Changes

• Completely changed the format of the map to be closer to a linear board game with a well defined end point goal.
• In response to the new map format attacking players, joining battles, forming parties, etc became ranged abilities rather than requiring players to be on the same tile.
• Created 6 new classes for PVP to fit the single class format, themed around multiplayer interactions.

Test Results

It’s a success, I guess? I’m burnt out in a way where I can’t really gauge the quality of my own product right now. Tester response was fairly muted, so it wasn’t as big of a leap as the jump to required battles. The pacing dragged in parts, but that was partially down to players getting used to the new format and other attention grabbing problems. I don’t think it was a step down or anything, at the least the racing nature of the game is much clearer to players now.

The main thing that feels off to me is that there are two things in the game that dilute the excitement of rolling the dice to move. Gates (basically, battles) interrupt movement entirely and by necessity have to occur at a regular interval. Branches where players have to pick their next route aren’t as disruptive, but are also necessary for the player positional games to really play out. Right now my thought is to merge the two interruptions into one thing- after clearing a gate, players can choose what lane to branch to with their remaining movement. It’s a good solution, it just has a lot of nasty details (ie you don’t want players transitioning lanes straight into another gate so gate positions become tricky, if a player lands with 0 moves remaining the branch has to give them an extra move point to transition to another branch, etc). The good thing is that this is probably the last fundamental system change that needs to happen.

One thing that I learned is that the new format for designing PVP classes finally seems like the right way to build classes. Each class gets a primary attack/defense type that their regular attack and most of their utility abilities use. For the other two types they end up getting abilities that tend to have MP costs or cooldowns associated with them, so they have to be careful with the application of them. This benefits PVP by adding a tension to predicting your opponent’s moves since your options will get smaller if you choose wrong as well as giving your opponent certain degree of predictable behavior, and it benefits PVE by adding an appropriate amount of resource management and a similar tension for prediction as in PVP.

Haven’t been able to get a group together to test Co-Op yet, so I have no idea how it fares in the new system yet. It’s probably fine?

Next

The main thing right now is to clean up the gate problem I mentioned above, in addition to some other bugs that popped up. After that I’m probably going to do some tests with a slightly wider audience of testers to get a better read on the state of the game. At this point I think most of the fundamental issues are settled. It’ll finally be time to move on to the detail and polish work. A daunting proposition to be starting on it so late, but in a weird way I feel confident about it. Getting the fundamentals right has been a tedious process of throwing away piles of past work. The next phase isn’t likely to be such a wasteful process, so with enough effort it won’t be impossible to get it done in a relatively short time period.