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Timely Transports (Part 3)

Welcome to part 3 of the devlog. Finally, we get to test the first prototype/draft of the game!

Before the playtest

Before I test a game, I always have some things I want to check or confirm. I have doubts about certain mechanics, or ideas for more interesting rules, and I need to see if they hold up.

This time, this is what worried me:

  • Space! Still! I just don’t know if, on larger player counts, the board will become a huge unplayable mess. It could be fine, I just don’t know yet!

  • Stress! I don’t know if the timers add more stress than some players can handle, or if players will go the other way and just … relax and do nothing while they wait for one specific vehicle to finish moving.

  • Strategy! The game hinges on fast-paced decision making. The person who wins, is the one who can manage their time (and vehicles) better than the rest, and who is more alert to the current board state, new goods and other events. I don’t know if this is enough, or even very interesting after several plays.

    • As such, I was toying with this rule: only 2 vehicles may occupy a city at the same time. (And maybe, in expansions, different cities could have a different capacity.)

    • This makes the game much more strategic. If somebody is blocking your path, you must go do something else or find the quickest way around it.

    • It also solves the space problem.

    • (An additional rule could be: during movement, place the vehicle halfway the route you’re moving on. This would remove them from their city and spread more evenly across the board.)

As you can see, all these things could be fine, you just can’t know until the first few playtesting sessions.

So let’s go!

A Quick Intermezzo

Update: I just had this amazing idea!

It’s quite easy to reduce the stress level and the number of mistakes people make … if I just build a “break” or “time-out” function into the game! Just spewing my first thoughts here:

  • Option 1: the interface is programmed to always start a break after 5 minutes of play. To end this, either wait 30 seconds, or press “continue playing” on your phone.

  • Option 2: there are squares/locations on the board. If you pass them, you can call for a break. All players can pause their interface, and you can collectively have a break and discuss things for as long as you like.

  • Option 3: breaks are completely voluntary. It’s a button on the corner of your device, so anyone can press it and yell “Time-out!” so the rest does the same.

I think this would be a wonderful feature (if I make it optional in the settings). I can already imagine people relaxing when I explain the game and tell them “don’t worry, in this first game, you can start a time-out any time you like”.

By the way, this is the primary reason I write devlogs and would urge anyone else to do the same. I only got the idea(s) above while writing this devlog for an hour, but not in all the weeks of development before. Writing about your thought process and reasons why you did (or did not) do something is so useful for figuring things out and getting new ideas.

First Playtest Session!

Finally, finally, the time has arrived for the first official playtest!

(Of course, as I develop, I try the game, check if anything’s wrong, etcetera. But this is the first play test with the full game, with everything finished and working, with a new group of people that have never seen the game before.)

IT WENT AWESOME! (… is that even a correct English sentence?)

The game was really fun, easy to explain, easy to get into, fast, (mostly) intuitive. I played a handful of games in succession, each time changing the rules a bit to test my doubts I wrote above.

This was the conclusion:

  • Starting with all four vehicles on your capital … is overwhelming and actually a dumb idea. Let’s gamify it: you start with only one vehicle on your capital. To add a vehicle (from your supply) to the board, you must use a timer as well! It has the exact same rules as moving a vehicle, now you’re just moving it from your supply to your capital.

  • Everyone forgot the rule about “you always get 1 point for moving a good”. So I just removed it, because the changes below made sure it wasn’t needed anymore.

  • We really need a timer on the “New Good!” message. Otherwise, players will miss it or simply ignore it (because they’re busy with something else), which is unfair. It means they get an advantage while putting the other players at a disadvantage ( = there are fewer goods on the board).

  • Yes, it’s way more intuitive to put a vehicle halfway between city A and B, when you’re moving from A to B. It also frees up lots of space on the cities. (And when moving a plane, just put it in front of you or whatever.)

  • That rule about a maximum of vehicles per city? I know something even better now! Whenever you enter a city that already has a vehicle … bump that vehicle off the board! Because I added this simple rule about “adding vehicles back to the board”, I could allow vehicles to be removed from the board all the time.

Especially the last addition is a huge one. (As in, it’s a really simple addition that solves almost all problems the game currently has.)

It gives a lot of space and clarity on the board, whilst introducing an interesting game element: will you go for the good, or will you bump a player’s vehicle off the board to set them back in time? And if you want to prevent that, you need to keep all your vehicles busy with something all the time, which is even more challenging.

(It also removes that “Teleportation Rule”, which means one less rule to explain and one fewer nasty exception in the rulebook.)

Lastly, I saw that people became really enthusiastic and engaged whilst playing. They were 100% focused on moving goods, checking what’s new, checking what the hell their airplane was doing in that city, frantically pressing timers on/off on their phone, and just having a good time.

People also became better at the game, within just a few rounds. They learnt to make better choices, use more vehicles simultaneously, position them at locations where goods are more likely to be useful, etcetera.

Our first game, we quickly became overwhelmed by the sheer number of resources on the board. In the last game, there were a few moments when everyone was so efficient, that all resources were off the board. (Which caused me to make the resource timer slightly faster.)

Bugs, bugs, bugs

Of course, when creating such a complex interconnected game with both physical and digital components, there are going to be some first-time problems.

Some example problems:

  • Some phones did not play audio. (Apple … why don’t you just update your technology like the rest of the world?)

  • The phones were using all cities, even on lower player counts, which was confusing (because it kept giving us goods to place at cities … that didn’t exist on our current board).

  • The board generation always placed an airport at the first city (Al Riz). That’s not only a bug and boring, it also gives the first player a huge advantage, as their capital has an airport while the rest probably doesn’t.

  • Some elements of the game weren’t paused when you won. (Which means you could still lose points after winning, bringing your total back to a value under 30, creating a mess.)

But after 60 minutes of programming, these were all fixed!

Additionally, I noticed that larger player boards were actually … more fun? I thought it would become a mess quickly, or just too hard (because there were so many cities to go to), but the opposite was true. I played one game with 2 players on a 4-player board, and it felt more engaging, because you were actually exploring a larger world and occasionally bumping into players who were traveling all over the board.

It just felt like actually moving through a jungle, discovering new paths, sometimes bumping into friends (or, in this case, competitor transport companies), and planning ahead (to optimize your vehicle movements through this large space).

So, I might just increase the default number of cities and connections, on all player counts.

The airport was a bit hard to see. Then again, I printed everything in black-and-white, and I keep getting surprised by how dark everything becomes. As such, I’m currently working on all the icons again to use brighter colors (and testing it with a black-and-white adjustment layer to see how it would look).

Luckily, I did plan ahead for this, and my randomly generated “print friendly” boards looked very good. Easily readable, as little ink wasted as possible, I don’t think anyone ever had a hard time finding a city or route.

All in all, this is a big success!

(It feels … kind of arrogant to say all of this, but I really mean it. I’m happy that this very experimental idea actually works and speaks to people. I cannot wait to fix all the bugs, improve all details that need improving, and play the game again. And then the expansions!)

A Quick Intermezzo, again

Man, I just keep getting the best ideas while writing devlogs.

Remember when I talked at length about how hard it is to “connect” phones to a board game?

Well, stupid me somehow forgot the most important tool in random generation: seeding.

A seed is a number you feed into your random number generator (in your programming language), which determines the sequence of numbers that comes out.

If you randomize the seed as well, by e.g. taking the current time on the computer, that’s how you get random numbers.

But if you keep the seed constant … any device should get the exact same sequence of numbers. If I tell my game “use seed 10”, it should always reproduce the same sequence of numbers, which means it should get the same results during generation.

See where I am going with this?

I can print the seed used in random generation on the game board. Then players could type this exact seed into their phones, and both should know exactly what the board looks like and what they can and cannot do!

(To make this more straightforward, I could use a random word as seed, and then just convert that to a number behind the scenes. It’s way more fun to type “JUNGLE” into your phone before playing a game, than “1903910690928”)

I could go even further and ask players to enter their player number. (A simply prompt at the start of the game saying “which player are you?” with a dropdown list of numbers 1-8.) Then I could show different events at different times, based on player number.

How can this be useful? Well, currently, new goods are announced completely randomly. This could mean that all players get this message at the same time, creating a bit of chaos on the board. It could also mean that, just by chance, nobody gets this message for two minutes.

If I know which player is which, I could time these events and space them out nicely. First show one to player 1, then another to player 2, and so on.

I don’t know if I’ll use this in Timely Transports. It would require rewriting a ton of code, whilst I don’t see pressing benefits at the moment. But future hybrid games will certainly use seeds for cool features!

In the next article, I’ll discuss playtesting this new and improved version of the idea!