Buckling Down

I've noticed a lot of people maintaining blogs on this site to keep a log of their progress, so I thought I'd give it a whirl. I'm currently continuing development of LH and in the process of setting up an indie game company, the name of which will be kept a secret until the domain for a website is secure.

LH is making rapid progressions in playtesting, quite aided by my current state of acute insomnia. After tinkering around with the rules constantly to try balance the scoring scheme, I've finally found it. The first batches of rules led to rapidly fluctuating rules that rarely reflected good decision making on the players' behalves. It mostly game down to the luck of what you drew.

With the adjusted scoring system, the games end in a 70-100 point bracket, save for one wonder game which resulted in 108. There is quite a clear line where, once you surpass that score, you're quite likely to win. As I want the luck of draws to still effect the game, whilst not crippling the importance of decision making, I'm going to next focus on the perfect balance for targets.

There are 10 possible targets, each represented by a card. These cards have multiple functions, used both throughout the game and at the end to determine victory or defeat. Due to the massive overshooting of the initial sets, these target cards will be balanced in my next version (V1.5). I will play one more game with V1.4 to round it off with an even number of games to make my assessments all the easier, then play the same number with V1.5.

I love all of the character cards and the lengthy time of artwork for them has begun. Interestingly, although the luck of the draw determines how strong or weak your team is, the games have appeared relatively balanced and high scores were achieved even with a seemingly weak team. The balance between characters, boosts and missions seems to be flowing smoothly - although I want to refine the boosts and chop a few out for a few new experiments. Once I have the targets balanced I can turn my attention to those.

Overall, the progress is proving great and I've tested it with my girlfriend, who also really enjoyed the game. Once I have the targets and boosts finalised I'll be turning my attention to the framing of the rules. It is a 4 player game by design, but I wish to adjust it so it can be played with 1,2 or 3 players. This will be a mind numbing and number crunching time, so as to not upset the balance of the 4 player preferred way of play.