What would change with 50 cards, rather than 30?
What changes would depend very much on what strength and weaknesses a faction has. What I'm worried about isn't necessarily the
card count itself. I'm worried about what too limited amount of cards might result in - a faction with "holes" in it function wise, making it hard or impossible to play it in a meaningful or interesting way.
I write "might" since I don't know yet. We have 7 card types. Creating a faction is not just a matter of deciding which cardtype it primarily uses, but finding some type of balance. If we exclude Heroes and Quests we still have 5 card types. We know we will need to have a huge amount of creatures since the game is creature centric. If you would however do a 30-cards per faction you end up with less than 6 cards per card type, in each faction.
Maybe that is too little to cover the way a faction is supposed to play. Then again, now that I'm looking at it again, it seems possible to pull it off with around 30 - 40. My point would be more valid if we went more narrow, say down to 15 or 20 or so.(And another part of concept testing is also to test if the games deck building works. That isn't doable with a too small pool. This is beside the point though, as deck building can be tested separately later). If people want to it is possible to create 300 cards in just 1 week, where at least half will be usable. It's just a matter of doing, not it being an un-climbable mountain.
A suggestion would for example be to ask every developer to suggest at least one card per week or something, even that would have brought us further than we are currently.
If you think, that adding 40 cards is not much - please think again, as for what we have (40 pieces?), we've been working on for a year or more, and we haven't even finished (nor we're close).
The only time we worked for real on cards was when old CS was around, and then it was actually productive and where most of the better ideas came to mind. Reason why cards aren't worked on is that nobody works on them. And reason for that is, again, time/interest coupled with no smooth or apparent tool to do it with. (As it stands now new cards should be created in forum, discussed if needed be, and then entered into wiki. Not sexy, but works, and no real hinder...)
That said, I changed my mind somewhere in the above about 50 being necessary per faction, as it doesn't seem to be true for testing.
To the point: doing limited internal tests for the fourth time (or would it be fifth or sixth?) is IMHO, against the project philosophy. As soon as things are playable - not high quality play, but "just" playable - I think it's the time to release an alpha.
Here's the issue at hand: In my mind there has been exactly
zero internal playtests. What we have done, like 3-4 times the most, is to spend 1 - 3 hours on playing around with nowhere near 30 cards per faction, with never before tried rules, no understanding of them, and a single faction. For me that isn't really serious playtesting, since we lacked both the cards to playtest and the rules, not to mention the very few times it was done to draw any meaningful conclusion about anything.
Internal playtesting for me would be, for example, something like you suggest yourself - 2 factions, a pool of around 30 - 40 cards per faction, and then actually everyone that playtests knowing what rules they playtest, and in addition to actually playtest it for real by say playing
at least 20 real games or so, trying out different builds, different factions. Is that much to ask? I think not. It's hardly any testing at all, but should suffice (heck, even 10 games would) to discover major issues in the rules and also to start polishing balancing and the finer points.
I don't agree that my understanding of what playtesting is or should be like is against the projects philosophy. If you for a second imagine that this would be a code-only project and we were creating software instead of a game, you would not code code code, compile it, and then release the EXE-file o the Windows-people without you as a programmer ever having tried it out
before compiling it. Not even for testing purposes. You would of course try out your code to see the results. We are in a staget where we have not done that. Hence I don't want there to be some kind of official public release - why would we release a game (for playtesting) that has only been tried out in theory, but never for real?
We probably differ in the assessment of what consequences a very-untested release, of any kind, might have on the project. If we release something that not even we ourselves have tried out and just give it to the world and say "hey, playtest this for us, because we chose not to and didn't care finding out how broken it is before involving you" we risk giving the public the wrong idea about the goals when it comes to quality of the game. It will be bad PR and whoever was interested will see a broken game, and that's that - he/she will most likely never touch it again after that. That's the way players work. They won't become developers over night, nor will they be patient or understanding. What would happen is that we would not cause nice ripples. Instead they'd be bad.
That is why I usually write about "internal" playtesting.
Secondly, to reconnect to project philosophy, our "internal" work is so public it is probably misleading of me to call it "internal" in the first case: What has been closed or hard for the public to gain access to this far? Whenever we did any playtesting with lackey the cards were around then, publicly and nicely packaged on site or even downloadable within Lackey by
anyone that happened to have the program and know about us. Project philosophy is being open. We are. For anyone that takes the time and has the interest. There are no secrets. Heck, even our meetings are downloadable and aren't taking place in "secret" spaces. We have also never stopped anyone from showing up at them, in here, or anywhere in the dev process, let alone playtesting.
- I think it's the time to release an alpha. Bundle, wrap it nicely, place a fancy cherry on top and just push it everywhere, explaining all the doubts.
Yes, on that we agree: It is indeed what should be our closest goal. What I want to do more is to lower those doubts and the amount of "explaining" before we do the
concept playtest release to the public, and with release it I mean explicitly telling the public about it and asking it to test it and get involved. As it is now we're not there since a) At least Banner lack some cards, maybe as much as 15 and b) we lack at least 1 gaian and 1 banner hero c) we lack a couple of Quests and d) we have not playtested. When all on the list happens we should indeed release a concept playtesting to the public. I think we have plenty to gain from doing that, but nothing to gain if done prematurely, as there is
nothing to release right now.
If people aboard are busy, demotivated, lazy, shy, or simply too few, I won't blame anyone, but we might get lucky seeking for some fresh blood ASAP. If you think the community focused around BfW and FLOSS games knows about us, why not just keep reminding, and reaching for some new audiences, huh? We still could make more in places like sourceforge or freegamedev forums, but most important are seasoned, experienced CCG gamers and creators. And I think we all know at least some places to advertise searching for those, apart from inviting our friends to join the ride.
What needs to be done
before getting to a point where new blood will flow into the veins can not be done by the new blood. It has to be done by us. You, me, whoever. When the above concept testing release has taken place,
then we will, in the best of worlds, get new blood. Not before. Not by showing people fragments of untested cards, untested rules, two unfinished factions of five imagiend factions, and so on.
I am not against the idea of us reaching out, nor do I deny we need the manpower. We really do need it. I'm just questioning the timing and why you deem the project mature enough for it.
Again, I think it's the ivory tower v. bazaar - where you want the second model, still closing yourself, the ruleset and game progress in the first. The ivory tower - name it benevolent dictatorship, snowdrop-o-centrism, or in any other way - is incorporated in our "ways"
I'm not sure how or where I am closing anything, when all is public, all is open, and anyone can work on anything if they choose to do so. The issue here is not my control (of
what exactly? Not to mention I have invited everyone at least on 3 diff occasions to be project leaders instead.). The issue is we haven't done enough for any serious playtesting of any kind to take place. I happily accept all the goals you lay out and agree with everything, except for the timing of when the public should be told to get involved. I also think your suggestion of the 30-card-playtesting is great. Now it is just about
doing it. Hopefully forum discussions and setting goals like that will be motivating for us all instead of just a power leakage.
The ivory tower - name it benevolent dictatorship, snowdrop-o-centrism, or in any other way - is incorporated in our "ways" so deeply, that we haven't even developed any collaborative workflows, not to mention the bus factor. To illustrate the problem: our latest launchpad revision is from 2011-07, It's done after I refused to process our illustrations the way they were processed, the last thing I've done was uploading Scribus file with finished Gaian template.
The reason for why there are no collaborative workflows is that nobody has mapped them out(?), not that I have forbidden it or hindered anyone from doing so. On the contrary, if people find it easier to work using some kind of other structures, I would kindly ask you all to create them and present them so we can adopt them yesterday. This has been "discussed" in a newsletter sent out a year ago or so where we tried to identify the bottle-necks in the project. Problem then was there was no real discussion that lead anywhere.
I'm not sure I understand your example with Launchpad: It hasn't been actively maintained as you yourself asked for another solution and I in response opened up the ftp-server instead, saying we'll try it out and see what comes out of it. Reason for looking for other storage solutions was that everything took hours to do in bazaar, even a simple 1kb update, that somehow became a 1 GB one instead. Personally I see no reason for why we should have both the ftp and bzr around when one would suffice. I'd also be happy to settle with something else.
By the way - there are 19 gaian cards in the Scribus files, 17 of those not even updated with the latest layout. And there is no single RB or other card in the making, that's because when I wanted to make those, you, snowdrop, were unsure about template colors and the last thing was accepting the new template - I'm not even sure if the size is correct or not - 65x92mm is what sits in Scribus. You were producing all the cards in Inkscape for all the time, rather than using what is expected to be used.
65x92 mm is the correct (new) size and the only one we'll use in officially maintained releases unless we get very good reasons to go smaller in the future. As it is now with that size it fits all standard sleeves perfectly well, and also leaves some space in them.
The Banner Template doesn't exist, not because I'm unsure of it, but because nobody has created it. You did a kick-ass job producing an totally different alternative to what we had template wise. I am against using templates that differ that much stylistically in one and the same game (+ have diff layout and means of representing info) and we would either only use yours or the one we already had.
What I did instead by fluke chance is to almost finish creating the Shadowguild template (minus the kidney logo which probably needs to be replaced). That doesn't of course help us with the RB template not being around yet. In total though, there have only been 3 attempts made: 1 disasterous by myself, 1 by somebody else, and 1 total make-over by you, where yours was the only one that looked decent.
RB Template is still on the to-do list. And what we're talking about is really "just" a re-colouring, as I did with Shadowguild, of the "original" Gaian templates. Again, all files have always been around for anyone to take a bite off it. And yes, I have directly hindered progress by not accepting the few attempts that were made to re-colour it, because they didn't live up to what I believe is adequate quality, and yours wasn't a re-colour but an alternative.
I could try to put in some time on it next week, but in such a case maybe somebody else could help Knitter with the sandscape icons?
You were producing all the cards in Inkscape for all the time, rather than using what is expected to be used.
Yes, because Scribus wouldn't install properly on my system at the time, and because it in the end doesn't matter what I use to produce mock-ups. You are right though that we should create all the playtesting cards in Scribus instead of Ink, and that will be done. As your recall I also asked you about the latest Scribus file some week ago.
I haven't had a chance to start doing that yet though due to everything else. For example this week I have put in 8,7 h
in the forum. It can also not be done in any meaningful way before I/we extract the data from the old CS database (maybe eased by the info Knitter gave in another thread).
If it's only me opting for Scribus here - just ditch it and be screwed later, I won't care, I like Inkscape way more anyways.
We've had that discussion many times already: We're not ditching Scribus since it was your choice for printing, and you know printing. As simple as that. Only thing that would change that is if it is impossible or near-impossible to do what we want in it when laying out text/images, and I wouldn't know about that since I have been cheating by usin inkscape