The State of the Game – January 2023

Just like last year, this post is a bit of a retrospective on what got achieved in the previous year. I’ll also engage in some goal-setting for the year to come. What has been and will be happening with Close Encounters? Funny you should ask…

Achievements

The biggest achievement from 2022 was getting another expansion to finalised status, bringing the total to two (in addition to the pre-production status of the base game). Close Encounters is a great game, and offers plenty of fun. And it gets even cooler with the expansion content! Adding heavy weapons and squad leaders is good for the troopers, while the new bug types and hierarch bugs boost the bugs. Using them all in new missions, on new map tiles, is like a whole new game. I’m glad this this has gone well, and although I’m blocked on moving the expansions to pre-production status (which we’ll talk more about later) it feels good to be building up the support structure for the game.

Setbacks

Unfortunately, two of the goals from last year escaped me. I haven’t been able to scale-up to even limited-rate production. Worse, it’s only once that has been achieved that I can close off the development work on art and story, so this has also blocked expansions from achieving pre-production status. It’s frustrating to be blocked like this, and I need to find a way around this obstacle in order to effectively progress.

Goals

Just like last year, I’m setting three goals for the year ahead. First is to get at least one expansion to pre-production status. I will deal with the obstacle mentioned above by ignoring it! That means using placeholder art and story text, stuff that I think is suitable but expect will need to be reworked if and when production commences. But it will let me get the expansion into a state where it’s comparable to the base game, so I think it’s worth doing.

The second goal is to get at least one more expansion to the finalised state that the first two are in now. That means nailing down the rules and concepts, and getting it to the state where I can confidently switch to writing the rulebooks and scenarios and working on art and story text. The main candidate for this is single-use equipment cards for the troopers, paired with mutations for the bug types in play. Initial tests on this have been promising, but it will need rework because of the changes made to bug swarms.

Finally, I’m going to keep prodding away at production partners and options. This is where things have fallen down in previous years, and I don’t want it to continue being an obstacle. I think one issue in the past has been that I’ve approached potential partners in serial rather than parallel – I’ve talked to one, and only once that succeeds or fails do I talk to another. That puts me at the mercy of other people’s timetables, and has caused a lot of frustrating delay. This time I’m going to try parallelising the process a bit, by engaging in discussions with several partners in a similar timeframe.

So, that’s the state of things at the start of 2023. Let’s see how the Year of the Water Rabbit progresses!