You may have noticed progress has been uber slow on my game(s) and my art grind progress has been a bit erratic, and both are kind of related. I had this kind of “eureka!” moment last week to change focus from a tabletop lite strategy game a la Heroscape to a card dueling game then when I sat to print out and test things I realized, “oh shit- I have no idea where to begin making this actually function.”
See, my goal with CH and Irrgarten before it was to keep things quick and easy to set up and play without making it so simple as to be boring or the same every match. So, the concept of the duel system was going to be danmaku, basically. Shmup stuff broken down in such a way it could be played with cards but still have the “vibe” of carefully taking shots while avoiding massed fire. The idea was each player gets a Battleship style board, but can move around between turns while trading fire via pattern cards. So, main issues:
- would require a large number of markers/tokens
- on a 5×5 grid, there’s a *lot* of possible bullet patterns
So, it was kind of starting to lose the vision I had in mind and all the compromises I could think of either were too board gamey or inadvertently ripping off something else (which I confirmed by going through my copies of Bullet?? and Pocket Paragons.) So, all that paired with the odds of anyone wanting to help test it have me a little crestfallen. I’m not quite ready to give up or anything, but I think I’m better off focusing on art for a while and/or learning how to make a digital version of the game for easier access and distribution.
Finally shaking off the funk so I hope to have more real content soon. Until then… take it easy folks.
