Physical prototype.

 Some playtesters voiced their concern that physical unit token will be unwieldy to use or impossible to implement. So I designed a two layer tile that is easy to handle even if it holds multiple tokens.

The health markers are flippable 1/2 and 3/6 tokens. This way it is possible to represent 4 health unit with 2 tokens and each point of damage taken with 1 flip or token removal. Units up to 9 health can be represented with 2 tokens. I may need to work on visual representation, perhaps make 3/6 token physically bigger.

Robotic factory - first round of changes

 Following the first virtual playtest I made some changes.

I swapped some of the cards in starter deck for cards with extra use cost and stats. This should make the choice of starting army more varied.

In hotseat I also tried to salvage the one deck system by providing extra stored research at start and making expensive cards cheaper by adding use costs. I will need to play more with this system.

Hotseat testing showed that the original shield is probably too powerful. I will need to either change the rules or make it more expensive or make distortion weapon cheaper. The power level of ballistic missile also did not feel right.

Feedback after first round of changes felt more positive. One common concern was that division for armour and shields is not fun and also requires keeping too much state in assembly area. Also it was recommended to get rid of any duplicates in starting deck.

Another suggestion was to start with body pre-deployed to mitigate first shuffle randomness. This one felt useful so I am keeping it.

Also game needs a way to keep important cards in hand. I consider a rule to allow keeping 2 cards in hand. You draw two less next turn and gain 1 stored research.

Robotic factory - first virtual playtest

 I joined virtual playtesting discord group some time ago and last Sunday I finally got my prototype in tabletop simulator to testable state. I had 2 players listen to the original version of rules and play a few turns and got a few more ideas for rule adjustment to try.

One conclusion was the need to speed up the pace of the game. Also it confirmed my suspicion that advanced deck must be split. Suggestion for guaranteed supply of mobility utilities was raised. But perhaps the main lessons was about organizing playtests.

One playtester was obviously eager to explain his choices as he played and followed what I would call the intended strategy. The second player was more silent and played strategy that was intended to be suboptimal.

During the feedback phase the second playtester told me that my attempts to suggest a strategy almost every turn were unwelcome, borderline rude. This was a surprise to me. I was asking "have you considered preparing to invade neutral territory earlier?" as a prompt to share his decision process. He felt it I was coercing people to play the game in less fun way. Lesson for me, if I want playtesters to share decision process in real time I must ask this explicitly. But maybe big part of the reason second playtester was so annoyed is that his idea of ignoring army for a few turns and just teching to build a robot with massive firepower (which he obviously saw as more fun) simply did not work.

Also I must learn to be optimistic. Originally I asked for 150 minutes, than I doubted that my prototype is mature enough to play several turns and changed it to showcase and play one turn with 70 minutes. At the end prototype was mature enough to be played for several turns and lengthy feedback phase so people who initially committed for 70 minutes had to stay for 150.

I also received much useful advice on TTS on editing player hand zones, on using thick cards instead of tokens whenever possible, on manipulating grids and snappoints.

And once again let me thank my playtesters for providing valuable feedback and boosting my confidence.

Robotic factory

 In previous post I mentioned that most of the cards in Robotic Factory are components used to build robots. Some cards are not. Such utility cards can be used for immediate benefit. Like all other cards after use it goes to discard pile.

Space bender is the transport of Robotic Factory. Having actual transports that carry other units would be too tricky to implement in cardboard so here is your transport.

If you are having problems with fragile yet very long range artillery ballistic missile may help.

Stay tuned for next post where I explain robot construction zone.

Robotic factory: key deck-building concepts

In my previous post I explained the basics of how deck-building games work and how I arrived to idea of the game I am designing. For now under absence of better name I call it "Robotic Factory".

Disclaimer: the card art on this page, more specifically absence of it, is temporarily and WIP. All icons on cards are taken from https://game-icons.net/ which provides thousands of images under CC-BY 3.0 license.

You and your rival land on mysterious planet and take control of precursor robotic factory. The inner workings of the factory are too complex for your understanding. You understand that it creates components from a list of schematics deep in machine's memory. By disassembling the produce you can learn more about the machine and add new schematics scattered around the planet to machine's memory.

You start with a deck of 10 basic cards. Every turn you draw 5. The two card types are component and consumable. Both types can be scrapped for research points. Components can be used to build robots to fight for you. Consumables provide immediate effect on your deck, enemy deck or battlefield. Both types of card move to discard pile after use. If you have no cards to draw reshuffle discard pile.

You have 2 assembly beds in robotic factory. Each may contain a robot under construction. To start construction place a part of body type on assembly bed. To do so discard the card and adjust the sliders in production area. As long as robot has enough power during your turn you can deploy it in your controlled area (more about it in future post). There are some restrictions, each robot may have at most 2 weapons or one special system.

Here are some examples (click to enlarge the explanation sheet). You can put a basic reactor and basic laser on basic rover consuming 5 space and reactor provides just enough power. However to put another laser you will need to put another reactor. Later in the game you may have advanced reactor providing 5 energy so you can put 2 lasers in rover with just one reactor. Or perhaps get an advanced mech body with integrated reactor.

In future post I will explain how production bed is implemented in cardboard.

As usual your feedback is welcome.

Robotic Factory: deck builder board game

Since I first discovered Dominion (BGG) I am huge fan of deck building games. I am also a fan of tactical wargames like Massive Assault. When I discovered Cogmind I soon became obsessed with the idea of creating a board game that combines elements of deck building and tactical wargames and building robots from parts.

Let me use Dominion to briefly explain how deck building games work. You start with a small deck of basic cards. Every turn you draw a few cards. You can use your cards in different ways. Some cards (like Silver shown here as an example) generate gold that allows you to buy other cards. When you buy a card it goes to your discard pile. The cards you played also go to discard pile. When there are no more cards in your deck and you need to draw you shuffle your discard pile and use it as your draw deck. The key idea is your deck
grows as you play and with each reshufle the cards in your hand become more powerful.

Some cards allow you to attack the opponent, for example inserting harmful cards to his deck. Some cards provide victory points but do not provide any benefit before the end of game and only waste a slot in your hand.

Seriously if you love games and do not know what is a deck-builder make yourself a service and watch some youtube.

There are many games, including digital, that followed suit. Ascension and Star Realms are examples of deck building brought to it's purest form. Slay the Spire has strong deck-building elements. Even some tavern brawl modes of Hearthstone are deck-builders. Digital games provided fancy mechanics that are impossible in cardboard form. But it is Dominion that started it all.

Not much can be said about tactical wargames. You carefully choose your army composition to respond to enemy army and terrain. You carefully maneuver your army to gain territory with minimal loses. There was a post (in Russian only) from developer, who is among founders of wargaming.net, that original prototype of Massive Assault was "analog" board game which gives me hope that my idea of doing this in cardboard is not doomed.

Cogmind is a clever roguelike videogame where you build your robotic hero by placing destructible parts into very limited slots. And you cant just slap all the fancy big guns and fire them at once because usable have weight that slows you down heat generation that requires cooling (and you will melt without it) and require energy .

The idea of building units from parts is not new in board-games. For example Eclipse has starships with components and you can not fire your big gun if energy requirements are not satisfied.

In future blog entries I will show how my game is supposed to work and how I expect to balance it.

Legal system for software developers.

Hello there. You as geeky software developer want to know the philosophy behind legal system? Let me explain it all to you.

To make it easier let's say that menacing Code of Laws is simply "code". Code is logic expressed formally. Suppose certain borrower refuses to return money to the lender. We as society need a set of formal rules that let us resolve the conflict. Just like our software needs code to resolve conflict if certain image is too big for its page. Sure enough there are many variations in each case.

Depending on your location your local laws may represent a codebase with pieces from 500 years ago and layers of patches on top of it. As developer you know how much misery can be brought by 20 years old software that can not be replaced. Here we talk almost 2 orders of magnitude more.

Such code is mission critical contributing to fear of change and especially fear of removal. You'd rather have 30 corner cases than one generalization. You'd rather keep obsolete pieces just in case.
And sure enough there are many cross-references and inter-dependencies all over the code.

The lawmakers are like legacy system developers while practicing lawyers are administrators in the field. The administrators know all the quirks and hacks of the system, are aware of inner workings that could drive simple people mad. Developers hate the current state of the system, have vague memories of the rationale behind part of the system and once hoped to change it for the best. Sure enough some developers are ready to put a backdoor into the system if the pay is right. I believe that while some of the law-makers are lazy or evil most of them are not, at least on the West. They are simply shocked by the pile of legacy rules. Remember the first time you as developer were asked to maintain a module in a 10-million-lines of code project and realized that your module affects 20% of the entire system?

Voters give power to law-makers in hopes for greater human friendliness and greater efficiency of the system. Usually such hopes are not fulfilled. Customers that pay for legacy software upgrades are rarely fully satisfied.

Software administrators are often seen as people who do no real job and get too much easy money, same applies to lawyers. The legal agreements are similar to scripts written by administrators, ugly, seems to work, may have side effects and you can't work and live without them.

Usually no one is guilty. Nor the lawyer, nor your candidate, nor you administrator, nor the programmer. That's how the world works. It's a consequence of incredible complexity of the task system aims to achieve. It takes a genius to improve such a system.

Please leave your thoughts in a comment.