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Viking Invasion: New title and some thoughts on Game Design

Howardsample

Well, another week, another blog post! Unfortunately I had no play test this week, but thats ok. Come September I will have a lot more play tests again; lots of people are out of town wrapping their summer vacations and stuff. It gives me time to begin preparing some files to be uploaded to The Game Crafter!

In big news though, I have decided on a name for my game, since Viking Invasion was just a working title. I have decided, based in part upon the opinions I gathered from play testers, that my game will now be called Defenders of Wessex!

Since I have little to share today in terms of game development, I thought I might start with how my game came to be.

For a long while (several years, I think) I have been trying to design a game. That first game was called "Dogfight" and was a miniature war game where the players controlled a squad of space fighters in a dog fight. The gimmick was that the game was played entirely on a 3 dimensional setup, meaning that the planes could actually move in 3 dimensions rather than the typical 2 dimensions plus buildings that tabletop wargames generally operate in.

Well, that idea got shelved because I just could not wrap my head around how to build a useful prototype (this was before my BGDF days). One day, last February, I was sitting in my corner of the basement trying to figure out a better game. I was actually listing antagonists. Zombies. Ninjas. Aliens. Robots. I went through most of the common tropes. Then I hit Vikings. Yes, a common trope, but being that medieval history is actually what my degree is in, this one came together and I had the first draft of the rules done in 30 minutes.

Next step: Call Dad. My dad is the least board gamey person I know; he abhors competition, and he despises most games. The only game I had ever know for him to enjoy was Zombicide, and that only because it was a Co-op.

I told him my plan, gave him an overview of the rules, and he loved it. He asked if he could help me make it even, which was huge! It was also useful because my dad is an artist of no small talent (I'm not just saying that cause he's my dad; the attached image is some of his work. Thats his name across the bottom), and he agreed to do the artwork for the game. Things began to move forward as I borrowed inspiration from Zombicide, Pandemic, and Ticket to Ride to name a few.

So, this post is getting long. I'll end it here. Next week I will tell you all about the birth of version 1.0 and how we found, and overcame, the pitfall that made it unplayable.

Comments

The 'call your dad' step is

The 'call your dad' step is fantastic. It is great to target people with an antithetical outlook and see if you can reel them in. I tried having my father proofread fiction for me, but he was too impatient. Two sentences in, I'd get comments like "Who is this guy?" and "What is he doing?!"

That your father is willing to do the artwork is just awesome. It looks like he does some great work that is visually compelling. The experience of working together and having this as a shared project to look back on years from now . . . I'm jealous. Father and son is the best collaboration anyone could hope for.

Also, thumbs up for having a

Also, thumbs up for having a degree in this. I expect that will set you apart from just about every other viking game, it looks really good in a KS bio, and it should help if you ultimately go with a publisher.

I was pretty stoked when the

I was pretty stoked when the idea coalesced. Its a golden opportunity to use an otherwise unusable degree (I only say that because a history degree now is only really useful for pre-law, teaching, or going full PhD; my plan had been to go full PhD and be a professor of medieval history, but that idea was scrapped at the end of the first 5 years of school).

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