Mutant Pizza

Hello again, Otherworldly Beings—

In the last entry, we talked about some of the changes to Escape the Entity. There was so much info to give y’all that couldn’t fit in just one entry! Well, here we are. In this entry, we’ll talk about changes made to the Entity.

Let’s get to it!

Before we talk about the state of the Entity, let’s talk about the state of the board

Like the title of this section, the board was too damn big! Here’s the board now…

It’s also the featured image, mainly because finding an “attractive” marketing-approved featured image is too time-consuming and, let’s be real—you’re not reading these Design Journal entries for pretty, pretty pictures. You’re reading them for the disgusting, unaligned, and barebones assets that proudly exist in the low res prototyping space.

Anyway, the board is smaller.

There are also “wormholes” at the edges of the board that allow the Ship to teleport. These are being added as a static feature of the board right now, but the plan is to eventually give the Ship player more agency (remember how we talked about that in the last post?) to create their own wormholes. And possibly, make that something the Entity can make and use as well.

The board being smaller kicks up the tension for both players and so far, this size has been just right.

Okay, so about the Entity…

My, how this has been a delicate balance. The Entity tries to control the board, blocking the Ship and obstructing them from making their necessary deliveries to these Star Systems. The Entity has one goal: Destroy the Ship. Their obstructions are also hazardous.

Touching on the theme of the last design journal entry, it’s all about finding a nice, safe, and slightly boring balance.

The original Entity had all the bells and whistles: dark matter, dark energy, asteroid fields, tendrils—even a three tendriled maw! The problem with leaping out of the gate with all of that in a prototype is that it’s difficult to balance. It’s difficult to understand. Not just for players, but for me as the designer. Was dark matter too powerful or too weak? The playtester didn’t know what the difference between them was, other than one was used as their resource and the other as a hazard.

It was also a pain in the ass to design and cut out all of these little custom-shaped doodads all the time. It was too time-consuming to rapidly iterate on prototypes.

Suffice to say, a lot of streamlining had to go down for the Entity.

All you need is, like, four things

Gone are the tech trees and RPG-like elements. Gone are the twelve types of anomalies with their own “upgrade” paths to turn stars into black holes and such. Also, gone is the tempo player mechanic, where the Entity had two states (Alpha & Omega and Delta & Sigma) that the player had to transition between to perform certain actions.

Also, effort was done to make the size of the spaces on the board fit correctly with the size of some standard assets such as cubes, small dice, and plastic disks, meaning those custom-shaped doodads no longer need be iterated upon. This greatly reduces the time it takes to design a new build of the game. (Yay!)

Now, some or all of that stuff might be added right back to the game in a future iteration. The goal here is to start with a few stapples and add as wanted or needed.

Which weighs more, a pound of feathers or a pound of steel?

Escape the Entity has had a consistent balance problem. That’s a top priority to solve. Throughout the various iterations of the game, either the Entity or the Ship has been far too powerful. Their goal far too easy to accomplish. Reducing and removing elements, even ones that are super wicked mega ultra awesome, makes for a better game. It’s hard at this point to say whether the Entity will have more “fiddlybits” or fewer, or the same amount.

Right now, the flow of the Entity is in a good space. Add dark matter to the board and then remove a certain amount to spawn scarier anomaies, each with their own placement restrictions and unique powers. Dark matter itself has a little kick in its step, so to speak, doing a small amount of damage if the Entity can thrust the Ship into it.

All right, enough with the essay. It’s time to get this latest build on the table and give the tires a kick.

Until next time, Otherworldly Beings…