In one of the latest articles, Jamey Stegmayer describes his experience with publicly sharing information about a creative process and how this can produce side effects.
On the one hand, writing a blog about how your game takes shape can be an extraordinary medium for creating and engaging the community even before the game hits Kickstarter or the shelves. On the other hand, it means shaping expectations that might be unmet for reasons related to a change in the creative direction of the project or an uncertain timeline, with the resulting pressure on the designer.
Jamey’s post voiced a need that had been in my head for a while.
In fact, almost a year ago, Emanuele and I presented our two creatures, Light Speed and Kosmykes, at a fair for the first time. With that, we began to share the evolution of our projects in person and on social media, with hints about dates and timelines. Of course, not everything went as planned because of the inventive processes’ genetics, and some ‘unforeseen’ incidents.
In this regard, the need that Jamey’s post originated was to re-establish a clear line of communication with the players who are following Tablescope’s mission.
This post reviews the project’s status and explains the choices we made over the past few months. Fellow indie game designers may find some helpful analogies to their own path.
Light Speed and its Telegram bot
In October 2021, during the Spiel festival in Essen, we presented our reimplementation supported by computer vision of the game Light Speed. We also spread the word that the public release of the companion bot on Telegram was close. On the one hand, the card recognition technology was already at an advanced stage, and the response during the fair had been more than good. On the other, there were aspects of the bot that a more thorough development could improve in terms of graphics and user experience. Motivated precisely by the positive feedback we gathered, we decided to make that extra effort and aim for a version of the prototype that was complete as far as all its experimental goals were concerned, including the relevant ones of graphics and usability.
The Telegram bot and the print&play are finally public, free as promised, and in a much more polished version than the one we brought to Essen, but it took us five months longer than the original plan.
Despite being a non-commercial project, the longer road taught us several lessons and allowed us the luxury of committing a few minor mistakes. We will take advantage of them to make the journey flawless for those who will support us once on Kickstarter.
Kosmykes
Kosmykes is a design we hold dear, conceived from day one to make the most of the creative routes opened up by computer vision.
During the Spiel, we demoed the game in the puzzle mode to let players get used to its unconventional mechanics and study their reactions and feedback. Although the Essen fair is more of a place for products than prototypes, the table with Kosmykes’ space mushrooms was always busy with enthusiastic players.
In addition to the work on the bot, after coming back from Germany in October last year, we immediately resumed Kosmykes’ weekly playtests. The solo or cooperatively playable puzzle mode had turned out to be on an excellent track. We had to reach the same degree of confidence for the competitive mode, which we had only presented in public during the previous month’s Play festival in Modena (Italy).
So at what stage is the development? The answer is the trivial one: apart from the last few months, which we had to devote to less playful tasks, we are still working hard on it! Our testers, the unsuspecting ones from the fairs and those a bit more aware from the playtest sessions, have confirmed the great potential of this project, and we want to ensure it comes through in the finished game. On the other hand, while a digital hybrid design offers unexplored opportunities, it also requires longer iterations involving software rewrites, nontrivial challenges regarding components’ ergonomics, and a study of the hybrid game experience as a whole. In short, there is a lot to do, and we want to do it well.
At Play 2022, we brought an iteration of the Kosmykes’ prototype that was improved under several aspects but again in the puzzle mode alone. After the 2021 edition, we regretted having proposed a competitive mode that had already changed in the first months of development after the fair. We do not intend to follow this approach again outside of our playtest sessions.
Opportunities
Among the unforeseen incidents I mentioned in the introduction, the main ones were the collaboration proposals we received.
One of the goals of attending fairs is certainly to show other publishers and authors the potential of our approach to tabletop gaming. We did not expect they would want to start working with Tablescope in the very short term! We needed to understand what resources we were already able to provide and what projects, on the other hand, required more careful planning and a volume of work that we were not yet able to offer.
Although we are still talking about work-in-progress, we concretely initiated two exciting collaborations, one more focused on game design and the other on developing technologies for other publishers’ products. In addition, the Light Speed Telegram bot has increased the game’s visibility and enabled a partnership that makes us very proud: In a few days, 20000 copies of our p&p will be around Italy as cut-outs in the reference magazine for tabletop gamers ioGioco!
What’s happening now
While the scale of the projects in the pipeline became apparent, in the last few months, we had to invest time in taking care of the more financial and less ludic aspects of Tablescope, which was officially born in November last year as a company 🍻 In particular, we are working on a couple of funding applications that would allow us to take on the challenges of the coming years with a broader creative scope.
Although the amount of work devoted to these tasks is far from negligible, it does not mean that game design has stopped.
We proposed the last major iteration of Kosmykes this June at the Button Festival in Graz (Austria). In the meantime, we have continued to elaborate on what Light Speed could become if it evolved from a print&play to a full-fledged product supported by computer vision. Besides, we began to explore more concretely a third project about which we have revealed very little, perhaps learning from past experiences.
What to expect
If it is unclear what will be the first Tablescope game to land on your tables, know that the buzz is far from off. Both Emanuele and I would have bet on Kosmykes (so much so that we fearlessly wrote that the Kickstarter would be in 2022). In spite of this, several factors, including external ones, have since played an unexpected role. Ultimately, Tablescope’s spaceship diverged temporarily from the course we set a year ago. Nevertheless, we got the chance to load our hold with more ideas and new opinions while forging promising alliances and learning that some aspects of an endeavor depend not only on one’s own system but involve entire galaxies.
We hope not to have lost the connection with your planet and that this post will serve to reestablish the tuning. We still have plenty of exciting things to show you.
Next stop: Spiel 2022 in Essen. Come by our booth (5C121) to say hi!
Articoli correlati
In the following article, I will discuss how the Light Speed companion bot supported by computer vision evolved over time from the technical and creative perspective. The emphasis will be on those assumptions we took for granted, finding ourselves proven wrong.
In the meantime, if you are interested in the challenges faced by a startup making digital hybrid board games, read 2 Pros and 2 Cons for a Startup Developing Hybrid Board Games. If, on the other hand, you want a more practical slant on the behind-the-scenes, check out 10 Lessons Learned by Exhibiting at 4 Trade Shows in 45 Days.
And, of course, check out the great pool of resources that is Jamey Stegmayer’s blog and, in particular, the article I mention in this post Game of Thrones, My Open-World Game, and External Pressures on the Creative Process.
