Misadventures in GameDev

Hey all! Last month has been pretty quiet. I’ve mostly been researching and getting quotes from manufacturers and distributers for Baker Street Heists’ upcoming kickstarter. That and finalizing trademarks. Both of these things are taking a surprising amount of time. :( Art has gone through several feedback cycles and is nearing completion! I hope to show it off soon, but I’m waiting for the final polish. I’m also hoping to get this website looking a bit prettier.

Hey all! On Friday I submitted Baker Street Heists to Boston Festival of Indie Games! Hopefully it will make a good showing. The rules are done (again baring any disasterous bugs), and all that’s left is polishing up the presentation and packaging. For that I need to do blind playtests, which means all new playtesters every time. I got a ton of feedback on the art that Gosia made, and the results were overwealmingly positive!

Hey all! This month’s update will be a bit of a downer. :( First off, the site’s been down for an incredible 4 days. Root cause: fatcow randomly decided to change the ip address of the hosting server. This would have been fine, except they didn’t update DNS to match. I don’t know why they did this. _They_ don’t know why they did this. They didn’t even have any alerting on this.

Hey all! Redbeard here. A lot has been happening behind the scenes here at Duadikos. Setting up a company is hard work. I’ve had lots of chats with laywers, accountants, and fellow game designers. I’ll spare you the boring paperwork stuff and get to the juicy bits. Baker Street Heists was a big hit at this week’s Game Maker’s Guild meetup, but those of you who have played it knew it would be.

Hey all, Redbeard here. Things have been busy lately, mostly dealing with taxes, legal paperwork, and other boring stuff. Between all that, I squeezed in quite a bit of playtesting for Baker Street Heists. Good/bad news time: Bad news: Baker Street Heists 5 player game is broken. Good news: I found out that Baker Street Heists 5 player game is broken before tryig to publish. ;) Here’s the scoop: In a 5 player game with Brutus, there is _almost_ no way for the Cops to win.

Hey all, Redbeard here. Just posted a new chapter of Leaving Lucerna. It’s as bit short, so it will be lengthened later, probably in the middle bits. Enjoy!

Hey all, Short update today. Basically just fixed all the bugs from the last post, and put it up on the Baker Street Heists page. At this point is _seems_ like the rules are all good. There probably will be a couple more small tweaks, but I’m not sure what those might be at this point. Commence Testing! And art. Def need art. Don’t worry. It’s coming. :)

Hey all! Playtesting for Baker Street Heists went beautifully on Wednesday. Not only did the victims playtesters really love Brutus’s new ability, it added much more dynamic play. Having to manage the one time resource made the game more exciting. They also managed to find some bugs/omissions in the rules (detailed below). In my head, Adler would win in the case of ties, even if Sherlock is revealed. Well that’s not how I wrote it before the test: Adler would lose if Sherlock is discovered, regardless of Moriarty’s status.

Hey all! Here’s another update from Redbeard, hard at work to make Baker Street Heists be as awesome as possible. Much has changed in the last 48 hours. Here are some highlights: Brutus gained a special ability: Take the Fall Dirty Cop became Corrupt Magistrate, and traded with the Bodyguard for the 7 player slot. Reemphasized the setting with tweaks to wording, also renamed the teams to Cops and Robbers Color coded everything!

Hey all. Last night I updated the win contitions and team selection dynamic for Baker Street Heists. I found out (from playtesting) that in a werewolf type game, if you have a leader for each group, there is absolutely no way to have only one team guess. There is just way too much information around, and it’s pretty easy to guess Sherlock or Moriarty. So! Back to the original design with simultaneous accusations.