July was a relatively quiet month where we did a lot of playtesting of Cyber Pet Quest and preparation for GenCon, as well as wrangle the logistical beast that is shipping and fulfillment for Lunar Rush and Omicron Protocol - Critical Condition Expansion. We are now 2 days away from GenCon 2023 starting, so if you're headed to GenCon, PLEASE come by Booth 2932 to say hi to us and check out the games!
The last week has been surreal... And since we haven’t written a blog post in a while, I thought I'd post this here to share.
Preparing for DunDraCon, GAMA, and JoCo cruise haven’t left me with much free time but I managed to squeeze in a couple hours of painting. Without further ado, here’s Lucky!
The blog has taken a back seat since the end of the Kickstarter campaign. The holidays were busy and we had a lot of logistics to figure out as we finalized our manufacturing plan and got started producing OP. Exciting times! One of the exciting developments is that we produced our first prototypes of the alt sculpt Bolt and Lucky miniatures.
Well, Brendan and I just got back from one of the funnest and most rewarding demos we’ve given in recent history, the demo to a bunch of our new friends at BackerKit! A bit shout out to Meah, George, Joe, John, and Antonio for hosting us, learning the game, keeping it fun, and giving extremely useful feedback to help us improve the game!
Oh boy that was a rough 2 weeks of internal playtesting!
As many of you know already, one of the unique mechanics of Omicron Protocol is the existence of a 3rd party enemy called the CyMS (Cybernetic Mutation Syndrome), or “Crazies” as the locals of San Lazaro calls them. The cool part is that besides having to do your objectives and fight off your opponent’s faction, you also have to deal with these pesky citizens who seem to randomly decide to attack you. The not-so-cool part is moving and keeping track of them at the end of the turn when both players have finished activating their heroes.
Once you have your basic rules and theme in place game design becomes iteration. You test and test and test, and as you go you make changes to your rules to improve play, simplify, balance. In our game we have many unique characters with a wide range of themes and abilities, we have objective cards, scenarios, and forage cards to balance….
Brendan and I just got back from a weekend of demoing, playtesting, learning, and meeting other game designers at the Pacificon Protospiel, so I'll keep this one short. What a weekend! Besides teaching the game roughly 6-8 hours a day for 3 days in a row and getting invaluable feedback, we also met a lot of great game designers and event organizers who we'll definitely be keeping in touch with in the future.
As PacifiCon Protospiel approaches this Labor Day weekend, Brendan and I have been busy creating our first "Learn to Play" (LTP) version of the game, intended for:
Fast 15-30 min demos that we can give at conventions and events, and
A single sheet version of the rules that teaches new players who eventually buys the game and want to learn the basics quickly.
So the last few nights we've been writing a lot. Mostly writing the 1st draft of our rules. Today, while working with our writer, Nick Brown, we realized that to do more world building (that'll be in another series of posts later), we had to get all the outlines of our characters for the first few factions written out for him to reference and add into the world story.
After reading Jamey Stegmaier's great blog post about writing a blog, Brendan and I have decided to see if we can try to post more often. We may not be able to do 5 blogs a day for 6 years like Jamey, but we'll start blogging about our design thought processes, painting experiences, and any other cool and exciting things we encounter in this fun adventure designing a game as first time game designers. :)
It's crazy how fast a month goes by! KublaCon just ended and now it's time for RageCon in Reno, NV. Brendan and I have been looking forward to this Con for a while now, simply because the organizers seem very on-top of everything, the signup system is super easy to use, and the Game Lab organizers were very welcoming from day 1. It's a smaller Con, but those are often the best because it's just that much more intimate and you really get to meet some great gamers.
