LORE SATURDAY - WHAT IS THE PIT?
almost 6 years ago – Sat, May 19, 2018 at 11:15:28 PM

Hello again everyone! In Canada this is Victoria Day Weekend, and also Saturday, so we have Lore Update for you. Today's question is: "What Is The Pit?" and here to answer it is our Lead Writer and resident Lore Goddess, Arinn Dembo!

-

What Is The Pit?

The answer to this question has three levels: story, world-building, and META. I'm going to start with the story first, because who reads The Silmarillion before The Hobbit?

The Story

On a frontiers of known space, there's a chilly little world called Arbuda IV. Sol Force has established a human colony there, as the planet has a nice biosphere and a lot of human-friendly terrain. There are many small towns and isolated cabins, domes and ranches dotting the globe.

Arbuda IV is a world that tends to attract people who Want To Get Away From It All. For example, retired Marines like Travis Hudson, who cashiered out of the service and is ready to claim his settlement package, build his dream cabin in the mountains, and spend the rest of his life raising kids and potatoes.

Unfortunately, the early survey team who mapped this world didn't spot the Pit.

-

The entrances and exits to this ancient  secret laboratory were well hidden, and well guarded. No one knew it was there until the Xombie Plague broke out among the colonists. 

Sol Force sent field teams out into the wild to find the cause and cure for this terrible disease, but time was short--the infection was lethal and difficult to contain. One young field worker, a biologist named Tamiko Hoshinara, was on the track of a cure. But she disappeared from her camp in the Feldspar Mountains, and the friends and colleagues who went looking for her discovered...the Pit.

One by one, they entered the Pit searching for Tamiko and a cure for the Xombie Plague. One by one, they fought their way toward the bottom alone. Most of them didn't make it far.

But what if they had worked together? Gone into the facility as a team?

This game answers that hypothetical question.

The World-Building

Buried in the heart of the forbidding Feldspar Mountains, the Pit is a research facility for an alien race known as the Suul'ka. Specifically, it belongs to one very special Suul'ka, a mad scientist who creates plagues and monsters for fun, and then unleashes them on the universe for sport. 

His enemies call him The Bloodweaver. His followers and flunkies call him "Master Control". His creations, the Zuul, call him "He Who Shapes"...and worship him as a god.

The Bloodweaver does not reside in The Pit on Arbuda IV. On the contrary, the entire facility is managed by one harried and increasingly glitchy Artificial Intelligence, the System Administrator. She presides over the Pit like an irritable patient trying to run an abandoned asylum.

A few important things to understand about the Pit, in no particular order:

1. It is old. Very, very old. There are life forms hidden away in its cryopods and stasis tubes that have been extinct on Earth for over 30,000 years.

2. It is big. There are many floors, descending deep into the heart of the mountain. Hundreds of rooms, miles of corridors.

3. It is bursting with life. There are many specimens of the native fauna of Arbuda IV, including the rockrats, moonbats and moonbears of the Feldspar region.  Some of these animals have been subjected to fiendish experiments. There are bats and bears carrying diseases and radiation--and there are even a few that have been turned into cyborgs.

But in addition to the local Arbuda wildlife, there are alien life forms from all over the galaxy. There are even prisoners from powerful star-faring species like Tarkas, Hivers and Humans. When you encounter a Crazed Human or a Crazed Tarka in the facility, you're running into a person who was kidnapped, often years or centuries ago, and subjected to experiments that have destroyed their sanity.

As a side-note, the Pit is not just a well-stocked zoo or a prison! A lot of the experimental subjects are running wild and free in the facility. Some of them are territorial, and will tend to stick to their dens and sources of food and water. Others roam the halls freely, hunting for prey or searching for a way out.

4. It is well-guarded. In addition to the System Administrator, there are hundreds of robots which serve various maintenance and security functions. Many of them are well armed and armored. Proceed with caution.

5. It is not alone. The Bloodweaver is a busy fellow. He traverses vast regions of space making monsters, mischief and mayhem, and he needs more than one research facility performing his experiments while he travels on business. So the Pit on Arbuda IV, thoroughly terrible and atrocious as it is...is not the only Pit in the galaxy! There could be dozens or hundreds of other facilities scattered in backwater solar systems.

THE META

The meta story of Sword of the Stars: The Pit is that the original video game was first crowdfunded in 2012, and released in February of 2013 as a single-player rpg with three playable characters: the Engineer, the Scout and the Marine.

 In video gaming circles this style of game is known as a "roguelike"--it has some mechanics in common with the classic Rogue: Exploring the Dungeons of Doom video game that was first released in 1980. 

When you play a roguelike, you descend into the dungeon just to see how far you can go before you get killed--that is a standard mechanic. You do get attached to your characters, and very engrossed in the game and the adventure as it unfolds...but death or defeat is not something you take too personally! The game was always out to get you, and you knew that going in.

This mechanic was also a pretty perfect match for an environment like The Pit, which is not only a dungeon, but quite literally out to get you (and your friends!).

-

Going further into the Meta, Sword of the Stars: The Pit was also the first game that our studio self-published in 2013. Although we've been making games since 2004, this was the first one that we were able to finance, develop, publish and distribute all on our own. As the game that represents our full independence, it will always have a place in our hearts.

From the time of its launch in 2012 to its final (current) bundled form as the Osmium Edition, the Pit has been through a lot of changes. It has been expanded more than seven times, adding new Playable Characters, new mechanics, new monsters and new items.

We are having a great time taking The Pit to a new medium. Our team loves tabletop games, and it is fun to make our own board games and card games for the first time. We hope that you and your crew will enjoy playing this one as much as we've enjoyed making and testing it.

If you have any specific Lore questions about the Pit or its Characters, please let me know!

In the meantime, thanks so much for your support. :)

DESIGN FRIDAY - ROOM CARDS IN DETAIL!
almost 6 years ago – Fri, May 18, 2018 at 10:36:37 PM

Happy Friday Pit Fiends!

We're heading into the long Victoria Day weekend here in Canada, but we are going to continue bringing you campaign updates and logging in to answer questions. Today is Design Friday, as well--which means that you get a juicy Dev Diary from our Lead Designer, Martin Cirulis.

For those of you who logged in last night to our Twitch stream, we had a fantastic evening with the devs from Bravely Told Games! We got together for pizza and soda and played a few rounds of Cult Following, including some sneak previews from the new expansion decks! Then Tom and Trevor sat down with us and learned to play the Pit Board Game, and they were amazing. Trevor killed SO MANY BEARS that we started to be nervous about PETA protestors.

So many. Bears.

A big thank you to everyone who chose to back our campaign or their campaign campaign after seeing the games in action!

_

Welcome back to The Pit Board Game Dev Diaries! I'm Martin Cirulis. This week I'll be talking about the cards that represent the devilish rooms of The Pit.

HARD WORKIN CARDS

Room cards are the heavy lifters of The Pit Board Game’s design. From the very start, I knew that they were going to have carry a lot of operational weight, and I had a set of One Stop Shopping requirements.

The Room Cards had to:

• convey the sense of being in an alien base (mostly on their own)
• convey information regarding monsters and loot
• tailor the monsters and loot to the Floor the players found themselves on
• offer enough variety to give the game very high re-playability
• present it all visually in a way that brought to mind the computer game we were emulating!

That’s a lot to ask of one card…but I had an idea of how it could work.

First of all, I knew we were going to need oversized cards. They had to be large enough to give the players all the info we needed them to have. Five of the cards laid out together could give the board game a feeling of structure. 

I started very early layout testing of the board using pieces from another game in my collection, Legendary: A Marvel Deck Building Game. The boards of Legendary offered a layout similar to the one I had in mind for The Pit’s Room Cards, and they were useful stand-ins during the prototyping phase—once again a reminder that game designers should keep a large collection of games around for inspiration!

Once I had a rough idea of the scale I had to work with, I just started roughly laying out areas of the card according to my priorities. 

The first part was easy: I created a clear area at the top for the room name with some expansion room for the inevitable additions I would make to gameplay. (The ambush system took 3 full play-throughs to reveal the need for it, just as an example).

From there, I knew the next priority was some sort of splash image that would make the room’s function and mood clear to the player. It was the artists, Ken and John who wisely suggested that the best way to evoke the computer game was to use images pulled from the game itself. This not only made fans of the original game feel at home, but gave new board game players a context for the art on the monster and item cards.

TRANSLATIONS OF TERROR 

The functional bones of the Room Card are in the threat/reward system. As in any good dungeon, the functional purpose of each room in the facility should relate to both its threats and rewards.

There was a temptation here to individualize each card, label the backs of the cards with what floor they should be used on, etc.. But as soon as I tried to apply our re-playability standard to this idea, it quickly devolved into an unwieldy, massive stack of cards with arcane rules for shuffling and arrangement.

Nope to that.

The design of the original computer game showed me the path to sanity. The original Pit is based on an increasing threat algorithm, utilizing barometer tables that use the Floor Number that the player is on to set the range of choices for monsters and items. By focusing on a Room Card’s adaptability, I was able to create a simple table on each card that showed which monster and loot cards the Players should draw, based on what floor the players were on.

When I combined this with a 4 deck system representing increasing power and value for monsters and loot, suddenly a huge weird deck of Room Cards collapsed down into a straightforward and elegant deck of room cards which still offered tons of variety and replay value!

The next step was relatively straightforward. Rooms had to have special functions. Players would expect to get food from Cafeterias, bullets from Armories and so on. I knew I wanted player characters to have Skills, and that led to a system where all rooms would have special functions that would represent the theme of the room and that could be activated and enhanced by those Skills.

Now, Security Rooms could open doors based on a Player's Computer skill, while MedBays could heal damage based on the Medical skill of the active player.

LOCKING IT DOWN

The final touch of Room Card design also took a page from the design of the original computer game: locking the doors. 

I wanted to map over from the computer game the ever increasing difficulty of unlocking room doors as you descended further and further into the facility. I accomplished this by adding a simple section to the bottom of the card that states the number of Lockpick Skill successes that you need to open it, generally with a plus sign beside the base number. 

The plus signs just means you add the Floor Number you are on to the roll, in order to open the lock. A room rated for 1+ is a relatively simple roll of 2 successes on Floor 1, but 5 successes or more on Floor 4. Once again, the Room Card gives the players a dynamic set of conditions, based on what Floor the Players have reached when they encounter it.

Hopefully this bit of insight into the how’s and why’s of Room Cards have given you some insight into the process of designing a game to achieve your goals. When you know ahead of time all the work that a certain component of your game is going to have to do, then you push the card or board to make it fit, both physically and thematically.

Tune in next week when I will go into The Pit’s wandering monster system, and what it adds to the game!

In the meantime, thanks for reading, and have a great weekend!

STREAM THURSDAY! SEE THE GAME IN ACTION WITH OUR SPECIAL GUESTS!
almost 6 years ago – Thu, May 17, 2018 at 04:48:13 PM

 -

Greetings all! As of today we are officially at the one week mark and 51% funded! We are very excited and happy about that, but still pushing forward to reach new board game lovers in the weeks ahead. We want to reach those Stretch Goals!

As some of you will already know, we do a board game stream event every Thursday night called Kerberos Plays. Normally we play a variety of tabletop games of all kinds, including the ones we've helped to Kickstart ourselves.

In honor of The Pit Board Game Kickstarter, we are teaching a variety of special guest stars to play The Pit this month for your entertainment! Tonight's special guests will be the two-man developer team from Bravely Told Games, who are the makers of a great, very fun little party game called Cult Following: The One True Game.

BTG has a Kickstarter running to concurrently to ours, so in honor of the occasion we will be giving away a FREE COPY of Cult Following to one of the lucky viewers of the show tonight.

Not only that, but our Lead Writer will be PERSONALLY HAND-LETTERING a set of Cult Sign and Seeker Question cards with Kerberos Themed prompts for your gaming pleasure.

Because what party game can't be improved by Giant, Angry Space Whales?

Tune in! Tell your friends! Support your friendly neighborhood devs and win free swag!

MEET THE TEAM WEDNESDAY! LESS THAN 24 HOURS LEFT FOR EARLY BIRD!
almost 6 years ago – Wed, May 16, 2018 at 09:21:49 PM

_

Greetings all! We are just six days into our KS campaign and over 50% funded! There are less than 24 hours left to grab an Early Bird Copy, so please do tell any friends who might want a copy before the promotion is over.

_

Today is Wednesday, so we have a Team Profile feature with the Art Director and 3D sculptor of The Pit Board Game, John Yakimow. There is a lot more news today as well, so stay tuned for other updates!

1. Let’s start with the easy question, tell us a little about yourself. What is your background, and how did you get started as an artist?

I've been drawing since forever, and knew I wanted to work in video games after seeing what vast variety the medium was capable of producing. I went to what is now the Art Institute of Vancouver, where I learned the principles of working in the video game industry as an artist.

In terms of 2D art I'm self-taught, and I'm constantly developing my 2D and 3D skills to get better results.

_

 2: When did you join Kerberos, and what games have you worked on?

I joined Kerberos in 2007 as a 3D artist and got to work on Born of Blood, the first expansion for the 4X title Sword of the Stars--the one that introduced the Zuul as a playable faction. The Zuul would go on to become some of the most wicked enemies that could be encountered in THE PIT (or anywhere else in the SOTS-verse, for that matter)!

Since then I've worked on other expansions for the original SOTS as well its sequel Sword of the Stars II: Lords of Winter, and original games like Fort Zombie and Kaiju-a-Gogo. I produced tons of content for Sword of the Stars: The Pit, the rogue-like PC game that inspired the board game. 

THE PIT: The Board Game is the first board game title I've worked on!

3: Which is more challenging, making a 3-D character for a video game or a fig for a board game? 

They both have different demands for getting to a viable finished piece, but I'd have to say making a full 3D game character is the more challenging of the two.

For one thing, you're not finished when you've got the high resolution digital sculpting done - with game characters you then have to go on to creating a low resolution model that will function as an entity within your game, as well as elements of texturing, rigging, and animating.

For the figures in THE PIT: The Board Game, I could get a print-ready miniature sculpted in a day or two. Creating fully textured and animated incarnations of the same creatures for our upcoming SOTS video game title PIT OF DOOM can take me more than a week!

-

4: What is your inspiration for the art style of the monsters?

 The games that made me want to be an artist for a living were 90s SNES games like the earlier Final Fantasy titles, Link to the Past, and Chrono Trigger. These games had a huge variety of wonderful and colorful enemies, while characters were represented as stylized, cartoonish sprites.

 This kind of retro, simplified style was the sort of thing Kerberos wanted to achieve with Swords of the Stars: The Pit, and I think we succeeded gloriously. We absolutely wanted to preserve that art style for THE PIT: The Board Game.

When we were putting together all of the game art and cards, I had the opportunity to show the creatures of THE PIT in ways that hadn't been possible for the animated sprites of the video game. Each creature was redrawn with extra details and greater color range than their lower resolution video game incarnations, and one or two even got some brand new designs!

-

5. What has been the hardest fig to make so far, and why?

I'd have to say the Zuul Lord astride one of his enormous Elite Zuul bodyguards! Both Lord and bodyguard were also modeled as separate figures, and then elements of both were combined together to represent the Lord of the Pit at his most dangerous. The result was the largest figure designed for the game (so far!). It was tricky making sure all the elements meshed together and printed properly, but while it was difficult, it wound up being a lot easier than I had anticipated, and the end result looks great.

There are few figures more complex than this double-mini planned - the next one that'll really challenge me is the dread Cyberjaeger Moonbear with all its cybernetic enhancements!

6. What tips do you have for someone who might want to break into 3D design for game miniatures?

There's never been a better time to get started, the internet has all the resources a beginner could ever want. I went from 3D sculpting for games to 3D sculpting viable printable figures in just a few days. 

Programs such as Zbrush and Sculptris have huge networks of support and users online who can provide enough instruction for anyone starting out to produce a printable 3D sculpt. It's the same for 3D printers - the community is huge and growing, whatever printer you choose. 

One big thing I learned is to keep in mind when sculpting detail for your figure is how the printer is going to render that detail. Sometimes having details bigger and more exaggerated on 3D printable figures is better, as they'll translate more clearly to a printed mini than detail that is realistic in proportion, which can come out lost or muted. It's also good to keep in mind miniature scale with things like wargame or tabletop minis! 

__

BOARD GAME BRAWL PREVIEW IS LIVE! SPECIAL GUESTS TOMORROW NIGHT ON TWITCH!
almost 6 years ago – Wed, May 16, 2018 at 09:08:59 PM

 _

Quick additional news today - we've got a preview of The Pit Board Game up at Board Game Brawl! Nick Meenachan sits down with the prototype and runs through the board, cards, and mechanics of the game in detail in a nice up-close and personal view.

Take a look and share the link!

__

In other news, our fellow Vancouver-based dev team, Bravely Told Games, will be joining us tomorrow night on our live Twitch Stream! They're going to learn to play The Pit Board Game for your amusement, and we will be trying out the new cards for their expansions to Cult Following, the One True Game.

TUNE IN TOMORROW and say hello! We will be giving away a FREE COPY of their first game, CULT FOLLOWING, along with a set of special Kerberos Themed Cards for the game, including both Cult Sign cards and Seeker Question cards. You can only win if you're in the viewing audience! You definitely don't want to miss it!

As a reminder--Bravely Told Games also has a Kickstarter ongoing this month. If you love funny and irreverent party games with cards and lots of humor, you should check them out.

See you folks tomorrow!