Finish line? What's a finish line?

The problem with juggling multiple projects is that each individual one can take a lot longer to make progress.  So for the past week or so I've been focusing entirely on Neon Knights and Under a Violet Moon to try to get through that last "10"% or so for each of them.

Violet Moon - after the playtest a couple weeks ago I've been making small tweaks to try to get the balance just right between the two sides.  Not sure how close I am, but better than last time, I think.  Originally I had worried that the game would be too hard for the villagers so I tried to correct for that, and in recent tests it looks like I might have overdone it a bit.  So now I'm swinging back the other way, but also (hopefully) just a bit.  Raised the threshold for eliminating suspects, changed one of the villagers' special move cards, feeling better about this.  Will show it off again next week, and if that goes well then I think it's time to start pitching to publishers.

Neon Knights - one of the things I've wanted to do before calling it done is to add more example enemies and magic items.  I've been going at a steady pace this week and I think I'm up to a good amount now.  I still need to write a few more example stunts, and I need to reread the whole thing to make sure the style and rules are consistent, and then I think that's it for the writing.  Then I find one or two proofreaders, and if they agree with me then it's time to move on to layout.  And then, someday, posting to DriveThru.

Violet Moon - new video

Last summer I posted a video for Under a Violet Moon, as part of my submission for a competition.  With another six months of feedback and a much prettier game board, I've posted a new video in preparation for the next competition coming up.  This one also does a much better job of actually explaining how the game works, so that should help.

Violet Moon - minor updates

Main thing to mention today is that I finally updated the Screentop version of the game to match with the most recent rule update.  Besides that, most of my attention today (and for the next week, especially when I have time off work coming up) is on making a better video than I had before so I can submit it to Cardboard Edison.  Not much in the way of new designing or revising, but it's still stuff that needs to be done.  And it doesn't involve so much caring about fonts like when I'm making a sell sheet or a convention flier.

PAX Unplugged 2023

Yesterday was my one day that I was able to go to PAX (advantage to being local is that there's no pressure to make the most of my time if I have to travel anyway).  First half of the day for me was, once again, playtesting in the Unpub room.  Wonderful feature, very much appreciated as a designer, also one of my favorite bits the year that I went as just a random person without my own game to test.  I was running Under a Violet Moon, mainly focusing on fixing the balance between the two sides.  Tried a couple different tweaks, might have over-corrected (Faeries won almost every single game yesterday), still working on that.  I did prove pretty thoroughly that I do not have the home field advantage I thought I might for being the designer of the game.  Despite all that, for the most part people really got into it, and I got a few comments on the mechanics being unique.  Most folks just played one game and then moved on, but there was one pair of players that wanted to give it a second try right away since there was no one else waiting at that moment, and they were both definitely getting a better grasp on the strategy in the second playthrough.

One negative that I picked up on, which I only picked up now that I had a chance to sit through multiple consecutive playthroughs, is that the advanced movement cards felt less and less useful over the course of the day.  There were occasionally moments where someone had just the right one to put them in a good position, but it didn't feel like they were adding that much value.  I'll come back to this in a moment.

The other big event for me yesterday was that I had pitch meetings with two publishers for Violet Moon.  I've never gotten past the initial email before when I've submitted a game to publishers, so this was incredibly exciting.  Unfortunately they both ended with "this is a really interesting game but it's not right for our brand."  One of those was polite but brief, but the other one was very enthusiastic about how much he did enjoy the game.  The way the pitch went, I talked for a minute, then he asked if we could play, then he stopped in the middle of the game to give me some feedback, then he wanted to dive back in and finish the game before he gave me his conclusions.  So I'm taking that as a partial win at least - I didn't get the result I was hoping for, but getting that kind of encouragement from a publisher is a big enough deal for me that I can run with it.  Of the feedback that he gave me, what resonated the most was about the advanced move cards.  He agreed with my earlier observation that they didn't feel as valuable as they should have, with the added observation that having that big deck to draw from set the wrong balance between strategy and luck.  He suggested that there should instead be separate, more limited sets for Faeries and Villagers that play to their respective strategies - namely, that Villagers benefit from moving more people to the middle ring and from separating people who are clumped together in one space, while Faeries benefit from moving more people out of the middle ring and from keeping them more clumped together.  I think this is a great idea, and while I still need to fiddle around with exactly how I'm going to implement it, this is going to be the next big revision.  Hopefully I have it put together and tested before too long, and if it works then I can get back to my slightly-less-Sisyphean pitching...

Violet Moon - a small maybe-update

Most recent couple of tests have suggested that the gameplay overall is solid, but I'm still not sure about balance.  I already decided that a change I'm going to test out next time will be to drop the rule about yellow spaces being safe for villagers.  Hopefully that's enough to keep it even between the two sides, but if not, I thought of another change today that would be next in the queue to test - penalizing the Villager player for wrong guesses.  In the game narrative, this would be something like "everyone is suspicious of John and focuses on him, and the faeries take advantage of this confusion."  What it would look like in the mechanics, as I'm currently considering it, would be that if the Villager player tries to capture a piece that turns out to just be a villager and not a faerie, then the Faerie player gets to turn one of their basic move cards face up again.  So it's not a huge penalty for guessing wrong, but it is something.  I actually really like the idea, I feel like it puts more pressure on the Villager player in a way that fits with what I want the game to be, but there's also the risk of it pushing the balance too far in the Faerie player's favor and that's not what I want.  Oh well, more testing to do.

Again with the dancing

I played Under a Violet Moon again today, with one of the same players I mentioned previously who does Medieval dance as a hobby.  We tried out the group move mechanic that I had added based on his feedback last time, and he declared it successful - much better than before at capturing the feel of a dance, while maintaining the strategy elements from before.  The way it works is simple enough - there's a separate set of basic move cards, not exactly the same as the ones the players get but similar, and after both of the players have moved then everyone on the board moves according to the group card.  Because it's a dance that presumably all of the villagers know, the group cards are shuffled and then set out at the start of the game, so you can see the whole thing in order and try to work that into your strategy.  It did add a layer of complexity without overdoing it, which was nice.  And while it wasn't part of the original plan, in our game today I stumbled on the idea of only using some of the cards rather than the whole set, which would add some variation from one game to the next.  I'm happy with it.

Board Game Workshop contest outcome and next steps

Continuing a trend that has been pretty consistent so far, Under a Violet Moon did not make it past the first round in the competition where I had entered it.  Judging was based entirely on a 2-minute video.  I've had a little time now to digest the feedback that I got, and here are the main takeaways:

• Most of the reviewers really liked the theme and the core gameplay.  A few people specifically said they liked the way it brought social deduction to a one-on-one format, which was exactly my design goal with this game so it's nice to see that it worked out.  There were a couple comments about gameplay elements being unclear, but that was a problem with my presentation rather than the game itself.
• A couple people suggested that it might be too easy to figure out who the faeries are.  I'm not entirely sure yet from my limited testing, but it feels like this is probably right.
  
• A couple comments also about the game maybe being a little too simple in a way that would limit replay value.  I haven't played it enough myself to assess that one.
• One person commented on the need to rely on the faerie player to give honest and accurate information every turn, which could be a stumbling block (not even maliciously, but just with the need to be paying attention to a lot of different positions on the board at the same time).

So where to next?  Well, as I mentioned in a previous post, I've been working on adding a "crowd movement" phase based on previous feedback (I was holding off until after this competition so I could incorporate the new feedback as well), and if I get it right then I think that might add the right level of complexity to address the "too simple" complaint.

Replayability and balance?  I'll just have to do a bunch more playtesting.  Keeping score will show me if one side really does have it easier than the other, and I guess if I start getting tired of watching people play my game then that will tell me about replay value.  Although the suggestion to find ways to vary it up from one play to the next wasn't a bad idea either way.

Relying completely on the faerie player - in a different previous post I discussed a suggestion I had received about letting the villager player capture whoever they want, with the risk of false positives to go with that.  That certainly would mitigate this specific problem.  I'm still not 100% sure myself if I like it, but I do think it's worth testing it out and then decide after that.  Maybe with a rule that this can only be done after the first time the faeries capture a villager (which, in my mind, helps stick to the theme where the villagers don't realize they've been infiltrated until the faeries actually start causing trouble for them).

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.

Violet Moon - revised movement rules

I think I've fixed it.  As I wrote in this previous post, feedback from the first playtest was that the movement cards were too restrictive and it made the game really frustrating.  The first thing I did after that was come up with a really simple AI so I could solo test, playing as the Faeries against a dummy Villager player.  I ran through one game using the original rules to get a baseline, and found that on about half of my turns I was able to make a move that felt strategic, as opposed to just filler or even not having a legal move at all.  Then I tinkered with some different ideas and tested those out.  The winning idea is to keep the original deck of movement cards as "special moves," with all of that working the same way as before, but also each player gets an identical set of "basic move" cards.  The basic moves are set out face up in front of the player, and on your turn you can either use any two basic moves that you have available, or one special move from your hand.  When you use basics you flip them face down, and they only get turned face up again after you've used a certain number of them.

In my one solo test (so far) of this system, every single move that I made as the Faeries felt strategic; even if it wasn't the best move I could imagine it still felt like it was leading somewhere.  And apart from the statistics, just the play experience felt like I did a lot better than before with finding the right puzzle challenge level.  Hopefully other testers will agree the next time I get to break this one out in public.

Next step - run enough test games to see if the two sides are balanced, and figure out how to fix it if they're not.  This could take a little while...

DGE - anonymous voting

In my post about Cardboard Edison feedback, I mentioned the recommendation to make voting anonymous, and I started spitballing ideas for how to do that.  Despite my earlier reservations, I went ahead and ordered some blank dials to experiment with.  This past weekend I finally got to test out the new system, and it went great!

Here's how it works - at the start of the game, each player gets a number (it's arbitrary, you just pick somebody to be 1 and go around the table from there).  When voting for inventions, turn the dial to the number of the player whose invention you are voting for, then place it face down in the middle of the table.  Once everyone has voted, the dials get turned over and you can see right away who got what.  When you move on to the next round, pass the dials around so everyone has one again; they're identical, so it doesn't matter which one belonged to which player before.

One of the things I always noticed when I played DGE in the past was that if other people cast their votes while I was still thinking about it, it often felt like that was nudging me to go one way or another.  Using the dials completely eliminated this, and I loved that.

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In other news, I'm still figuring out how to change the movement system for Under a Violet Moon.  I think I have the general idea of what I want it to look like now, but I haven't put the cards together yet to test it.  Hopefully I'll have that before too much longer.

Violet Moon - first playtest report

Had my first test session for this game last night, through Game Makers' Guild.  Two players, neither of whom was me, which helps.  The Faerie player had some good strategies and was able to capture six villagers before we ran out of time; the Villager player had correctly figured out who two of the four faeries were, but had not been able to maneuver them into being captured.  Overall conclusion was that the core concept is good, but the movement cards in their current form are too restrictive and work against the puzzle solving aspect of the game more than they contribute to making the puzzle interesting.  The main problem was that most of the movement cards require a specific starting position for multiple pieces before you move, which made it much harder to find ways for that move to be useful.  At the same time, they did feel that the cards supported the in-game narrative of the villagers dancing around in a circle.  So it looks like the next step from here is to either make the individual cards more flexible, or change the way movement is handled altogether (i.e. instead of "play one of the four cards in your hand," come up with a way to have more options available at all times - and based on the feedback from yesterday, it doesn't sound like just increasing hand size is the right solution).  We'll see where this leads...

Under a Violet Moon prototype

I was hoping to get at least one virtual playtest (and possible revisions) before printing, but I have an in-person event this weekend so this couldn't wait any longer.  So here you go - the hard copy prototype for Under a Violet Moon.  Blackmore's Night CDs not included.

 

Hopefully I'll be back here in a couple days with the first playtest report...
 

Under a Violet Moon - ready for public testing

Well, I've been talking about it lately, now it's time to show it off:

Current version of the rulebook is here

Virtual prototype is available here - play in browser, no downloads necessary

More dancing, and hopefully no self-deception

 After my initial solo test of Under a Violet Moon, I've spent the past week coming up with new movement cards.  Tested that out today, felt more satisfying than the initial test, ended with a Villager victory in 12 turns.  No idea how accurate that is for real gameplay, given that hidden information is an important part of the game and I don't have a good way to simulate that when it's just me messing around on the computer.  But it did give me an idea for how tricky the strategy is going to be for the Fae player, needing to balance between capturing enough villagers to have a chance at winning without giving away too quickly which characters are the secret fae.  In any case, I at least verified that the basic mechanics are working how I want them to, so that's pretty satisfying. I just need to make sure it's also fun for anyone else besides me.

I also wrote up the basic text for the rulebook.  It needs a few diagrams though, to explain the movement cards and how capturing works.  Once I have that I think it will be ready to share.  Maybe by the end of this weekend?

Keep on moving

 Burst of inspiration hasn't faded just yet - in between various non-game things today, I also spent a chunk of time making movement cards for Under a Violet Moon, and a little time on character tokens as well.  I think I have enough now to put together a proof-of-concept prototype; not the full game, but enough that I at least know it works more or less how I want it to.  One thing that does worry me is the risk of the game deteriorating into endless walking in circles around the board, and right now I'm not sure how well I'm going to be able to spot that, or to fix it if I do.  But I'll see how it works with the dozen cards I came up with so far, and then adjust once I have any idea how this thing looks on the table and not just in my head.

 

EDIT (because I don't feel like writing a separate post for this): proof of concept is successful, and to me messing with it by myself it does feel like there's interesting strategy here.  I'm also quickly spotting that I need a lot more variety in the movement cards, because with the dozen different ones so far it's still really hard to move anyone where you want them.  But at least I can be confident that once I do come up with a bunch more I will have a fun game at the end of t.

Slowing down, and maybe picking up again

After the push to finish Neon Knights I really haven't had the brainpower to do much designing in the last couple weeks.  I mean, I think I earned a break after that, but still.  Not that it's been entirely a break - I've started a playtest on RPOL (setting creation was fun, they're still getting their characters together before the action starts), and I've also gotten recruited onto a small team designing an action/horror game that's looking fun so far, but isn't going to get too much attention on this blog for now since it's someone else's game a lot more than it is mine.

I've also been playing around with some of my other game ideas to see which one might be my next serious focus*, and today I had some inspiration after work which I think answered that question.

Under a Violet Moon is a 1v1 game about fae trying to kidnap villagers during the (unspecified) big festival.  The board is a circular grid, where the villagers dance around the maypole or central bandstand or whatever gets illustrated into that spot someday.  At the start of the game, the fae player randomly determines four of the villagers to be fae in disguise.  Players then take turns moving any pieces they want around the board; cards determine how many pieces and which way they move this turn, but not which pieces, so both players are able to move humans and fae equally.  Fae capture villagers, and villagers eliminate fae, by maneuvering them into specific positions on the board.  Fae win if they capture more than half of the villagers, and villagers win if they eliminate three out of the four fae.

Today's work was sketching out the board and the basic rules.  Next step is to design the movement cards.  Then I can start prototyping and testing.  No idea about timeline; I'm anticipating that movement cards will be one of things I get stuck on and take months until I'm satisfied with even a first attempt, but let's see what happens.

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*No, I haven't forgotten about Explorers of Legend, I'm just not feeling that one currently.  I just finished a rough draft for an RPG, I need to work on lighter stuff for a while.