Design and Play

With the pledge manager live, and generating a very surprising (to me and Paul at least!) number of upgrades/add-ons, I’ve been able to focus this week on the graphic design for the expansion. In the run up to the Kickstarter I didn’t want to invest too heavily in it because I didn’t know which stretch goals we’d unlock. With that information sorted I’m now in a position to lay out the rulebook (and the ship dashboards - something else I’d deferred to focus on the Kickstarter). Last week I spent my lunch breaks on the dashboards and this week I've finished them off and started on the rulebook. We've also made a couple of tweaks to the base game rulebook to make things easier to understand and adjusted the points value of the fighters slightly (from 5->6 points).

The other thing we needed for the expansion rulebook was a bunch more scenarios. Again, the exact selection of scenarios relied on which stretch goals we unlocked - we’ve a limited amount of space in the rulebook, so we wanted to get a nice spread of scenarios that covered all the unlocked stretch goals.

On Saturday I went down to York (where Paul lives) and we spent six hours thoroughly testing the scenarios we’d chosen and confirming the points values for the new ships. I also got two hours on trains to work on the dashboards too!

Testing a scenario with the mines

This week will be all about graphic design again so I can get everything we need in place for on-time delivery of the Print and Play files (due by the end of this month).

After that it will be back to crafting physical rewards and ordering the stuff we need from manufacturers to do that. The Kickstarter funds have finally arrived, so it's all systems go!

Change of Gear

For the last several weeks our focus has been on making games - Paul has been flat out laser-cutting ships and bagging bits and I’ve been spending several evenings a week making games and then most of my lunch breaks taking the week’s batch of completed games to the Post Office.

Paul is now way ahead of (even our accelerated) schedule and I’ve used up and posted the last of the bits I got from Paul at the end of February, so I can’t post any more games until we meet up and exchange bits again. I’m still making boxes and cutting dashboards, but those are now stockpiling ready for our next exchange of bits.

This frees up my lunch breaks this week, so I’m planning to try out some new scenario ideas so I can get them up on the website - now that 75 people have the game I want to ensure there’s plenty of scenarios available to keep them entertained.

Next week I’ll be on holiday with my family (16 of us!), so I’ll not be making any games, but I’m betting we’ll play some FlickFleet as I’ll be hand delivering my brother’s and sister’s copies and I think my nephew and nieces in particular are very keen to play.

Until then, I'll be crafting another batch of boxes, etc. that will take us to over 100 completed games - that's a quarter of the run! I've also done a little Zombology this week too - I've still got 49 of those to make (20 of which are for Kickstarter backers).

Back to Zombology crafting as well this week