Weekly Recap - Week of 9/20

​This week, we turned the dial back on playtesting a bit in order to spend some time on the more strategic aspects of game design, namely discussions about Kickstarter, artists, and community engagement. We’re quickly approaching the end of the year, which means we’re just as quickly approaching our desired Kickstarter timeframe.
 
With that in mind, we had some good discussion around how we wanted to handle the Kickstarter. Did we want to sign on a pledge manager, or did we want to try to handle that ourselves? How soon should we do X? When should we make a post about Y? These and many other questions were discussed this week and will continue to be discussed in the weeks and months to come.
 
Our artist continued to impress us with his box designs, and we’re inching closer and closer to a final cover that we can’t wait to share. Our Adversary artwork will be starting soon as well, and we’re excited to see how that turns out. We’re planning on handling some of the smaller art components such as tokens and icons ourselves, thanks to our resident junior graphic designer Ethan.
 
Lastly, we finally spent a decent chunk of time discussing our community engagement strategy and how we wanted to get more involved in the community. We had done a lot of reading on this concept but had yet to take any action, and I’m pleased to say we started to get involved in the community this week. We’re starting small by providing feedback for other designers on various platforms like Reddit and Facebook and will progress from there.
 
Even though I mentioned that we spent less time playtesting this week, that doesn’t mean we didn’t playtest! We actually had one of our most intense games yet, with it coming down to a matter of a single turn. As mentioned last week, we made some changes to the way objectives work so that any number of Investigators could escape through either objective and were excited to test those changes out.
 
Unfortunately for the Investigators, we weren’t able to test that change since we lost three out of the four of them before we even got to the point of being able to escape. The silver lining is that we realized one of the Apparition’s actions was quite powerful when there were three Apparitions, so we’re adjusting that power accordingly.
 
We’re coming up on some pretty major milestones between the tutorial version and our artwork, so stay tuned to see those once they are revealed!
 
Take it easy,
 
Jeremy