Lessons learned from play testing: Game 01

Good Tuesday everyone!

I trust if you were off this bank holiday weekend that you had a good time!

I know I did, if not only because of two very interesting alpha testing games of CRYPTS!

The good news is that both of these games were recorded, and I will be editing and posting these episodes for your listening pleasure in due course.

So what happened?

I'll try to answer this in as constructive manner as possible:




Game 01:
This was a game where there were a total of 3 rooms separated by corridors.

The first thing I noticed was that corridors became pointless, just wastes of General Actions to walk and open doors.
- This was addressed in game 2.

Secondly, after the Posse's caster got lucky and an epic DPS spell dropped after the first room, the encounters became SUPER easy, this was down to the high amount of damage being out out in an AoE causing many beasties to die in one hit.




This needed to change, and was looked at in Game 2.

So what else was noticed, for starters lots of very useful weapons were dropping quite quickly, but I knew this would happen.

You see in a normal game you should have 60 cards, of these 30 are common, and 6 are 'no loot' cards, meaning you have a 50% chance of getting common items and a 10% chance of nothing at all.

In this game however the ratio was completely off, we were looking at about 25 cards in total, and there was equal distribution between common, uncommon and rare, meaning you were just as likely to walk away with a rare item as you were a common one.
- This will be worked on and getting the ratio right is important, but my focus for these games was less about that and more about "does the game work?"

You see my biggest fear was that the combat mechanics over all would just suck, however I am pleased to announce that our of everything, the combat mechanics including the Blood Shard re-roll system shined as the best part of the whole thing!!

I'll be writing more about this, including more info on game 2, and an over all summary later on, but for now, stay safe and I'll see you Cryptside!

- Your friendly neighbourhood Doctor Loxley