Design Diary #2 - "A Pitch To Amaze"
about 1 year ago
– Mon, Mar 27, 2023 at 03:25:42 PM
We've crossed 5700 backers and over $300k raised! We're extremely grateful for the response the game has gotten. As I've mentioned several times, the primary purpose of the campaign was to see what folks thought of the new mode and gauge interest for future sets. Well, I think it's safe to say that Adventures has a bright future.
If you missed it Jeremy from Man Vs. Meeple posted a detailed video about the game with lots of closeups and a good overview of the rules. Please check it out. And we've got a livestream by the Brothers Murph coming on Tuesday, April 4th, at 9:00 PM ET / 6:00 PT over on their twitch channel.
Now, onto the design diary. If you missed the first entry, you can catch it over on Board Game Geek. In this installment, Darren and Jason talk a little bit more about their first pitch to us.
How did you get an opportunity to pitch Unmatched Adventures: Tales to Amaze to Restoration Games?
Darren: Restoration is active on their Discord channel, and we had been members for several months at that time. (Justin: Check out our discord HERE.) I contacted Justin directly, told him what we were working on, and that we would like to share it. Beyond the moonshot possibility of Restoration wanting to make this themselves, we wanted to make sure we were transparent and not stepping on any toes.
I still believe that maybe Justin got me confused for someone else. But either way, we got a meeting on the books!
What did you bring to the first meeting?
Darren: Mostly anxiety. You never really feel ready to pitch a product. But looking back we had a lot of documentation to back up our design choices. I’m a project manager in corporate america for my day job. Presenting a plan or a finished solution to a group of stakeholders is something I’ve been doing for over a decade now. Working within a group of people with more expertise in a subject than myself is a familiar experience.
Jason: I have some experience working in game design, but I still get a ton of butterflies before pitches. Looking back, though, we had put in the leg work. On the surface we had a fully functional Tabletop Simulator version of the game. Behind the scenes, we had a 9-page presentation document, 50+ playtests, a 49-page rulebook, a detailed list of co-op design best practices, more than a dozen playable hero, villains and minions to compliment the folklore theme, and a slew of additional solutions we could dip into if the conversation went that direction.
Jason: We had tried to make this thing look as much like a final product as we could. We were calling the system “Undivided” at the time.
Darren: Our original fallback plan was to release the set (and system) as fan content, so we had put as much polish into the prototype as we could, including art. Jason makes great art, and the set and theme was fun to play with. So our initial presentation looked pretty good on the table. Again, I don’t know what impact that had on the Restoration team, but we were far beyond the proverbial “scribbled on pieces of paper” stage of design.
What was that first meeting like?
Darren: “How did we all get here?” I still wonder what was going through the mind of Restoration in those initial minutes of the call. (Justin: "Oh, no, that's a lot of stuff!")
Jason: That first meeting was mostly about the system at the 1000-foot view. We played it, but we mostly talked about our overall design goals and what we had bolted onto their game. We discussed the flow and the AI. We also discussed some general observations about Unmatched in a co-op setting.
For example, we tried to emphasize how important it is to move the action around the map. You should be able to leave the game with stories like, “remember those turns that happened over here – those were wild. But then, you got over here just in time – and then our plan changed!” One of our biggest watchouts was to avoid anything that resulted in “meet in the middle and brawl” gameplay.
What happened after that first meeting?
Jason: They seemed to like it!
Darren: We were on hold for a bit. Which even being on hold felt like a huge win. We had shown enough to give the developers of the game something to consider. About two months later Rob reached out and asked if we would spend some time refining the system. Essentially we needed to trim off a level or two of complexity. Which we did. We tore into the game pretty hard and cut quite a few sub-systems. Come April of that year we had the revisions done and showed those off in a second gameplay-focused meeting.
After that meeting and some back and forth Restoration offered a contract for the system!
Let’s deep dive into the system. How did the cooperative system change over time? Where did things land?
Tune in to the next Designer Diaries to find out! Until then, stay amazing!
