Hey everyone! Hope you read my last few journals about stealth which i earlies posted. I have been making a lot of progress on stealth lately which in detail i have blogged about right here: http://www.bgdf.com/blog/stealth-strategy-explosion
Recently, i had an awesome stealth playtesting party, in which i invited some of my fellow gamers, one of which is also a video game designer. The party went great! we couldn't stop playing it! 7 people were invited, out of which 5 came at my house at 12:30 pm. Believe it or not we played till 7:30 pm!
The first challenge was to explain my game to people. Some of them had read my earlier blogs so were familiar with the concept but didn't know the mechanics. So, to make the explaining part real quick, i passed around a piece of paper i had written the plot on, while i explained in brief some rules. Most of them didn't know what goes on with designing and were not at all familiar with the designing. So, before even starting the game i got suggestions like, we'll play this way instead of that, why not just disclude the card game and play the board game. It was kind of scary, i mean "let us just play the game first! :P". There is a reason why the game is made the way it is :P.
After a few minutes of convincing, we started out with the first game. In the first game, i decided not to play and let them play so that they will get an idea of the gameplay. The game started. If you know about stealth, you'll know that there are two teams a cop team and the criminal team. I somehow expected players fighting to be in the cop team. The exact opposite happened. The criminal team had a great honor. Its true when they say, not much humanity left in this world XD :D.
The game went on and at the start, they were like "Oh, i want see what happens when i move here, so i'll move here." then, as the game progressed it started changing like "Okay, lets see, what will the opponent do next? I can trick him like that, but i won't take a risk.. hmm.." Stealth involves a lot of team planning and strategy. So, i was really happy when i saw the players of a team whispering strategies into each others ears and discussing them. It made me realize how much they were 'into' the game.
Stealth is an adventure that can be played on three maps/in three phases. So after 3 games in three maps and completing the adventure, the rest of the two friends came and i joined in too. That's when things started to get really interesting. You see, as a designer, i should be the one people are afraid of losing the game to. Especially as stealth is purely skill based and doesn't have an element of luck. Somehow, and i have no clue why, the team that i would go in always lost! At the beginning i blamed my teammates for it :P, but when it started to happen almost every single time, i really started to worry XD. Game by game, my friends were really getting very good at the game beating me every time XD.
As a designer i had mixed feelings, first was the feeling of drowning in the shame of losing at your own game XD :P, but the second was that proud feeling that someone is getting better than you in your game design. Makes you feel really confident about the game.
We later analysed that it was also partly because,somewhere in my mind, i was trying to make the game close. And also because my friends were huge boardgamers.
As we played for quite a while, i also found out some minute rare case glitches in the game. I really loved the feel of playing your very own creation with others, especially when they are enjoying it!
We packed up at around 7:30 having played 7 to 8 games!
They gave me a lot of really great suggestions (this time because they gave it after playing 7 rounds, they didn't scare me with it :P)
I haven't implemented most of the suggestions, mainly because of some mechanics issues or complexity problems. That's the thing with highly strategical games though, You can't just add or take away a mechanic because it didn't match the theme or it wasn't very attractive sounding. If you do so you might have some balance issues.
But yeah, taking some of their suggestions, valuable feedback and the fact that they loved it, helps me a lot when i am at this stage of finalizing every rule or mechanic in the game.
All in all, a really fun playtesting party, that actually got my friends really interested in stealth. I now have to send them all the artwork and progress as i proceed. Hearing this, if you want to have a look at stealth, Here it is:
THE HOW TO PLAY YOUTUBE VIDEO
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKV6mV8TK6k
THE TGC GAME PAGE
https://www.thegamecrafter.com/games/stealth
RULEBOOK
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/7ka7212fmr5b2lq/AABjl2i7CfZjEFCCZsv61V3Va?dl=0
PRINT AND PLAY
https://www.dropbox.com/s/gc4r742gqlv5t4s/Stealth%20PnP%20version%202.0....
Hope you like it! Thanks for reading!
