2022 summary

As it’s December and I won’t have any more playtests until 2023, I wanted to make a quick summary of the past 5 months working on To the Gates of Truth.

(If you’re interest in learning more about the game, design processes and more, feel free to join! https://discord.gg/ZwrYUqrUaY) 

To contextualize, I’ve started working on the core mechanics and lore in July/August 2021. Apart from two playtests, I didn’t have the opportunity and the time in 2021 to continue working on it until July 2022.

With approximately 1 playtest per week (sometimes 2-3, sometimes none), it really helped me figure out a lot of things about the game itself, what I wanted the experience to be, where do the issue generally comes from, etc. But if I already knew a game can only be made for AND with the players in mind, the playtests sessions really convinced me this is how game design is made.

So, here’s some different topics I explored and learned thanks to those playtests:

• Using references and game genres is useful to communicate to players what to expect. However, this need to be clarified and shouldn’t narrow down my design process. Thanks to that, I no longer consider TTGOT as a RPG but as a scenarized, tactical and cooperative cardgame. (See the new quick rule video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoI3Itbb5vk&t=3s and this article I wrote about game genres: https://the-gates-of-truth.itch.io/to-the-gates-of-truth/devlog/410765/gd-breakdown-4-game-genres-expectations-vs-reality)
• Cooperation should emerge in AND outside the game to be meaningful and impactful (when I mean outside, that is in conversations between players to organize themselves).
• A feature that does not bring neither fun, tactic or anything to the playful experience should be questioned and/or taken out of the game. The focus is the experience and letting mechanics or features go can sometimes clarify what you want the experience to be.
• The game does feel like it improves over time. Firstly, because the more I design the Islands, cards or lore, the more I know what I want and what I enjoy. Secondly, because when players self-report their rating on the experience on a scale of 7, the mean is 5.5. The graph below comes from a pool of 23 players for their first playtest (so does not include testers that did play more than 2 times), and all of them didn’t experience the same version of it (though, I cannot statistically compare each group). This is promising! Also, something that comes a lot when debriefing is the potential of the game. The game is still early on its conception phase, but that really looks promising. The changes I made since August/September really seem to pay off. However…

• Playtesting on a low fidelity setting (here tabletopia) is great, but its own usability cannot be separated from the playful experience itself. Let me explain: when beginning the playtests, I always briefed my players that I was only looking for feedbacks on the gameplay mechanics, not tabletopia’s interface work. But even though it can theoretically be separated, in fact the experience is taken as a whole. So, usability issues from the low-fidelity interface do impact the aim of the playtests. Moral of the story? I need to plan in the future meaningful playtests in the contexts where the players will experience the game (for instance, with physical cards).

To sum up, I’m pretty confident in the future of this game. I’m still not sure of the scope of it or even how I want to release the game. But as playtesters do say, the game has potential and I really want to continue trying to exploit it!

Finally, I also want to thank @ShirojikiM and @ExpelliMARius who really helped me out as playtesters but also with card design layouts and visual tips on how to define the identity of the game (that of course, will still continue to evolve !).

Thanks for all of you that read and have taken interest in the game in 2022! See you in 2023 :D