I was lucky enough to be invited to Triple Ace Games’ Designer Day held on 30th June at Melksham Rugby Club.
I played two fun games that weren’t mine which were in a bit too early a stage for a detailed report such as I did last time, so I will just concentrate on the Spaceship 47 play test session.
There were three players, myself and two others.
There were several bits of UI feedback which I won’t bore you with – things such as making numbers on the alien stats bigger so that people could see them from across the table.
The main takeaways were:
Targeting – looking at the section you want to target and then looking at the list of the targetable sections you are in, takes too much time and takes you out of the game. This was one of the pieces of feedback I was given in the first play test but I ignored it thinking I knew better. I really need to work out how to do this better.
I’ve realised my aim of getting a mission done in 1.5 hours may not be achievable. Each mission is composed of 3 maps, so 30 mins per map. I was aiming for 10 rounds per map, meaning each round needs to take 3 minutes. That seems very ambitious with choosing where to move to, who to attack to and all of the dice rolling that your attacks entail. I’ll keep trimming the fat to make the game as quick as possible, but I may have to accept that each mission will only be 2 maps.
The alien enemies are a little bit too complicated. Mainly due to having to track stuff – for instance who the sniper has been aiming at to get their blue dice for when they attack.
They were a few other bits, but for now, those are the main ones I am working on for the next play test.