Greetings all!I have faith in both Plan Z projects and I hope with all my heart that at least one of them will bear fruit allowing me to yet again don my mask and cape and fly around with my mighty superpowers and beat the snot out of villains and giant monsters.
But, as we all know, that might take awhile. So what can we do while waiting? Glad you asked, here's an idea from me.
I played City of Heroes for over 7 years, but I've also been a board game designer for 10. I am a part of a company called Gigantoskop and although we don't have that many games in our catalogue yet (it's a tough branch) I have a huge amount of prototypes in various stages.
And as a game designer I really wanted to do my own super adventures, create villains and make others have fun. So a few years ago I designed a game that lets me do that.
The prototype is a
Superhero co-operative boardgame for 1-6 players that is both highly customizable and very expandable. Each player plays a hero going from level 1 to 5 getting from 3 to 8 powers that you need to juggle endurance to use effectively. You play story arcs containing a number of missions and each mission has a map (the board you play on). Instead of having all the mission information in a booklet form I chose to have all information on cards so that the surprise when playing the story arc for the first time would be maximized.
I have play tested it a lot (at the lower range of hero levels) and the engine works, and players have fun. What I want to do know is to try to finalize it and give it to the #SaveCOH community so that all can play an analogue offline boardgame while waiting for (and perhaps even after) the launch of any online Plan Z game.
Here's the deal. I need help finishing the game. I cannot do this alone, and all of my colleagues at Gigantoskop are working on our regular products. I need your help. If any of you are interested please let me know and I will find us a place on the interwebs were we can communicate, exchange files and have fun.
The prototype is playable, but all maps are in black and white with no graphic at all. Cards are text, no icons, no graphics, not pretty. The rules are plain, missing graphical examples (of course). Hero character sheets and Superpower cards are also plain text and very cluttered. The only color right now is each Hero on the character sheets (and those heroes are of course created in the Custom Editor).
What I have used so for is MS Word for the Rules, Photoshop for maps and Indesign for all the cards and character sheets.
This is what I need help with.
- Project manager. Someone who can have the overview of the project, making sure everyone have what they need, checking that things get done. Handing over stuff when we have a change of personnel. (Why is this not me? Well, I would like to focus on the rules and the engine while others produce material, components, lore and story arcs. This is my side project and being a full time worker with two small kids leaves me with not that much spare time.)
- Copy and editing. English is not my native language. I am from Sweden. Also handle what other Mission creators produce.
- Graphical artists.
- The maps need to be so much more visually appealing.
- We need to draw heroes for the character sheets with smaller versions for pawns
- Villains, animals and monsters needs to be drawn to be pawns.
- Icons need to be created to remove much of the card texts.
- At a later state, box art.
- AD. To get it all together
- Card design
- Character sheet design
- Rule sheet design
- Create templates
- Number crunchers and math wizards who can check my numbers and balance the powers for both heroes and villains.
- Mission creators. Once the engine is perfected and the decision is made to go by card or booklet form we need more to put into the game. Guidelines on how to create stuff will be done too.
- Play testers. As many as possible. Just remember that play testing is fun, putting together the prototype is usually not that fun (mostly since you need to print about 200 cards with 200 back sides, cut them up and sleeve them, then create pawns, get a lot of dice and a huge amount of tokens and counters). Yes, hard work. But then, oh so much fun!
If all goes well, we have at least three ways how to get the game out. We could make it Print & Play (which we might do anyway), we could Kickstart it or we could put as print on demand at the Game Crafter (https://www.thegamecrafter.com/)
If we could get out a basic game, then my dream is to have a community website where everyone could contribute with new heroes and new superpowers, new story arcs and new maps. I would really like to play my game not knowing anything about the Story Arc my hero and his team is about to embark on.
So if you read his far you are apparently interested. Do you think you are up to this? Let me know and we'll take it from there.