Repeated testing of something new is important. In software development everything gets verified, validated, and acceptance tested at every step of the process before it's released. That's why the apps and software you use daily have absolutely no bugs in them.
Obviously (or I hope it's obvious anyway) I'm kidding. Software gets released with bugs all the flipping time for many reasons. Sometimes it's because the developers skipped some of those testing steps, which is negligence on their part. Sometimes it's because the thing that's broken is such a tiny niche condition that they just missed it, because depending on how complicated something is and how large the user base is, it's impossible to test everything. But sometimes, and here's the pertinent point today, it's because some idiot really likes a particular feature or methodology for doing something, and they refuse to let it go even though it's hopelessly broken.
Writing upgrade paths for ships and then testing them in actual combat has revealed that my engine scale mechanic is, in fact, hopelessly broken.
The issue mainly lies with the d4 combat mechanics; if you have an engine scale you have to overcome and it's higher than, say, 4... well, small ships without much weapons accuracy just can't hit. Ever. The reason I like the mechanic is because I want engine damage to be a concern. I like the idea that as a ship takes damage it becomes easier to hit. And if I were doing some kind of large ship combat game, something that mimicked Star Trek or the ilk, I can think of several ways to implement specific systems damage in a compelling way. But all of those ways would involve a slower combat style, and that's not what we're going for here. Here we're dealing with small, light craft, and the whole point is the combat should feel like Descent. It should be fast.
So I'm ditching the engine scale. Replacing it will be a dice roll, which also replaces the pilot skill roll with the understanding that pilot skill will be able to make this number higher as you improve. I just couldn't think of a way to make the engine scale progression make sense with this d4 combat, and since the combat is fast and fun (one of the core components of this game as stated when we started all this), it's the engine scale that needs to go, not the combat. Gotta ditch the broken feature so that the app still works.
This is what we suss out with testing. Beyond that I have verified that there are compelling ways to make upgrading the ships fun, and there are some openings to make your character's progression tie in to your combat prowess without having to resort to something like class-specific ship upgrades. So we're making good progress!
The next step, of course, will be to figure out the role-playing aspect of the game, which means designing and progressing characters. Character mechanics are a little harder to test in quick sessions, so these will be simpler than the combat mechanics for sure. To make the character mechanics easier to parse, I'm going to lead off with an activity called "writing crap down". To this point I have been using a collection of notes and my own brain to explain mechanics to the people who have been helping me test. Now it's time to take those notes and turn them into a set of combat rules that other people will be able to understand.
I expect this to reveal some gaps where things like "how does pilot skill affect dodging" and "how does pilot skill affect recovery" will pop up. I'm hoping to be able to resolve those issues with the character mechanics I'll be developing next. In either case we've reached the point of development where there will be an actual artifact associated with the game, not just a loose collection of notes and my imagination.
Exciting, isn't it?
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