Big Stompy Robot Update – First Playtest
As I mentioned in my introduction to the project, I’ve kicked around the basic mechanics for Big Stompy Robot for a couple of months, but other than sitting at a table moving dice around on some cards, I had not actually played them. Last week I was able to get in a first game. My friend Carl Brown, of Second Thunder / Open Combat infamy, popped over to push a plastic robot around some old Epic terrain and roll funny-coloured dice.
Playtesting is just a fancy name for playing a game, although it can have different implications at differing stages of a project. Later on, specific parts of the rules, particular weapons, army builds and such might be targeted, but in the opening stages of a project it’s more important just to get table time with the rules to see what gets thrown up as sticking points or areas for exploitation.
At this point, in what would be the video games equivalent of a pre-alpha build, I wanted to know two things:
1. Does the game work?
2. Is it fun?
Carl brought essential playtesting equipment – chocolate eclairs
Does the Game Work?
As I’ll be explaining in a bit more detail in my next Big Stompy Robot newsletter, the core mechanic of the game involves moving dice around on a set of cards that represent the mech and its systems, and then rolling the dice to resolve actions. In my head I understood that this worked, but did it feel right on the tabletop?
Thankfully the answer was yes. Although a couple of turns in I made a big change to the initiative / activation system, after that it all felt intuitive and streamlined. The benefit of playing with the actual dice showed up the ways that mechanic can be used – putting dice on top of each other to indicate special damage and damage control, for instance.
Similarly, it only took a couple of shots fired to highlight issues with the initial cover system, and from the resulting discussion we came up with something not only slicker to play but far more characterful.
The same was true of a couple of other areas, but all-in-all, the engine runs. Draft two is already far more streamlined and coherent than draft one.
Is it Fun?
A game may work mechanically and yet lack that vital thing that actually makes it good to play. It needs to have decision-making (and tactics) and offer up opportunities from the theme to create stories. Not only that, is the gameplay rewarding and fun in the mechanics it uses?
This is something I will be talking about in my seminar at the same ROBIN event where I will be debuting Big Stompy Robot – how mechanics can create narrative and what that means for the gameplay experience. So rather than go into too much detail here, let’s keep it simple.
The game was fun.
After streamlining the system, the decision-making side of things was a nice challenge and the movement and fighting across the battlefield engaging. Nothing jumped out as unnecessarily complex and, most importantly, at the end of the session we both had long lists of cool stuff we would want to add, and the game has the mechanics in place to accommodate them without breaking the main engine.
It was also clear that my total made-up numbers for ranges and power for some of the weapons were totally out of whack! But that didn’t matter. I re-ran the battle the next day, pretty much as we had played it, with some tweaked profiles and it all seemed rather more balanced.
I had to raid Sammy’s Lego box for damage markers
Going Forward
All good so far. In terms of being ready for the participation game, I’m feeling confident with the rules. I’m building the mechs myself so I can focus on just a handful of weapons to begin, and similarly I can keep the terrain straightforward so I don’t need to come up with the rules for lava flows and low grav fields just yet…
Our next game should hopefully be more a case of making those numbers work and delving into the tactical side of the game. I really don’t want to end up with something where two mechs stand still and just blast each other until one loses; manoeuvre needs to be an intrinsic part but that will only come from more games. I want the experience to feel more like a first person shooter than an RTS in some ways – scoot and shoot, use cover and go for the kill shot.
I’ll let you now how we get on.
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