5/28/23 - various updates

One of the design groups I'm in, Indie Game Lab, runs occasional live streams of games designed by the group members (which then get archived on YouTube).  They haven't done one in a while, but yesterday we brought it back with Dwarven Guild of Engineers.  It was fun, though scheduling issues meant we only had three players, so not as fun as it could have been with a larger group.  And I got some feedback on more things I can improve in my game that I thought was already pretty polished up.  They're not wrong though; I probably could find some sillier Bases and Modifiers, and I could probably find more opportunities for players to mess around with each others' inventions (this wasn't feedback that I got before but it really resonated with the other players yesterday, and I'm sure I could at least put something in as an optional rule).  So I've got that to ponder for a little while.  And they did say they'd like to do another episode of DGE in a month or so once I've updated it, so that's cool.

Update - the DGE video is here

In other news, I've been working on adding more content to Neon Knights - test players so far have suggested that example stunts and aspects would be helpful, and now that I've passed the threshold of "good enough for some basic alpha playtesting" I also want to put in more example adversaries and magic items (especially if I'm going to feel justified in charging actual money for this and not just pay-what-you-want).  I don't think I have a specific target for how much I want in there, although doubling what I had before would be a good start at least.  Most likely it'll be a few months of "this song title or lyric is awesome, how have I not turned into something for the game yet?"  Which, for instance, is why the most recent cartridge I added was Ride the Sky, which starts out just giving you super-jumping but can be unlocked to grant full flight and air control powers.

Under a Violet Moon: the "game of dancing and deception" needs more dancing

I brought Violet Moon to my regular board game group today.  Technically not ideal because it's supposed to be a two-player game (we played in teams and that worked well enough), but a couple of them are medieval dance enthusiasts, and I wanted their feedback on the medieval dance aspect of the game.  Their conclusion was that it felt more like a chase than a dance - most of the movement was focused on a handful of characters, while everyone else on the board pretty much stood still the whole time.  One player compared it with Scotland Yard, which I can kind of see (although I think I was maybe 10 the last time I played that game, so I'm a little hazy on the details).  So after the game we talked about some ways to make feel more like dancing, and I've been thinking more about it since then.  The basic idea was to keep people moving more, as a whole group.  I'm not sure yet what the solution will be, but right now I'm thinking to add a "group move" phase in each turn, where a basic move cards is randomly drawn and everyone on the board who is in the right starting position will make the indicated move.  That should increase the dance feeling, but I'm not sure what it will do for strategizing.  Future testing will tell...

Serious changes for Violet Moon

I had a small playtest today for Under a Violet Moon, with another game designer.  He played as the villagers, and gave me feedback specifically from that side.  On one hand, my revised movement system was a success, so that's good.  On the other hand, he felt that the villager side was too passive, especially in the first few turns before he had any useful information to try figuring out who the fairies were.  So we talked about some ideas to address that, and what came out of that was

• Reveal one of the faeries right at the start, so the villager player has a target right away and the faerie player has incentive to be aggressive early on instead of moving too slowly
• Instead of the faerie player revealing when the villagers have captured someone, let the villager player decide when to take pieces off the board if they are in the right position, and don't reveal until the end of the game if these were good choices or false positives.

Based on one evening of pondering, I like both of these and want to test them out.  The first idea I would probably keep as an optional rule (or, depending on how testing goes, make that the default and then make the other way optional).  The second idea would require me to change the narrative description of what's special about those target spaces on the board where villagers are able to capture faeries, but that should be easy enough if I verify that I want to keep this rule change.