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What IS next after you receive player feedback?

From June into this month, I kept asking myself this question. Up until this point I had created a prototype for Rule the School (aka RTS, the board game I am developing), playtested thoroughly, and pitched it to a publisher – but this was just the beginning. The player feedback I had received from PAX and playtests following made it clear that there was more to be done with the game. After taking a break from development, I zeroed in on three major opportunities for improvement:

I. Setup/teaching the game takes way too long

This started as a personal observation that grew into a concern. After practicing teaching the game for the convention and the publisher pitch, I started to get frustrated with how long it took to explain the parts of the game that weren’t the win condition. At first, I tried to come up with different ways to optimize it (phrases or game specific terminology, shorter sentences, etc). But this exercise helped me realize that there was a lot crammed into this game, and I didn’t know if those things were in line with the game I wanted to make. 

II. Last player advantage

If you remember our recap post from May, I mentioned that a significant advantage to the last player was identified by playtesters. This was by far the most challenging thing to address. For weeks I had thrown potential solutions at it, but nothing stuck. Funnily enough, it seemed like I wasn’t the only one with this problem. While researching remedies that other designers had tried, I learned that last player advantage is a typical concern in area control/area majority games, especially in games that had scoring rounds like RTS. It also made perfect sense too: the player who gets an action right before scoring has the most sway in the game. Since it invalidates any decisions players make in the rounds far before the scoring rounds, it is an utterly unfair boon. I wanted to try to minimize that or remove it entirely.

One thing I played around with was a mechanic where the amount of resources spent on a turn determined turn order. If the last player advantage was here to stay, why not lean into it? For example, a player who spent the most in a round would go last in the following round, while a player who spent the least would go first. The idea was that the players who were burning the most resources would be put in a disadvantageous state, while those who were more conservative and strategic were given the advantage. This backfired pretty severely though. Not only did playtesters find this new turn order confusing, last player advantage was much easier to abuse.

III. The game’s direction: who am I making this game for?

At this point, I got really burned out after the attempts to fix RTS’s weak points. I would constantly hit walls when brainstorming and I had a lot of trouble moving past that. Once I realized I was in a rut creatively, I took some time away from the project. I was starting to resent the game a little bit as well, which was not a good sign. So for a while, the best thing to do was nothing at all.

In the time I spent away from Rule the School, I started ask critical, yet difficult questions:
– Who is this game for?
– How would I describe the game to a friend?
– Are the existing mechanics helping or hurting the player experience? Are they in line or in conflict with how I would describe the game?

It took some time to answer all of these. However, once I did I realized the next step forward was to overhaul the game entirely. The game I wanted to make is something more approachable to all ages, but with a rewarding level of depth beneath the surface. I wanted to focus on scaling back and simplifying the game to get to the fun faster. Ironically this is the type of game I want to play right now; I’m in a transitional stage in my life and I don’t have the same amount of time as before to work on this project, let alone play games. A game that onboards players fast, can be set up and taken down quickly, and still creates memorable moments is exactly what I need. Knowing this makes my design decisions more intentional. There were core pillars that I wanted to keep for sure (the school/election theme, area majority gameplay, and tableau building), but I’m open to discarding what didn’t fit to make room for new ideas.

So What Now?

At the end of the month, I’m going to share more about how Rule the School evolved from its old version to the current. I’m especially excited because I’ll be attending a public playtest event through the Game Maker’s Guild in a week! It will be interesting to see if the changes I made are received positively by players.

Until you swap hands with the player to your left,

Alfred