Tried out the new version...

We were able to try out the new version of the game this Thanksgiving weekend.  I actually think it turned out pretty good.  We really didn't play a long game, and a lot of the time was spent explaining the rules or figuring out how some things should work that I wasn't sure of.  The balance seemed pretty spot on though surprisingly.  I actually don't think there are many number tweaks that i need to make right now, although that may change after playing the game a few more times.  I may tweak the number range for the exploration credits on planets and also how many Starship upgrade cards there are slightly though.  I'm thinking of just removing one per division (so 3 total).  I am also thinking of changing the hand size from 3 to 4.  The game was weighted pretty heavily in favor of one player when we played, but that was due to poor shuffeling on my part before we started playing.

Nacole thought I should post some of the things I used when making the cards so I'll post a couple here:

For this first card,  I actually used a real satellite cloud map from our planet for the cloud layer of the planet.  Then the continents are made up of different rock textures.

For this next card, the small text to the right and left of the planet scan picture are purposely small enough that they can't be read, but just provide flavor.  The text on the right is actually information about one of the planets in our solar system.  Each one of the scientific missions has info from a different planet.  The text on the right is actually pulled from a list of information from the periodic table of elements.

This next picture isn't in the first card set, but is a sneak peak for the first expansion.  This is the first card I've worked on it might not be completely done yet.

The Cards Arrived

I was surprised to have the cards arrive with the mail this last Saturday.  I had thought it was about 4 to 5 days for turn on around on getting them printed, but apparently it only took 3!  They look great and turned out very well.  I had decided to drop the border on the cards like on the picture from the sneak peak post.  I think that was a good decision, as it is very difficult to tell the cards that are cut slightly offset.  With the border on it would have been pretty easy to see I think.  The templates that thegamecrafter.com has available to work on cards has a "safe zone" just in case there is a slight offset when they get cut.  Even so, they did a great job and there is very little offset on the cards.

I also have the rules done.  If anybody would like me to email them the rules, let me know.

Update and a couple of the new cards

So I haven't posted here for a bit because I have been working hard to get the cards as finished as I can so that I can get them printed and delivered before Thanksgiving.  My Sister-in-law is coming to visit and I wanted to be able to try it out with her as she had helped try out the original game.  I figured out that I would need to get the game done Wednesday and get it uploaded and ordered to hopefully have enough time to get here.  I managed to get it mostly finished (a few cards have placeholder art), uploaded, and ordered at about 11:30 Wednesday night :)  Now I'll just have to wait and see if it makes it here in time.

I have a couple more cards posted to show how the new card type looks.

Sneak Peak

Sneak peak of the card style for the new version of the game.



Playtesting and Shifting Gears

Ok, so if you are starting to read and you see this post first, I'd suggest you scroll down to the bottom and start at the first posts.  It will make more sense I think.  A lot people reading this so far already know about this game and have seen some of these cards, and even have seen the test cards I had printed from http://www.thegamecrafter.com/.   What most everybody doesn't know is the rest of what I'm about to say towards the end of this post.

While working on the rules for the game and all the art, I also created a quick and simple prototype that I could just print on my home printer to test playing with.  Here is a sample of what these cards look like.

We've playtested the game twice.  One game we didn't get to finish the game, but the other time we did play a full game.  The full game we played earlier in the summer and the partial game was late spring.  Now after playing the full game there was some great ideas for changing some things to make the game better.  I made the changes and continued to work on the art and the instructions.  Over the summer though I just got busy and didn't have time to work on it very much. 

Now that I think about it more though I think it was also partially my slight dissatisfaction with how the playtests went that made me not work on it for a while.  The game was fun, but not quite as universally fun for everybody that it thought it might be.  I didn't totally expect it to be, but some other shortcomings made me rethink the direction of the game.  As players explored the galaxy and laid out all the cards, the table became VERY crowded.  The base game pretty much took up an entire table top, and I have tons of ideas for creating expansions.  Another problem was that there was little interaction between players.  Most good games have a degree of interaction where the players either directly compete or they directly work together.  Maybe not all games, but the vast majority do.  This game just didn't have that.  It almost seemed like everybody was playing a solitare space game at the same table.

About a month ago I decided to stop development on this version of the game.  I plan on finishing up the last 10-15 cards I had left here when I have time and have a copy of this game printed so that I have a copy, but won't put it up for sale.  With that said, I wouldn't have posted all of these last posts if I was just outright quiting :)  No, instead I am shifting gears and have worked to redesign the flow of the game.  Much of the art assets are all done already, so I don't actually have to do much there, except the new style of the cards.  The new version has actually direct interaction/competition between players and I plan to add some cooperation in the expansions.  The main premise of the game has remained the same though,  players are exploring the galaxy, except now, the only cards out on the table are the cards for the star system that the players are currently in.  It's also less involved as the game won't require dice, tokens, or pen/paper.  Which will make the game cheaper to have printed as it's just cards now.

The last thing I want to add to this post is the card back that I had originally created for the game.  The name of the game that I had planned on going with was: Cosmic Odyssey.  I'm not sure if I should think of a new name or not for the new version.  I'm leaning towards using this name but redesigning the card back somewhat.

Ships and Missions

These next two card types both also have models created in Google Sketchup.  The first is the ship card itself that a player would keep in front of them during play.  This would be the ship that the player is using.  I created it to look like a blueprint.  Sketchup is pretty cool to use as you can set up the style to display how you want.  There is a wide variety of different looks you can achieve with this.

The next card is a mission card.  It has a description of the mission and the numbers you need to roll to be able to finish it.  It also has the reward for finishing the mission.  This card style I created to look like it is a computer screen.  The model of the spaceship is an example of another view style that Sketchup is capable of.

Space Station

This next card type is a space station.  This one has a model that I created in Google sketchup.  You can't see it as much in the card, but the model is fairly detailed.  As you can see in the screenshot below the card, the laser turret on the station is very detailed.  The model is scale to the ships and I added as much detail to the station as is in the ships.  That way, I can use these art assets down the road for other things.  Like a computer game maybe.  There is some extra image processing done in the gimp to station.  I added the window glow, the lights and an embossed layer to give it a little more depth.

Planets

The style of the planet cards is just as simple as the star cards.  Just the title, the planet graphic, and an icon showing what number you would need to roll on a 12 sided dice to successfully explore the planet.  For the star background on the cards, it may look like I created a different pattern for each card, but all I did was create one large star background that I can move, rotate, and flip to give the cards different back grounds.

The graphics for the planets are harder to create than the stars though.  With the stars once I came up with "recipe" for how to create them, it is just a matter of tweaking the colors to what I want.  The random texture to the stars is created procedurally through Gimp.  The planets on the other hand are all different styles and types.  Even in our solar system where we know what planets look like, they all look quite a bit different. 

Each type of planet I had to work out how to create the look from scratch.  For gas planets, once I worked out the steps to create them, it didn't take too long since I just had to change what colors I used and the differences in the swirl pattern.  A few even got rings :)

Other planets have not been as easy as I have had to create textures or find free textures to use.  The first card below uses several rock textures (real pictures of rocks) and also uses a real cloud map taken by satellite.  The second card I created the texture myself in Gimp.

Stars

The game I started working on is a space game based on exploration.  The game would have the players exploring a galaxy, star system by star system.

One of the first things I worked on when starting the graphics for the game were the Stars.  I thought I might have saved some of my original files, but can't find any of that art now.  It took me a while, but I tried a bunch of tutorials I found online and ended up changing and tweaking things until I came up with a style that I liked.  My brother said they actually kind of look like viewing our sun through a certain filter.  (can't remember what the name of it was though)  The card design is fairly simple with just the title, the picture of the star and an icon showing how many objects are orbitting it. Each of the star cards have a different number of objects orbitting it.  Once players fully explore one star system they are able to reveal a new star and start exploring the objects orbiting it.  Each time the game is played, the map of the galaxy will be completely different.

Ethereal Butterfly Games

Hello everybody!  This is my first blog so forgive me if it rambles.  I started this blog to put down some thoughts and progress on the game I have been working on and hopefully the future games I'll be working on.  Earlier this year I was looking at different board and card games that I wanted to buy.  While there were some games that I really wanted to buy and play, I had the idea that I could make my own game.  So I started looking around online for a possible place that I could get a set of cards or card tiles printed.  Most places that I could find you either had to order a large amount of sets or only could do simple things like customizing a regular deck of playing cards. 

Finally I came upon a great site that is a print on demand board and card game site.  Not only can you get regular sized cards printed with whatever you want on them, you can make game boards, and buy different tokens and parts.   Once you are finished with your game you can just keep the game private so only you can make copies or you can publish it on the site so others can buy copies and earn you some money.  The great thing is the game authors all 100% keep the rights to their games.  In fact it seems like some people just use the site to make prototypes to try and pitch to game companies.  The site is http://www.thegamecrafter.com/

I found this site and started on my game design around April of this year.  I'll go into more details about my first game design in my next post.  I basically carried around a spiral notebook with me, jotted down ideas, worked on card lists.  I started using a couple programs to do my own art.  I use Gimp as my image editing program and Google Sketchup for modeling.  Gimp is a image manipulation program very similar to Photoshop, but is open source, so it cost's nothing :)  It has also come a long way and is very close to Photoshop in what is possible with it.  I've used both of these programs for several years so I know how to use them reasonably well.

That's about it for this first post but the last thing I'll add is the logo that i have worked up so far for our game "studio" for lack of better terms.  Since it's not really a company and I don't really expect to make much if any money from it.  Mostly it's just to create something (hopefully) fun to play with friends and family.  This logo is kinda a first effort.  I kind of based it on a tutorial I found online so I need to rework it here eventually.