting

The playtesting has been focused on two main areas. The first is the special missions that go along with the heavy weapons expansion. These are working out fairly well so far, and I’m pleased with how they feel. Secondly, I’ve been testing out some of the concepts I have for balancing out the squad leaders that the troopers get. Briefly, the concept at present is for the bugs to get some specialist additions, which grant the entire swarm special abilities while certain conditions are met.

That’s going… well, it’s going okay, but no better than that. Apart from the usual issues about game balance, there’s a conflict for the bug player between using their scarce actions on these specialist bugs vs using actions on the stacks of bugs like usual. If they spend the actions on the stacks then they don’t get much (if any) benefit from the specialists, but if they use the actions on the specialists then at the moment they usually lose the game!

I’m still not sure what to do about this. The whole point is to add cool stuff, but I want to do that while maintaining the simplicity and “tightness” that makes the game great. There definitely shouldn’t be reasons to avoid using the new stuff as much as possible! I’ll keep tinkering with this and I’m sure a solution will emerge eventually, but for the moment it’s a bit frustrating.

Scaling Up

I’ve had some productive discussions with various people on this topic. We’re still a long way from anything being decided, but there’s reason for some cautious optimism. One thing that I hadn’t expected, though, was just how much waiting around there would be. I guess this shows the difference in perspectives – for me, apart from my day job, this is my main project, so of course it gets a lot of attention. But for others, this is just one of several opportunities competing for their attention, and without much of a track record to guarantee the value of putting time into it.

When I put it like that, I can see why this doesn’t get prioritised elsewhere. It’s still a bit frustrating, though, because I firmly believe that this is a good product. There’s probably a good opportunity to practice my day-job skills in assessing this, so perhaps I’ll do that later on! For the moment, though, I’ll try to continue practicing patience.