EPT
Personal
My wife’s immigration was approved and she landed in Canada in October 2014! The original timeline on the Canadian Immigration website was 14 months, but it took us 8 months to get approved. So life is really good these days.
I drive a 1998 Toyota Camry. It has had minor issues (changed the battery about 4 times in 6 years, replaced the starter and alternator, and I fixed an oil leak by replacing the engine oil pressure switch). But I absolutely don’t want my wife driving it in case it ever breaks down on her (it has on me). She came for a visit to Canada in spring 2014 and we started our car search then. It took all the way until December 29, 2014 for us to make a decision. But I was happy we met our timeline of “before the end of 2014” haha.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/qdkj1O7.jpg)
Old and busted
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/oBdwtZx.png)
New hotness
Unfortunately, the car hasn't arrived yet. So it's still Camry for us for now!
Our next step is to get out of this tiny condo and into a house, but given how long it took us to buy a car, I’m not optimistic that we’ll be able to get that done any time soon. With these oil prices, everyone is a predicting the housing market in Calgary to drop off, so taking our time might work in our favour.
Also, to embarrass him, Coagulation got engaged a while ago. Everyone send him a congratulatory PM! Hooray! One of us… one of us…
Progress
Do you know this feeling? At the start of something, you have a feeling that nothing is final, so you can make quick, sweeping decisions that have huge effects on your project. It seems like the first 60% gets done in 5% of the total time. Then the refining starts and things slow down. You revisit and redesign and recycle your work many times. You finish 30% of the project in about 25% of the total time.
Coag and I are now in that last 10% and it’s brutal. Even though the project is still technically in Alpha, everything is getting closer to “final”. I’ve reread the cards about 1000 times, rewrote the instructions at least 100 and keep pouring over every design decision to make sure it moves the game in the direction we want.
The positive side is that the artwork really stands out and it just keeps getting better. I’ve recently been storing and categorizing past blog posts and obsolete designs. It’s pretty interesting because you can actually see the artwork evolving and Coagulation’s style changing through the project.
I started learning Photoshop to help out with minor things. The results have been NOT GOOD lol. Drawing is hard.
Schedule
So I printed rev.16 in October and got decks out to our programmer and web designer as a small thank you for their help. As I’m reading my last blog, that was supposed to be the end of Alpha. Well… that didn’t happen haha. But I am confident that this next run of cards will be the last Alpha run.
The move to Beta in spring will coincide with a simple website launch at http://www.manaspirits.com and a call for a round of Beta testers. I want to say thank you again to the people from TL that helped with early Alpha testing. That was back around 18 months ago… Hopefully if those people help out with Beta testing, they will be able to notice the improvements made to the game.
The focus will move to a kickstarter campaign in Q2/Q3 2015. I would have liked to hit the ship date of Christmas 2015, but we will surely miss it. I’m aiming for production around Q1/Q2 2016, as I foresee A LOT of issues with printing, sourcing, and assembling all game components into a box >_<. I have no idea how to do any of these things, so it’ll again be a learning experience.
Printing
Up until now, we have done all our custom card printing with Superior POD. The experience has been relatively positive, but I do want to give some honest feedback in case people are sourcing custom cards in the future.
- Their prices are competitive, but can’t compete with the Hong Kong printing companies. I haven’t tried any Chinese companies yet.
- They seem really busy. Every time I order from them I have to follow up 2-3 times and have always had to pay for expedited shipping in the end. They are really nice whenever I call, and last time they finally told me to just write in the comment section of the order when I need the cards by. So if you order from them and have a deadline, you should do that.
- Our card art is pretty dark. When we tested a few cards with competitors [Artscow, Printer Studio], their brighter printing suited our cards much better.
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/Slhj2fD.jpg?2)
Left = Printer Studio | Right = Superior POD
You probably can't notice the difference with my shitty photo, but in person it's very clear. Also, please ignore my lazy cropping on the Printer Studio version, and the hot fix to the Black Dragon's stats
I’m just waiting for Coag to finish updating the artwork before I print the rev.16a deck. I’m really, really excited to see how a full deck turns out with this brighter printing
Testing & Feedback
We are starting to get broader testing with the few decks that are across North America (Alberta, Ontario, Michigan, Illinois) now
. This is invaluable, because the player experience ranges from MTG enthusiasts to people that barely play board games. I started formally summarizing and tracking feedback. I try to list all possible solutions to the issues people raise, and then think through all the implications before implementing a solution. I think it’s pretty important. I open the document about once a week and read through all the open and closed issues to see how everything is being affected.I got in a game with three TL members a while ago. I think it went pretty well but there were some very clear flaws in the design that showed up that game:
- A cheap card that makes a player miss their turn. This card is way too powerful late game. I ended up getting chain stunned by this card two turns in a row and killed. The card was revised so there are now two possible effects, and the defending player gets to choose one of the two.
- There are too many options on a turn. It’s overwhelming, and causes frustration when a player realizes later on that they made a clear mistake from simply not remembering what things they could do. I changed Heroes to all only have passive “at the start of your turn” effects, which should simplify gameplay.
My two friends in Ontario also got a game in. Their advice was very thorough and specific. In many cases they touched on subtle points I had never even considered:
- Players feel very frustrated when their turn is ended prematurely by opponents with “lose your turn” or “take all resources from a player” cards. I went back through and changed all those cards to have different effects to relieve this frustration.
- You can win or lose simply based on starting hands. I loosened the mulligan rules.
- Some Heroes seem OP in 1v1. I added a “ban” phase at the start of the game.
- Going last sucks. Well at least now you get an extra card if you go last to help that.
- There is no downside to hoarding resources. This has been a consistent problem in this game. I added a maximum amount of resources each player can have based on their level. I am worried the mechanic is too direct and tedious though… I haven’t played with it so we will have to see.
- Comebacks in 1v1 are almost impossible. I agree, and will discuss that in the Design section below.
As always, I’m excited to get some games in with the new rev.16a and see what the changes do.
Design
There haven’t been any major design changes, just subtle changes. I do have one big worry about a change. As stated above, comebacks in 1v1 are really difficult. For a while now, we’ve had Event cards. Basically, whenever a player levels up, they flip one card and a random effect happens. Originally, they were supposed to be like raid bosses – They would distract players from fighting each other temporarily and give them incentive to band together to kill this boss or suffer group consequences. It sounds like a really great idea; however, the implementation was clunky and these cards frankly took over the game. They made it so no player was able to accomplish anything. All players just ended up trying to survive and let the bosses kill everyone else. It allowed comebacks only through purely passive play, which was not the way I wanted to solve this problem.
The new Event cards have a simple instant effect. They are much cleaner. Only about 60% of them are positive effects, and 40% are either negative effects or help your opponents. The idea is to give losing players some hope of catching a good card and getting back in the game. I really worry that this is too direct of a catch-up mechanic. I also worry that players will feel resentful because they played well, were ahead in levels, and then one card helped their opponent and lost the game for them. As always, it just needs play testing and constant fixing.
Another big struggle has been tracking Hero level and Life Points. Currently, we have two boards that sit in the middle of the table. Everyone puts their pieces on them. I don’t like it too much because the pieces don’t always make it obvious who is who. One of the things I absolutely hate in games is when the score isn’t immediately clear to everyone. I hate players having to ask “What level are you?” “What’s your Life at?”
To combat that, I’m experimenting with each player having a tracking stand that represents their Hero. It also keeps all five pieces of information about the state of your Hero front and center:
1. Your Life Points.
2. Your level.
3. How much Mana you get per turn.
4. Your maximum Mana per turn (new).
5. How much XP you need to level up.
To solve the issue of having to ask that I mentioned before, we decided to try making them double sided and standing up, so everyone can see your current stats easily. Here’s a picture of the current state of our prototype, after 7 revisions:
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/cG2H0D5.jpg)
Old and busted
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/C4aa8LP.jpg?1)
Maybe new hotness? Who knows...
Yes, this is the terrible drawing I did
Except for the central artwork – that’s awesome and Coag did that obviously.Right now the stands are large binder clips and the clips are paperclips, but I ordered some plastic pieces for proper testing. The spinner “bearing” is one of those rotating fasteners that you used in grade two to make a paper plate clock… For some reason I absolutely cannot seem to source the two-piece plastic spinner bearings that they use in literally every board game with a spinner (Glass Road, King of Tokyo/New York are three that I have that immediately jump to mind). WTF? Why are these so hard to find? Searching “plastic snap fasteners” is leading me to things that are using in hemming clothing. Searching “plastic rivets” is leading me to industrial fasteners. Searching “plastic game fasteners” leads nowhere!
I have massive concerns about this idea. Firstly, while searching for clips, I found endless threads with people complaining about Arkham Horror. I’ve never played the game, but apparently it also has plastic clips but they don’t fit well and constantly fall off. I’m pretty sensitive to making sure that doesn’t happen here.
The bigger concern is if production of this is even possible. I’ve never seen two-sided cards with a spinner. I also don’t know if they will be able to have high enough quality to make sure both sides are perfectly aligned. You can imagine if the windows aren’t aligned, the spinners aren’t aligned, or the Life Points numbers aren’t aligned, then the things you’re showing your opponents will be different than what you see
I’m worried about this a lot!Artwork
Artwork comes last because it’s the most impressive part of the post
Coag and I did a one-by-one review of all the artwork. I would say 60% of the artwork is complete. 20% of it needs very minor touch-ups. 10% of it needs a little rework. And then, unfortunately, we added some new cards, which means we need 14 new drawings, which is about 10% of the artwork. But since Coagulation runs some sort of third-world slave labour artist camp, I’m sure this will be done in a week.
Here are some new dragons!
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/nlM4JY4.jpg)
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/FBqkbO3.jpg)
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/2qqPS8d.jpg)
![[image loading]](http://i.imgur.com/I5x5tzT.jpg?1)
If you made it this far, thanks for reading and see you in the future!
Also games looks really cool now.
