Chroma Team Revised

Regular readers of this blog may remember that my game, Chroma Team VS The Terrorlights, was a finalist in this year's Game Chef. I received a lot of good feedback and suggestions on the game and this weekend I sat down and started revising the game. You can view the current version of the game here, and I have kept the original Game Chef entry around for those curious about such things.

The revised game grew has grown by almost a thousand words and includes rule clarifications, math fixes and a few less grammar mistakes and typos. Of course, that doesn't account for anywhere near the increased word count. What does? I'm glad you asked.

City Creation

Chroma Team now feature a city creation aspect. During character creation the players will define important locations of the city they are protecting and lay them out on the table. Threats now target specific locations and if heroes aren't careful those threats will spread across the city.

Threat Proliferation

As mentioned above, if heroes completely fail at overcoming threats those threats will move out across the city and wreak havoc. This new mechanic has the added benefit of giving the push your luck rolls more teeth as well as making the aftermath phase of the game less depressing because heroes can have, at most, only a single failure per location where previously there was no limit.

Super Powers

Heroes now have access to super powers/special abilities. This takes the form a of a simple mechanic that allows players to exchange transformation energy for reducing threats.

Transformation

The changes to the way threats work and allowing the addition of super powers meant that transformation would no longer work as written. I altered transformation so that instead of gathering energy to reach a transformation state the heroes instead increase their odds of a successful transformation with each threat they overcome.


I think that Chroma Team is definitely an improved game from the original Game Chef entry, but I think it still needs a lot of playtesting and tweaking before it gets to where I would like it to be. Again, you can get Chroma Team Revised here and, as always, I want to hear from you if you play it.

Categories: Chroma Team, Game Design, Kaiju, Sentai

Game Chef 2013: Chroma Team reaches the finals!

The peer reviewing and nomination process for Game Chef 2013 is over and the finalists have been announced. The dust has settled and ten* games are going before the four expert judges and this year I am astounded to say that my entry is one of those ten.

My goofy little game, that was written stealthily in the middle of the night whilst my wife slept and in spurts as I moved around my home evading wet paint** and moving furniture, was deemed good enough to go to the next round. I'm surprised and honoured that my fellow designers liked the game enough to nominate it.

Whenever I finish a game for one of these contests (be it Game Chef, 24 Hour or something else) I am always left feeling sour. By the time I hit that 'submit' button I despise my game.  I'm always left thinking it's the worst thing ever committed to digital ink. As time passes I warm back up to it, but those first couple of weeks all I have is criticism for myself: This time around was no different and even as I write this I am still in that phase of my creative process. The positive (and constructive) feedback has been quite the shock to my post-design negativity bubble and learning that my game was nominated for the next round is the pinprick that burst it.

Somebody pinch me.

*All look to be interesting games and I will be reading my way through them while we all bide our time nervously until June 12th.
**Which in retrospect might have influenced my decision to use colour so heavily in the game.

Categories: Chroma Team, Game Chef, Game Chef 2013, Game Design

Game Chef 2013: Chroma Team vs. The Terrorlights

The design part of Game Chef 2013 is now complete and I am already hard at work on the the peer reviewing phase. I have already shared my initial brainstorming session as well as teased a character sheet, but now that my entry has been submitted it is time to actually share the fruits of my labour.

How's that for an ugly cover?

Chroma Team vs. The Terrorlights

I went with a goofy game this year and built a game about a team of brightly coloured super heroes fighting giant monsters. I named my super hero team the Chroma Team because Power Rangers was already taken and Rainbow Warriors sounded like it would be a game about gay rights activists.

The general premise of CTvT is that a mysterious force (Terrorlights) is sicking giant monsters on the most populated cities in the world. As members of Chroma Team, the players must kick some giant monster butt while also keeping innocents safe and their identities secret. I think I nailed the first two parts of that, but I don't think I really accomplished much on the secret identity front (at least not mechanically).

You can read/download the Game Chef 2013 copy of Chroma Team vs. The Terrorlights here. As always, I would love to hear from you if you read or play the game.

Categories: Chroma Team, Game Chef, Game Chef 2013, Game Design, Kaiju

Game Chef 2013: Character Sheet Teaser

The clock is ticking on Game Chef 2013 and submissions are due when it is no longer May 26th anywhere in the world. Naturally, with less than 48 hours left on the clock I have decided that my time is better spent updating my blog than actually working on the game. It's all part of the creative process, I swear!

I have stepped away from designing and proofreading to tease the character sheet for my entry and without further ado, here it is:

I could explain everything on this sheet to you, but I think it will be more fun to leave it up to your imagination until I do up a proper blog post on my entry to the competition. I've stuck fairly closely to my original vision in the brainstorming post and maybe you can glean some hints from there. I will also say that the name of the game has changed to Chroma Team VS The Terrorlights, make of that what you will.

Categories: Character Sheets, Chroma Team, Game Chef, Game Chef 2013, Game Design, Teaser

Game Chef 2013: Ingredients & Brainstorming

Game Chef is back for 2013 and I am already scratching my head and staring at the ingredients. I have participated in Game Chef twice before, 2010 and 2011, but have never won or placed as a finalist (historically I have done better with the 24/48 hour jams).

This year's ingredients come in the form of five images, the first of which is the theme.

I'm not really sure what to make of this image. The first thing that sprang to mind was an elevator, but the only thing I can thematically link to elevators is heaven/hell and business. I'm really not interested in doing another afterlife themed game for Game Chef as I did one back in 2010 with In Between.

Some other things: teleporting, grow/shrink, alien abduction, glowing eyes. If you turn it upside down it looks kind of like a sword

Brainfreeze, cold and calculating, elemental affinity, death/skeleton, train driving through snow, head cold, thinking about winter, paralysis/frozen in place. Upside down it looks like someone eating snow.

Worms, bad apples, parasitism, corruption, growth. Upside down the apple becomes a tree and the monstrous worm is still  a monstrous worm. The apple could refer to New York which would mean a giant worm is eating New York.

Armour/chainmail, diamonds, expensive clothing, status symbols. I guess it could be an anchor or some kind of weird pot if you look at it upside down.

Lanterns, shine light on/revealing, shadows, China, keep darkness away, hiding from light, film noir, beacons/being drawn to light.

I have done a game that used light/fire in the mechanics before, so I don't think I want to go that route again.

What am I Going to Do?

I have been staring at these images for about 24 hours now and a lot of the ideas I have been coming up with are too similar to games I have done in the past. I don't want to build mechanics around light or fire again and I don't want to do a game about the afterlife or death. I also don't really have much interest in doing a game around status, politics, castes or things of that ilk.

Looking back at the games I have made for competitions of the years it seems that I am often drawn to darker themes and horror. The same is true of this year's Game Chef. Most of my ideas involved dystopias, parasites, corruption, social climbing and so on. I am kind of sick of dark topics and this year I have decided that I am going to go in the opposite direction; I am going to interpret the ingredients and theme in the most off the wall and fun way that I can.

Attack of the Terrorlights

Glowing lights pulse in the night sky. They dance over the city until falling down and into the most ordinary of things. Destruction follows the lights. They are the Terrorlights, some kind of otherworldly force intent on the destruction of the earth. The creatures their light touches grow to massive size and become enraged, laying waste to everything around them.

Someone must stand up to the Terrorlights and their gargantuan creations and that someone is you. Players take on the role of members of the colorful Chroma Team, mighty defenders of earth with the power to grow (and shrink) in size to combat any threat.

 That's right, I am going Kaiju with this game which will be inspired by such classics as Kamen Rider and Power Rangers and the Terrorlights are a little bit like Mysterons.

I haven't put a lot of thought into mechanics for AotT yet, but I know that I want to include few core ideas.

1. I want the colour/pattern of player clothing to matter. If you wear a plaid shirt then you get to play the Plaid Ranger. What I think this means is that there will be a kind of class system where players match up their clothing and it gives them some abilities or powers. This is then paired with a choice of title like 'Ranger', 'Warrior' or 'Defender' to get their full sentai member code name.
2. I plan on using push your luck mechanics in this game. My thoughts are that the heroes can keep pushing forward when fighting giant monsters but if they push their luck too far they will damage the city or injure innocents.
3. I want the game to be a balance between giant monster battles and slice of life for the heroes. My idea is that we get to see the heroes struggle with the fallout of their actions when they push their luck too far and I also want to have some fun with the players hiding their secret identities from friends and family.

I have just over a week to make something out of this and, luckily for me, this year Game Chef falls on a long weekend.

Categories: Brainstorming, Chroma Team, Game Chef, Game Chef 2013, Game Design, Kaiju, Sentai