#gear grid

[packconfig]

Loadout: Mountain Hiking

Here’s a great loadout from Przemek Mac of his one-day equipment for hiking in the Izery Mountain (Poland).

bit.ly/loadout134

[level99games]

Seventh Cross v26-29 - Gear Tile Redux

In this series of articles, we track the development of Seventh Cross, our upcoming cooperative adventure game. Inspired by metroid-vanias, rogue-likes, and dark fantasy adventure, it is planned for release sometime in 2018.

Last Time on v25...

Version 25 introduced updated castle wings and an exciting new Karma/Anathema system. There were still a few things that I felt were holding the game back, however. The Gear Grid was becoming a bit of a mess.

Overhauling in a Big Way

Through versions 26-29, I tried out four different variations on the gear grid that provided interesting gameplay, but were ultimately just a bit too fiddly and didn't contribute enough to the experience of the game to justify their existence.

In general, you want to make simple decisions at the start of a game and complex decisions at the end. Since the Gear Grid asked players to lock in a build, then execute it later, it created an decision funnel that was the exact opposite of this paradigm. Examined it like this, it was clear tjat there was really no way to work this mechanic in its current form into the final game. So, after about 10 versions of exciting development, the Gear Grid was shelved. Perhaps I'll be able to bring this mechanic back and refine it for a future project, but I'm now pretty convinced that it is not right for Seventh Cross.

We also tried various forms of monster fights, hazards, castle builds, and story formats in these versions, but nothing felt quite right to me. It was always a goal of this game that the enemies in this game would have a lot of personality and lead to tough and memorable fights. The direction that the game was headed with roaming monsters just wasn't in line with that ultimate goal. I needed to try something different.

New Innovations

Still, a lot of great innovations appeared in these versions. We introduced Sanctuary, a zone where hunters can upgrade their gear, interact with NPCs, and acquire story advancements. We also worked out the rudiments of a campaign structure that have developed nicely in the time since. And of course, the karma/anathema choice system mentioned in our previous updates was something too good to throw out, even if the systems it fed into weren't optimal. Overall,

I'm happy with what we learned in these versions, though I think that if I had focused a bit more on development and less on content that they would have gone more quickly and more smoothly. Developing a game while being the content author for that game has been pretty tricky, as every time you get a new idea, the temptation is to build an entire game around it. In the latest updates, I trimmed down all the background work I was doing in order to get solid prototypes more quickly.

My Own Thoughts

Although each of the versions 26-29 individually functioned well enough, they weren't up to my own standards and goals for Seventh Cross. Most importantly though, I didn't feel that these versions added much to the existing genre, even with the novelty of the Gear Grid. You could play Descent, Mansions of Madness, or Gloomhaven and get a very similar experience. This distress eventually brought me to the point of making drastic changes one again.

It's not enough to make a game that just works–I promised myself that Seventh Cross was going to be something really unique. In version 30 we introduced Episodes–our next major innovation towards what the game is going to be. Look out for an update on that soon!

[level99games]

Seventh Cross v22 - Challenging Encounters

After version 21's action system proved to be a bit too obtuse, I worked to refine it v22. Version 22 of Seventh Cross led us to try and improve the encounters by simplifying them–making things a bit less narrative-heavy.

Encounter Cards in this version relied on an illustration (not shown here) to convey the challenge the player faced. They provided several different actions which could be used to overcome the obstacle ahead. The penalties for failing a specific check were described at the bottom. This challenge would inflict 3 damage and cause the player to lose 1 Stamina if it were no succeeded.

Path Cards determined the difficulty of the encounter (when summed with the encounter's base difficulty) and provided a way to determine the rewards for victory. These path cards could also Explode (as shown here), which would force a player to draw and add another card to their challenge.

These developments appeared to be headed in the right direction, but the assortment of actions to choose and the drawing of the path cards still seemed like too many steps for a series of actions that players were going to have to do every single turn. Also, it was a little too calculated to decide which action to take and which difficulty to attempt it at–a decision made by your board setup rather than by your thematics or preferred style of play. 

We also tried much simpler gear cards this time through. Gear Cards provided the players a way to approach the encounters, though not as directly as before. Instead of having several different uses, they interacted directly with the action options on the check (cutting out v21's "Encounter Tags"), and also could be used to provide raw stats in a pinch. After being used, these cards would be discarded until the players were able to rest and recover their stamina. Even without a card though, any action except 'Attack' could be activated directly from the player's Gear Grid.

How did it work out?

Version 22 was a step in the right direction, but it still required a lot of work to commit a player action under this system. Even in their simplified form, the skill cards were a lot of work to keep track of, and players didn't like operating a hand of cards AND a gear grid at the same time. I felt that it was going to need to be one or the other, and the Gear Grid was definitely what the players who tested the game were more interested in exploring.

The main disappointment of the encounters in this version is that they were simply a little uninteresting. The combination of encounters and movement didn't put the players into a situation where they needed to do anything differently based on the situation. There wasn't a real impetus to adapt or to strategize, only to get stronger. Furthermore, even though certain wings prioritized certain kinds of skills, this wasn't too clear, and didn't provide enough context for the players to make a decision about where they wanted to go on their turns.

The scenario paired with this version was again Tower of Ascension, and players enjoyed the structure of the scenario, which had them traveling around the castle, opening up checkpoints, and encountering a narrative-style story point about once every turn, then making narrative decisions at those plot points. I felt that this was about the correct pacing for story developments, and decided to structure future scenarios around this setup.

One of the main complaints in this version was the lack of boss presence throughout the tower. This led to a much larger thought–what if the encounters were more active threats to players. Rather than waiting for players to come to them, what if bosses prowled around as a constant threat, and had to be avoided or engaged?

For version 23, I introduce a new scenario and a new way to interact with the bosses! Look out for that update next week! :)

[level99games]

Seventh Cross v20.1 - Into the Heart of Darkness

There have not been any updates in a little while, as I've basically been building and rebuilding for the past month without any break. But it's all been worth it, as I'm more confident than ever in the design of the new Seventh Cross!

I'm excited to announce that we've finally done it! Seventh Cross v20.1 was a big success, and I believe that this version of the game is very close to what the final will be! After nearly a year of development and design, I've assembled a prototype that puts all the pieces of the game into play, and I think we're finally happy with what it is and what it does. So here's a quick overview of what's happened in the versions since my last post, v17!

v18 - Deckbuild-y Adventuring

Version 18 combined an improved combat system and deckbuilding mechanics with the castle traversal mechanics from v17, while also improving on these a little bit. We introduced a different method of Traversal (non-combat challenges) that drew more on the player's own deck. There was also more of a focus on how characters would grow in skill.

In this game, you would proceed through the castle, using the cards in your deck as stamina, drawing as many as you felt you needed to complete a challenge as presented. The excess cards would be lost, and the only way to reset your deck was to return to a checkpoint and rest.

v16 had introduced a system of symbol-driven combat and encounters, and v18 expanded upon that by introducing a number of new symbols used for exploration and non-combat encounters.

A weapon in this setup could be played in either direction, presenting a simple choice to the player with each card drawn. The words in parens, like (Slash), are damage symbols, and are used to attack enemies. The words in carats, such as <Roll>, are Traversal symbols, and are used for non-combat applications.

This version tested well, but there was still something missing. The skill and weapon cards felt a bit forgettable, a little too easy to leverage, and the encounters we faced were a little too generic. I realized that I needed to put a little more interesting behavior into the monsters, and a simple choice into all the traversal encounters, in order to make things memorable. v18 tried out longer and more complex scripts, but I discovered that events like NPCs needed to be both short and very memorable. Dark Souls definitely did it right, with a silent protagonist and NPCs that can carry an entire (brief) conversation by themselves. With these ideas in mind, I moved on to v19.

v19 - Structured Wings

In v19, things began to get a bit more interesting. I got the impression that we wanted to guarantee that monsters and story events made sense based on where you were exploring in the castle. The larger wings would enable me to write a number of paragraph encounters that encapsulated the story of the wing itself. These would enable interesting choices and the kind of "interactive story decisions" that I wanted to capture. I also expanded the types of encounters to include puzzles. I'm very excited about puzzles.

For the intermediate development of the game, I built a description of each of the wing tiles. In order to visualize how these would look in-game, I asked Fábio Fontes to do some illustration and show us the castle tiles fully realized! Let me make a clear point that it's important not to start on the art for a game too soon. I knew once I saw the way the Castlevania screenshots looked on the tiles in v17 that this was absolutely the way I wanted the game to look on the table. With that certainty in mind, I felt alright to go ahead and commission the art test.

Here's a look at the process behind those...

The tower design document helped Fábio to get a plan for what the area would look like and what features would appear in each tile.

After that, sketching began, giving a general shape to the rooms, and a level of detail.

Elements are blocked out in base colors.

And finally, the detailed touches are painted in, giving the area its final look.

Here's a look at how detailed the individual rooms are up-close. Each tile is one and a half inches of real table space, so there's room to really get in close and observe these minute details. This particular room (with the statue of Sethi, the founder of the Church) is the equivalent of the Dark Souls bonfire in Seventh Cross. In these rooms, players can rest, re-equip, and alter their character loadouts. 

Version 19 is what I like to call an "Intermediate Version" in development. It was envisioned as a direct upgrade to version 18, but it never hit the table in its complete form, despite having a complete rulebook and a number of cards designed. After a few small combat trials, we hit upon a much more promising idea, and immediately dropped work on v19 to begin work on v20.

v20 - Gear Grids

The big idea that made us drop everything and move on to v20 was Gear Grids. The main problem in v18 and v19 was the availability of resources. You needed certain resources to complete challenges, but because of the nature of deckbuilding, they weren't always at your disposal. We didn't want to give the players all their tools all the time, but we also didn't want things to be arbitrarily hard to use when they shouldn't be. Instead of deckbuilding to see your way through challenges, it dawned on us to let the players actually equip their gear directly onto their characters.

Behold!

Weapons, subweapons, armor, and tools all provide symbols to your character, so we decided to reduce them to just that, and let players arrange these symbols on their character grids. When activating your grid, you turn certain symbols on, providing them for the sake of finishing challenges and fighting monsters. After activation, a Stamina Marker is placed onto your grid to clog it up, costing you some of those resources.

Furthermore, each character has their own sort of traversal puzzle. Galdred here uses a Tetris sort of play, where he can only activate in the downward direction, but each activation puts a new piece in his grid, making him stronger even as he runs out his options.

This worked out very well, but there were a few too many symbols to deal with. In version 20.1, we got rid of the Traversal Symbols altogether, reducing the game down to just Stat Symbols (the ones in the circles), Damage Symbols (the ones in red), and Assist Symbols (the ones in Blue, which are used to aid allies during their turns). This worked out much better.

In addition to a gear grid, players have access to Skill Cards. These can be utilized by activating certain combinations of symbols. For example, Galdred's Eviscerate card here allows him to convert all of his "Strength" Stat Symbols into "Slash" Damage Symbols, turning his raw stats into an alternate way to deal heavy damage in combat. Acquiring gear and building an engine with your skill cards are now the primary ways to explore and prepare for big boss battles in Seventh Cross.

I had to do a lot of manual work to assemble this prototype, and it's the most tactile game I think that we've ever made. It's good! Even though my hands hurt now, it was worth it to cut out all these pieces in order to understand what the real game would feel like when it was complete. In the future though, I may use Gamecrafter to make my prototype tiles! :D

Version 20.1 wasn't perfect. The ordinary monsters were a bit too complex, and the bosses were a little too tough. The game's exploration phase wasn't properly punctuated by the boss fights, with players instead doing all the exploration, then all the boss fights. I'll work on these pacing issues, as well as expanding the engine building, reintroducing transformation mechanics, and improving the flow of combat in our next version! Look out for reports on that as they become available! :D

[level99games]

Seventh Cross v23 - Norbett's Claw

Unlike version 22, which was a minor patch to the Tower of Ascension created in v21, our next version of Seventh Cross was more of a full revamp. This version featured heavy changes to the encounter system, as well as new options for players to activate their Gear Grids and clear the encounters. Bosses now roam the castle, providing an ongoing threat to the players.

I created a new scenario for this version as well, in order to experiment with a less linear narrative. In the tiny village of Norbett's Claw, an eternal winter has fallen. The hunters are summoned to the castle when the disappearances of young women from local villages coincide with the strange weather, prompting rumors of an evil ritual. Within the castle, they secure the unlikely help of allied Church Hunters, and the optional aid of a fire devil bound in service to the castle's master.

The Castle

For this castle, the major change was to the Wing Tiles that made up the place. We opted for larger wing tiles, which had the encounters that players would face printed on them. The castle was set up at the start of the game, and players would traverse through it, seeking out Story Events and Checkpoints. Checkpoints provided easier traversal around the castle, while Story Events would trigger narrative segments from the adventure book and advance the plot.

This ended up being a great style of play. Interspersing the narrative segments with more mechanical turns about once every 2 or 3 rounds broke up the gameplay just enough that players were always looking forward to the next boss fight or the next story advancement.

Gear Grids

Players overcame the challenges (which were now printed directly onto the board) by activating Gear Grids, placing Stamina Markers onto grids which were filled in by various pieces of equipment (shown on the right). Each character had a Special Power, which was useable by placing a Red Stamina Marker onto the board (the player had a much more limited supply of these 'Advanced Stamina Markers' than they had of normal ones).

Player Progression

Level cards provided a way for players to level up and customize their skill sets, and could be used for the Life or Stamina boost on the reverse (far left), or for the actual skill on their face (right). (I got the idea for this from Terrene Encounters, for those following along with that blog :D)

When a player made an evil plot decision or was defeated in combat and revived, they would acquire a Dark Level which provided better upgrades than normal, but carried some nebulous story-related baggage if you got too many of them.

Bosses and Combat

Bosses in this version were spawned by story events, and would patrol the castle in search of the players, attacking when they closed in. Combat could be carried out by means of attacking a boss with a Weapon (right) which converted certain stat symbols into damage.

These battles were fine, but the boss's specific path tendencies were inflexible, often leading to the player knowing they were safe from certain enemies. We tried a few variants with more pro-active monsters that could chase players, and those worked much better.

Getting the right balance of memorability and mechanical uniqueness in the bosses has been pretty tough. V23's bosses were good, but many had abilities which activated at inopportune moments and had to be constantly remembered, such as the Knight above. 

Conclusions from v23

We felt fairly good about the gameplay in version 23 of the game. We had a lot of fun, and players enjoyed the pacing and content of the story segments, and the choices the game asked them to make. In general, we felt that v23 was heading in the right direction, and resolved to add and adjust from this version, rather than cutting back or moving in any radical new directions.

The biggest hurdles were that boss balance was still a bit weak, and the pacing of moving around the castle needed some improvement. The individual names for the challenges, and skills that helped you best specific kinds of challenges, weren't worth the complication (much like the encounter tags in v22).

We didn't get to explore the characters' monstrous powers much in v23, but we delved much deeper into this area in v24, and began thinking about the larger scale of the castle as one adventure in a campaign. We began working on v24, resolving to preserve the best elements of v23 as well as to improve on the pacing of play and the relevance of the bosses.

I'll share more about the development of v24 next week! :)

[level99games]

Seventh Cross v21: The Tower of Ascension

In my most recent article, I mentioned that we had a great breakthrough in the form of Gear Grids! We expanded upon that idea in the next few versions of the game, as well as refined the way that castles are laid out, how events are triggered, and how characters' monstrous forms come into play.

v21 - Tower of Ascension

For version 21, I created a simple scenario, the Tower of Ascension. The story centered around a sorceress who built a machine that would allow her to become a god. Now, centuries later, the machine has come to life once again... We enjoyed the tower, and I hope that some version of it will show up in the final game.

I decided to try and make the gear grids a little more modular in v21, by giving players more modular options and a Level Up system, where grids were built outwards, sort of like Yokohama, where the grid grows as you play hexominoes (6-part dominoes).

As you may have seen in this blog so far, a great deal of building Seventh Cross has been as much about deciding what goes into an encounter as it has been about resolving one. In v21, I decided not to go to the book for every single encounter, and instead give each wing its own deck of encounter cards, which had a short paragraph and a check for the player to perform. This expanded upon the ideas we had for a card-based castle in v16 and combined it with the castle tiles we added in v18.

The checks are made with verbs that are thematically tied to stats, so the Spike Pit Trap below could be cleared by Climbing–activating Strength and Dexterity symbols.

In addition to activating boards, players could use Skill Cards to approach challenges. The challenges were tagged (such as the "Fall Hazard") challenge on the left. These tags related back to the skills. For example using, the "Bug Zapper" skill could allow Luciya to clear a Machine or Electric Hazard challenge using its 3 relevant stats, rather than the ordinary ones on her grid.

A Path Card (shown here) added a random factor to the difficulty of a challenge, and also provided you with various rewards. You could choose to take a more difficult path card, which had higher risk, but also higher rewards. Path cards also had a chance to activate 'Luck', which could provide extra successes on any encounter.

How did it work out?

If reading about the interaction of the grid, skills, challenges, and path cards seemed a little bit obtuse, you'd be right. The system worked, but the chain of thought that was required to make it work was a bit too long for sustained play. Here's a typical player turn in v21:

I move into a space.

I draw an encounter card and read it.

I can use "Climb (Strength/Endurance)" to clear it by default. How much of that can I generate with various ordinary grid placements?

How much of that can I generate with these cool skills I have?

Oh, it's a Fall Hazard. Do I have any skills that deal with those?

It seems I do. This one uses Dexterity, Endurance, and Faith. How much of that can I generate with various grid placements?

Ok, I'm finally going to make my placement and total my proficiency.

Knowing that I have a certain amount of proficiency, how difficult of a path should I draw? Can I guarantee success on certain path card difficulties?

Now I draw the path and sum it the difficulty of the check, plus a Path Card. Did my 'Luck' activate? Time to recalculate my final proficiency then.

Finally, was my proficiency greater than or equal to the difficulty of the check? If so, then I succeed! If not, then I fail.

The amount of calculations and thought required to make each decision in this chain created a lot of downtime. Our first castle would have taken about 6 hours to complete, without a few hotfixes to reduce the size of the place and allow us to move faster.

Another big part of the problem of this game was that because you couldn't see what encounters were coming up in advance, you couldn't really prepare yourself for them during the other players' turns.

Even if you're willing for a game to be 6 hours long, the amount of downtime and trivial math required to play a turn of v21 was't acceptable. However, a lot of good data was created. We learned what parts of this system players liked, what they didn't like, and continued to think about how we could pack all those elements into a simpler system.

What players liked & Disliked:

The idea of having a special skill that you could activate on your grid was great, as was a unique weapon that created a unique way of fighting for your character. You just didn't need a whole hand of them, as having five didn't add a much more to your play experience than one or two.

Players really enjoyed placing the oddly-shaped pieces from earlier versions of the game onto their boards. The free form boards were not actively disliked, but they were universally less popular than the more restrictive boards.

The ability to place anywhere on your character's board offered a lot of control, but also a lot of AP. We experimented further with this in later versions, but ultimately moved towards a more restrictive method of placement.

Bosses in this version were fewer and further in between than in previous versions. Since this version was mainly about testing encounters, we didn't think too much about it. However, comments were made that the bosses needed to play a larger and more integral role in the game than the mechanics of v21 allowed them to play.

With these ideas in mind, we moved on to version 22, which I'll share more about in my next post!

[thecrookedatlas]

JMT Gear Part 2

The last few weeks have been full of REI trips, resupply mailing, youtube video watching, trail report reading, and conditioning. We are ready for the JMT. Prep for this trip really started when I first heard about the trail, its history and its significance. Over the past year, this exciting idea in my mind has grown into a reality that I cannot wait to live. We are only able to escape for a week this time, but the entire through-hike is on our list in the next couple of years.

This gear is everything that I deemed essential, all 37 pounds of it. Mariah and I can’t express how excited we are to share our experience with everyone and if anyone reading this has done or will be doing the JMT, we would love to hear about it. Message us your tips, leave us a comment, or give us a follow!

[coxcycling]

Welcome to the classic tools of bicycle repair.