Two weeks after the first post about the new space freighter game, I’ve had a lot of great preliminary response and put in quite a few hours on getting the first samples together for an open playtest. If you haven’t had a chance to see it yet, download the demo from here.

Going from a pre-alpha that is scrawled cards as pictured in the first design diary post to the playtest cards on the starscape website is an awful lot of work. I did a lot of playing around with demo card design – nearly everything I’ve heard from other game designers suggests that some reasonable level of visual appeal contributes significantly to potential response to a game (even by seasoned playtesters). In other words, the asteroid I took 30 seconds to draw is good enough for me, but not for you. So I went out and spent a few bucks on some cheap clip-art and did a few of my own vector drawings to drop into a quick and dirty card template (OmniGraffle and Photoshop, for those interested), and came up with cards that basically look like this:

Simple enough. Clean, to-the-point visual design that will print quickly and does something/anything to give playtesters a little bit of the feel of the game. I didn’t spend a ton of time on the final block of cards – maybe three or four hours total, but if that little bit of style draws even one person into the game, I’ll count it a huge success.

Finally, I’ve nearly finished the first draft of the “upgrade” package. Next design diary post, I’ll talk about the process of writing the upgrade packages and generally dealing with this weird form of storytelling.

In the meantime, I hope you’ll try the game out and I’d love to hear any thoughts you might have to share.

I’m starting a new feature here, as I work on designing a new game. The idea is that it’s a solitaire/multiplayer game based loosely on the old Wing Commander: Privateer video game; which is about a layabout dude who inherits a crappy starship and goes out on these solo freight or mercenary runs and grows into…whatever you make him out to be, and there’s big storyline etc. It occurs to me that that was one of the first sandbox-style video games I remember.

So anyway, I started coming up with the general idea of what I wanted this game to look like Wednesday afternoon, and by Thursday night I had a working prototype that I ended up drawing and playing much longer than I expected (I’m pretty sure it’s a good sign if you get lost in your own game). Anyway, I’m intending this game to be an inexpensive to buy/play with an ongoing story, in-game content that joins to online storytelling, add-on expansions, and maybe even ways to integrate player characters into the fiction of the game.

I’m intending the game to be low-cost and have ongoing inexpensive print/play expansions, with one small star-sector beginning area, and expand as I go. The sandbox is a big place, and I’m really excited to see where this game goes.

Let me know if you want to help test.

The Do: Book of Letters has just been released as a PDF to both Kickstarter Backers and is also available for sale to the general public for just $5. This is particularly exciting for me as I contributed a letter that is included for you to play. The product description from the webstore follows:

The Pilgrimage continues! (That’s a good thing, right?)
Do: The Book of Letters expands the slapstick fantasy universe of Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple with new letters for your pilgrims to answer. Each letter describes a new world with weird problems:

“Oops! I summoned a giant monster.”
“My world is counting on me marrying a doofus!”
“They say you can’t have too many pandas. Actually…”

Do: The Book of Letters includes new letters, plus tips for writing your own!

Check out the Evil Hat webstore for Do and other awesome games!