3D MONDAY - THE STRANGLER STRIKES! PLUS - ALMOST 90% FUNDED!
almost 6 years ago – Mon, Jun 04, 2018 at 01:33:11 PM

We're back! It's Week 4 of our campaign and things are still swinging! Lots of news today, so we are just going to jump straight into it. Hold on to your hats!

-

GETTING GEEKY WITH GAMERLEAF

Our Lead Writer and resident Lore Goddess has done a podcast interview with your friendly neighborhood Geek-In-Training, GamerLeaf!

-

Tune to the podcast to hear Arinn talk about her earliest experiences with board games, her current favorite party card game (Spoiler: It's Cult Following: The One True Game.), The Pit Board Game, Sword of the Stars and Kerberos, the impact of digital download on the industry of game development, and many other topics.

Share the link and give some love to Arinn Dembo and GamerLeaf!

-

-

In other news--it's 3D Monday! Which means that we have another sample miniature for you to download and enjoy.

Today's miniature is the Strangler, which is a charming nickname given to warriors of the Uttuku people. Arinn Dembo will be giving us a Lore entry on the Stranglers on Saturday, but for now--the miniature is available for you to download on Thingiverse. Engineers and 3D printing fans--please check it out and enjoy!

-

-

That's it for now--but this final week is going to be exciting. We're preparing for Origins in Ohio, we've got more dev diaries and team interviews, we have a live stream on Thursday night and we'll be taking The Pit Board Game prototype on the road on Friday and Saturday to live demos at Starlit Citadel and the Fraser Valley TableTop Day.

In the meantime, if you folks can keep sharing our Updates and campaign page, it would be greatly appreciated! We're very close, and with your help we can make this happen.

Thank you for your support!

LORE SATURDAY - WHAT ARE THE PROTEANS!?
almost 6 years ago – Sat, Jun 02, 2018 at 11:00:54 PM

 -

Hey everyone! I am Arinn Dembo and today is Lore Saturday. Which means that it's time to answer another burning question in Sword of the Stars lore! 

Today's dev diary is about everyone's monsters, the Proteans. A.k.a. THE SLIME OF THE STARS.

-

-

Ancient History

Proteans (pronounced "PROE-tee-ann") are named after Proteus, the Old Man of the Sea. In ancient Greek myths and legends, Proteus lived both on land and in the water around a secret island in the Mediterranean. He could see backward and forward in time, and if you could just capture him and pin him down, he would tell you almost anything you needed to know.

In order to squeeze that knowledge out of him, however, you had to tackle Proteus and subdue him! And Proteus did not fight fair. During any given wrestling match with a Greek hero, Proteus would transform into various animals and monsters, rapidly changing from one form to another to wriggle his way out of the hero's grip.

-

- 

The word "protean" today means "changing frequently or easily". So anything that is hard to pin down because it is ever-changing, unstable, fluid, adaptable and slippery...is protean. And that includes everyone's favorite squish monsters, the Proteans from Sword of the Stars: The Pit!

The Proteans in the Pit come in three sizes and many variants. The basic Protean is white, and tends to split in two: when you defeat a Large Protean, it splits into two Medium Proteans, and when you defeat a Medium Protean it becomes two Small Proteans. As Proteans get smaller, they become faster.

All Proteans are covered with a layer of protective acid, which tends to burn through your weapons and equipment if you come into melee range. If you don't have any protective Base Paste to keep them from turning your armor into swiss cheese, it's best to take them out at range if you can.

In addition to the small, medium and large varieties, Proteans also have variants with different colors and abilities. Essentially, Proteans are the embodiment of "That Which Does Not Kill Me Makes Me Stronger". If you put them into a tough environment, they survive and learn from that environment. They are evolution in action: they change very rapidly to become something new, whenever the going gets rough.

-

-

Proteans that have been injected with poison can become highly venomous Toxoids. Proteans can adapt to climates like desert sand and ice, and produce extremes of heat and cold to protect themselves--they become Cryoids or Fryoids. 

If you expose them to disease, they incorporate the bacteria and viruses and become immune, but highly contagious carriers. They can even incorporate steel filaments to become cyborg monsters called Adaptoids! Players quickly learn that a sneaky Adaptoid will re-shape itself into innocent-looking piece of furniture, and wait to ambush you when you come seeking loot.

-

 -

The upshot is that Proteans are slippery devils with a lot of tricks up their sleeves. The question is...where did they come from? And how long have they been around?

-

SLIME OF THE STARS

Fans of the Sword of the Stars games first encountered the Proteans seven years ago. When they first appeared in the Sword of the Stars universe, Proteans were huge--the size of star ships! Traveling in packs, you would find them slowly crawling through deep space in pursuit of ancient automated vessels called Gardener ships.

The Gardeners were mysterious alien terraforming vessels, traveling from star to star on a mission to fertilize the galaxy. When they entered a solar system, they would move toward any rocky planet or moon large enough to potentially support life, and work their alien mojo. That world would undergo a rapid genesis effect, and seemingly overnight, a thick biosphere would develop. Formerly barren rocks would suddenly become prime real estate,  abundant jewels ripe for colonization.

-

 -

 -

If the Proteans caught these Gardener ships, however, they would tear them apart and destroy them in a rage. If players defeated the massive Proteans and boarded the Gardener vessels themselves, they would get some simple bonuses and possibly the chance to see inside. The interior of each massive, ancient vessel was a sealed life support system, full of plants, clean water, wild animals and a breathable atmosphere.  

A smart galactic overlord would tend to eliminate the angry Proteans and then step back to let the Gardener ships continue their mission, faithfully shuffling from star to star to seed the galaxy with new life. The Gardener ship is massive and powerful, but really it is no more aggressive or dangerous than a Roomba if you stay out of its way. If you let it trundle along, it leaves behind some pretty valuable real estate!

-

-

The Story Behind the Proteans

The lore behind the Gardeners and the Proteans goes back in the very distant past. The Gardeners, although long extinct by the present day, were once a powerful Elder Race. They rose and formed an interstellar civilization billions of years ago, and developed incredibly high tech starships, stations, cities and colonies. Although they produced many scientific marvels, their highest achievements were in biology and genetics. They were masters of Life.

The Gardeners were bold experimenters, tinkering with the raw stuff of life to create the Proteans. Proteans could serve the Gardeners in every possible role: they could be house pets, food animals, beasts of burden, slaves, soldiers, and living tools. Strong, flexible, sensitive, tough and trainable, Proteans could be any size or shape, flow into any container or slip through any crack. They were the workhorses and attack dogs of a high tech civilization...until eventually they rebelled.

How and why the Proteans turned on their creators is not known. What we do know is that the Proteans are still alive and kicking now, billions of years later...while the Gardeners are long gone. 

-

 -

Proteans today can be found throughout the galaxy. They are aggressive, intelligent, and highly dangerous.

Sometimes they are sleeping in a raw proto-state in stasis chambers that are billions of years old.

Sometimes they are crawling from star to star, still determined to destroy every trace of Gardener civilization.

They are the only surviving creations of the Gardener biologists, except for their tiny cousins, the tardigrades--which are equally widespread throughout the universe, but completely non-harmful.

And adorable.

-

 -

That's it for today folks!

 We'll see you next week for one more Lore Entry, and thank you for your support!

COMPLETIST PLEDGE LEVEL UPDATE! PLUS - NEW MINI BUNDLE FOR SMALL RETAILERS!
almost 6 years ago – Fri, Jun 01, 2018 at 10:46:16 PM

Special Update on Completist Level Pledges:

We are adding more GUARANTEED CONTENT!

Just to be clear: when we launched the campaign, Completist Level Pledges included a boxed copy of the Base Game, a full set of 3D files for the game's Player Characters and Monsters, and a cast miniature for all monsters and Player Characters that were funded through Stretch Goals in this campaign.

This has not changed, and this package always had the potential to be a great value if the campaign reaches all its Stretch Goals, but...what if we are just funded at the lower level? 

Small campaigns don't always blow up into sky-high Stretch Goal territory. How do we make sure that our Backers get good value for their support?

We've put our heads together and come up with a plan: we can solve this problem with TECHNOLOGY. We have a great FormLabs2 3D Printer in the office! Even if our campaign doesn't reach Stretch Goals for mass-produced minis--we can make our own!

-

-

WHAT THIS MEANS IN PRACTICAL TERMS

Short answer? 

If the campaign funds successfully, even without reaching any Stretch Goals...

Completist Level Backers will receive a Kickstarter Exclusive Backer Package which includes ALL THREE of the Playable Characters in the Stretch Goals of the Base Game, along with their minis, cards, skills and items.

In addition to that, your Completist Pledge Package will include a Kickstarter Exclusive Brawler Mini.

-

-

We appreciate your support for our campaign and we want to make sure that you receive good value for your gaming dollar. 3D printed miniatures are fun to play with and paint, as you can see from our recent "How To Paint" videos from Life of a Board Gamer. And The Pit Board Game will definitely be a gas with more Playable Characters.

Regardless of what is made available via Stretch Goals or through BackerKit after the campaign wraps...the Completist Pledge Backer Level will always have the Brawler mini, a little something extra as a thank-you for that commitment of support.

*Please note--these changes to the Completist Backer Level will also apply to higher-level Backers who have rewards that include the Completist level, including Retailer Bundles. 

-

NEW MINI BUNDLE FOR SMALL RETAILERS!

In addition to the Update to our Completist Level Pledge, we are adding a new Pledge Level for small retailers. Some of campaign supporters both at home and abroad have pointed out that many small brick-and-mortar stores do not stock more than five copies of any given game! Small retailers need a Pledge Level that suits their needs as hobby shops for smaller communities, as well as access to the Retail Level prices for Add-Ons after the campaign.

We have put together a Mini-Bundle that includes just three copies of the Base Game for those folks. Long live the Mom-and-Pop Hobby Shop! And thanks everyone for your support. We'll have more content, reviews and surprises coming for the last week of our Kickstarter campaign, so...please stay tuned!

Go little game, go!

DESIGN FRIDAY - RECIPES! PLUS - MINIATURE PAINTING VIDEOS!
almost 6 years ago – Fri, Jun 01, 2018 at 05:50:46 PM

Happy Friday Pit Fiends! Fair warning--we have two updates today, and this is only the first. Stay tuned later today for an important Update about a new Backer Level for small retailers and some improvements to the COMPLETIST PLEDGE LEVEL  of our campaign. 

In the meantime, we're back to bring you more Dev Diary goodness from Lead Designer Martin Cirulis. This week's entry will be about the Recipe system! But before we get to that, we've got some new videos to watch, for those of you who love our minis. :)

MINIATURE PAINTING VIDEOS FROM LIFE OF A BOARD GAMER!

Danijel Ljubas, a board game reviewer and miniature painter from Croatia, has been working on a pack of The Pit Board Game miniatures. Photos of the painting journey of our 3D-printed minis have been appearing on his Instagram, and now the first two mini-painting videos are up!

-

 -

If the photos above don't click through properly for you, you can find the How-To-Paint video for the Medium Protean here and the Elite Zuul Female here.

 We'll have more news about some changes to our Backer Levels later today, but for now, here's Martin!

-

-

Welcome back to another chapter of my Dev Diary! In today’s installment I am going to be detailing the Recipe system and how it was adapted from the one in the original computer game.

PARTS!

From the start, I knew I wanted crafting in the board game because it was such a huge part of the computer game. The original Sword of the Stars: The Pit has hundreds of recipes and ingredients, and that immense variety was itself the biggest hurdle in translation.

A board game just cannot support the same level of detail and content that a video game does, unless the entire game was going to be about crafting alone. There were already hundreds of monster and item cards planned for The Pit: The Board Game, so there was no way that adding more cards just for ingredients was going to be a viable answer.

We also couldn't make Items serve as ingredients alone, because every item a team finds is vital to their survival. There was little point presenting the player with a choice that was almost never going to be worth it to them, when the chips were down.

When a designer needs to expand gameplay without adding a lot of components, the best answer is to revisit and re-examine what's already on the table. Ask how the pieces you've already designed might do double duty for you. 

In the original game, defeated monsters drop a variety of items that are used in Crafting. In order to reproduce this effect, I had to step back and do a little abstraction. If I reduced the idea of dropped items to categories of components, then a monster really drops materials which are either organic, mechanical or exotic/strange.

That concept can be easily added to the information on pre-existing monster cards by using a simple set of 3 icons. Double duty to the rescue!

-

-

RECIPES FOR SUCCESS

Now that I had figured out ingredients, it was time to add a relatively small number of cards for recipes and their results.

 A number of useful and rare items could be crafted by laying out a logical set of symbols. The recipe for Roast Beast, for example, could be represented with a card asking for a large number of organic and a small amount of exotic material, for example.

While very abstract, players can easily imagine that they are being asked for a big bunch of meat, and pinch of weird alien powder to use as a spice.

-

-

CRAFTY LOGIC

 Maintaining some kind of logic in game systems is vital for drawing players in and letting them anticipate the future, rather than having to constantly look up rules that are non-intuitive. Once the raw material system was mated to the Recipe cards, it flowed with the style of the game, and tied in very easily to other parts of the design.

Creating things became a room function. The Laboratory Room Card was born in order to give players a place to create their recipes, and to offer more rewards for exploration.

The final added value that we gained by using monsters as a vehicle for crafting materials is that it also created another interesting choice for players. Now you had two choices of what to do with your Monster Trophies! Do you turn them in as an ingredient for a Recipe? Or do you save them up to use their point value and get a new level of an important Skill?

Whenever your design decisions can give the Player more choices, and more interesting choices, you are having a good day! 

That's it for now. Tune in next week for a few last thoughts about designing a game that hates the players...in a good way.

TONIGHT AT 6:00 PST! KERBEROS PLAYS...NUDE AND CONCERNED!
almost 6 years ago – Thu, May 31, 2018 at 05:16:14 PM

Morning folks!

 We're hard at work making the fun today, but we'll be doing a Live Stream play session of The Pit Board Game tonight, and we have other news about where and when you can play our games in person. So, taking it from the top...!

-

 -

Tonight on Kerberos Plays, we'll be doing a run of the game with Extra Challenge rules. For a NUDE AND CONCERNED run of The Pit, all the Player Characters start the game with nothing but a melee weapon and a pack of rations--no armor, no extra items. Tune in tonight on Twitch TV to check it out, cheer on Kerberos and our special guests, and laugh at our painful demise!

-

Catch Us at ORIGINS!

We have a full schedule of events planned for Origins Games Fair this year, and we will have demo space at the vendor booth for AD ASTRA GAMES. Note--if you still haven't registered for Origins but plan to attend, Early Bird Registration ends on June 1! So today is the final day to save a little money.

Already planning to come to Origins? Fantastic! Here's our Event Schedule--come check out our games and say hello!

-

-

-

GAMEX/STRATEGICON, LOS ANGELES

In other news, we wanted to share some of the highlights of our trip to Los Angeles last weekend. GameX was a great convention and it was a pleasure to meet and play games with so many great great folks, including reviewers and fellow devs.

Photos below, plus some cool video of people who played our games--check it out!

 Testimonials!

 Digging into The Pit

 The Pit proved popular enough, we had a waiting list. Next year, bring more than one copy!

(when a guy has only two planets and is grinning like that, be suspicious)

That's It For Now...

That's all we've got for today, but we'll hope to see you all on-line tonight to say hello and have a few laughs together. In the meantime, we still have 10 days to go and we're over 80% Funded.

Keep sharing the campaign, Pit Fiends! And thanks so much for your support.