encountertable

Deconstructing a Bloodbath

In my last post, I talked about how the first mech playtest was a complete bloodbath. It’s worth digging into that a bit more, in an effort to understand how it turned out that way, so here’s how it went down.

First Playtest: Mechs

One of the expansions I’ve been working on for Close Encounters is based around big robots that accompany the troopers to add some extra firepower (and perhaps other abilities too). I just got to the point where I could playtest this content for the first time… and it was a bloodbath.

Gradients in Practice

During playtesting in the weekend, I realised that cognitive load is a big problem for some players. This isn’t exactly news, of course – right from the start I’ve been trying to minimise it, especially for expansion content. But it’s one thing to be aware of this idea, and another to see it demonstrated in front of you. Fortunately, there’s a way to cope with this.

Playtesting Models

As part of the game development process, I prefer to use figures rather than cardboard counters or plastic tokens or meeples or something. I do have same vague justifications for this – I need to be able to test with other people who are non-gamers and figures are easier for them to see what’s being represented; and it also lets me try out figures from different sources to see which might be worth using as sources. Honestly, though, it’s mostly because I prefer to push around figures which look cool! In this post, I’ll be talking about the figures I like to use.

Content Modularity

We’re back in the world of Close Encounters for this post, and specifically the expansion pack content I’ve been working on for it. As you’ll know from previous posts on the subject, I have plenty of content for expansions, and testing and tweaking isn’t a huge obstacle – the issue is figuring out how to group all the content together. I still haven’t made a final decision about that, but I do have an interim plan.

Diving Into Dungeons

Close Encounters is taking up most of development time these days – or, more specifically, expansion content for it. I’ve talked a lot about that recently, so today I want to change topics a bit. Let’s talk about a project I am currently thinking of as “Crypt Encounters”.

First All-Up Playtest Complete

I took advantage of the long Easter weekend to do some all-up playtesting of the expansion content I’m working on for Close Encounters. Of course I’ve tested all the bits of it before, in various combinations, but I hadn’t done an all-up test of everything at once. This testing cycle was also special because I was getting the perspective of some testers who haven’t seen any of the new content before, so it was a good opportunity to throw everything together and see how it went.

Play Styles in Close Encounters

A little while ago I mentioned that the way different people choose to play Close Encounters can be interesting. In this post, we’ll look at some of the play styles I’ve commonly seen.

Tactical Choices

Oddly enough, this post isn’t about the tactics people use when playing Close Encounters. I’ll talk about that another time, because it’s an interesting topic in itself, but today we’re going to be looking at something different: representing tactics in the game.

The Testing Continues

Here at Encounter table headquarters, I’m continuing work on expansions for Close Encounters. The basic outlines of the content, at least in first draft form, are ready to go. It all works… in theory. However, as we all know, in theory, theory and practice are the same thing. In practice, they’re not. That means I have to test the heck out of it all, in varying combinations, to find out how it all interacts and make sure there’s nothing unexpected lurking in the bushes.