Art & IT Management
Round seven, the blue captain wins by one successful delivery and the final torpedo attack. It was a head-to-head between the yellow Broadside and the blue Platform. The green Interceptor had really bad luck with dies, one mistake with planning, and couldn’t get points fast enough.
I’m almost happy with the flow. Almost, as there is still a need for test plays to prove (or disprove) my ideas.
Of course, I have to thank all my friends who attend those test plays. We are almost there!
After this week’s playtests, an issue occurred to me. There is a problem with time. With endless time, there is no point in rushing the fight, no need to score points in a hurry. And that led to a boring experience. Aerial combat of privateers should be fast and dense.
I have checked the statistics, and with the given number of maneuvers, there are plenty of ways to cross the board several times, so narrowing the number of rounds may speed up the action.
Of course, I wouldn’t be me if the visuals weren’t updated as well.
It’s been a week of “breaking things to fix them.” We recently put several core rules through the ringer, and—as is often the case in game dev—a few of them proved to be significantly out of balance during live gameplay.
While it can be a bit jarring to see your systems buckle, that’s exactly why we playtest. We’ve already drafted a series of solutions to reel in those outliers, which of course means another round of testing is right around the corner.
The most exciting takeaway is that the main game loop is finally aligning with the original vision. Movement feels somehow intuitive and “at hand”, and new paths to victory are opening up, giving players more agency.
A few “on-the-fly” tweaks suggested during today’s first session turned out to be absolute game-changers. It’s amazing how a minor adjustment to a variable can suddenly make the whole experience click.
Over the past few months, I have been developing a new tabletop board game title, Privateers of Aether.
Driven by a passion for systems design, I’ve enjoyed seeing the game’s mechanics transition from concept to functional gameplay. While development is well-advanced, I am currently focused on iterative testing and refinement.
I look forward to sharing more updates soon, including a retrospective on the game’s evolution and the lessons learned during the process.