Continuing to work out what Villanostra‘s facilities should do. Still struggling to understand how corruption should work mechanically. Trying to figure out facilities that cost coins to operate. Hope I can get a playtest in before our Indy Tabletop Game Creators meetup on Saturday.
I feel like corruption is an important mechanism that needs to be added to Villanostra, because it can so easily be caused by Authority and Loyalty and Liberty, while Sanctity and Fairness at least partially exist to act as checks upon it. But I’m not sure how to model corruption in the game. I was thinking of adding corruption counters to the villagers, like the stress counters I already use for them. But that felt too personal. I think corruption needs to feel like a problem for the entire village, and needs to be the entire village’s responsibility, instead of just an inevitable thing that “bad people” do. So for the next playtest corruption tokens will be added to the threat bag, like raids and unrest. When a corruption token is drawn for a facility, every villager not morally aligned with that facility will gain stress. It’s a place to start.
While considering this, I’m also trying to minimize tracking for the villagers. I’ve been using an injury / illness status on the villagers, which makes them more likely to be killed and also reduces their effectiveness when they work. But I’m concerned that could be seen as a criticism of disabled people. So I’m using removing that status and basing its effect on stress instead: for each 3 stress a villager has, their effort is reduced by 1.
Also, when a villager works but generates no effort, the village gains 1 corruption. Hopefully stress and corruption will form a downward spiral that the councilors need to work against together.
Continuing this morning to analyze thematic intersections in Villanostra to come up with ideas for facilities. One thing I realized from my intersection chart is that, even though some of these intersections are strongly conflicted (e.g. fairness + authority, sanctity + liberty), each facility must be something that the players with those values must both want to add to the village. It’s okay to show the downsides of each of the moral values, but they have to be worth what they cost.
Some mechanism themes are starting to emerge:
I’m not exactly sure what corruption does to the village, but it’s not good. It should add stress to the villagers, and lower any overall score for the village at the end of the game.
Many of the foundational mechanisms of Villanostra seem to be working, but the facilities that get built for the town have been pretty primitive, and had a lot of duplication. The moral values that are the basis for the game aren’t really differentiated to the point that playing a different councilor makes you care about different aspects of the village.
I’ve put together this matrix to explore thematically how the villagers of each predominant moral value see other villagers with different values. Since each facility in the town relates to an intersection of two moral values, I hope it will lead to more interesting ideas.
I definitely feel a need for a corruption mechanism that relates to many of the morals. I also feel like there should be a bigotry mechanism related to loyalty and fairness: it will be interesting to see if that’s too highly-charged a topic to include in the game.
I had a good weekend at Protospiel Online. I met a lot of great people, and got in three playtest sessions of Villanostra, my semi-cooperative village-building game. And I was able to enjoy some downtime with my spouse and sleep in my own bed!
Here’s my playtest log (with apologies for any spelling errors):
I consumed 16.5 player-hours. I contributed 18.5 player-hours.
I’m excited to playtest my new tabletop game project, Villanostra, at Protospiel Online this upcoming weekend. I’ve been running solo playtests in Tabletop Simulator, and I think it has some interesting interactions. Now I’m looking forward to getting feedback from other game designers.
I recently watched this excellent presentation by interaction designer Matt Leacock on finding players’ emotional responses to your game. A key source of emotional responses to Villanostra will involve the players’ relationships with the villagers. Villanostra is a worker placement game in which the workers–the villagers–place themselves. So I want to maximize the opportunities for emotional connections toward the villagers, and that requires giving them faces.
I went to https://generated.photos/ as a source of ethnically diverse faces that are free for personal use. I need about 30 faces of uniform size, and being able to generate them randomly instead of selecting them individually is very appealing.
That’s a great first step, but I don’t want photo-realistic images on my game components. The level of detail is distracting, and they set too high a bar for other images to be used elsewhere in the game. So I want to convert these faces to something that looks more like a line sketch. There are several YouTube tutorials for doing this in Photoshop, but I want a process that is quick and easy and doesn’t rely on expensive software. After considering a number of options, I selected Instant Photo Sketch. It does exactly what I want without a lot of options I don’t care about. And it’s free. Hopefully, I didn’t add any malware to my computer when I installed it.
(One odd thing I noticed: The original jpeg is 27.7KB. The generated sketch is 143KB. That’s a five-fold increase for a less detailed image. If I open the sketch in MS Paint and immediately save it, the size decreases to 76.3KB. I suppose jpeg compression might be optimized for human faces, but that’s still pretty unexpected, especially converting color to grayscale. If you have a theory, I’d be interested to hear it.)
For my next step, I uploaded the image to Component.Studio and added it to my previously-blank villager cards. These are micro cards, only 450×600 pixels. The image doesn’t need to be very detailed! At this point I’m hardcoding the entire deck to show this one face, just to test for feasibility.
From Component.Studio I generate an image cache for the entire Villager deck. Then I went into Tabletop Simulator and updated the Custom properties for the Villager deck to point at the new image cache. Here’s what the cards look like in maximum zoom on TTS, with a poker chip for scale.
Is the image too small? Maybe. Does it look better than the blank white space that was there before? Absolutely! Like any creative endeavor, game design is an iterative process: our goal is improvement, not perfection. And this easy process is good enough for the tests I want to do this weekend.