Supervisor's Quarters

This was... a game. I'm not sure what to think of it, really. I don't expect it to be a Scummy winner - that was never the intent. But I don't think I quite met the quality I was looking for, and to me I'm a bit ashamed, even if the reasons are logical and, at least in my eyes, fair.

In this, I'll generally be talking about portions of the game that I feel like deserve a special mention for one reason or another.

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So its no surprise that the pacing here sucked. This was... in large part our fault, and then made worse by the pre-merge being a large number of activity boots.

The sheer number of returnees, while part of the design, slowed down the game more than I expected. There were multiple occasions where we had two [or more] 48hr challenge rounds back to back, and one challenge phase lasted 4 days or more. I only say 'or more' for this one because I was going through a pretty rough breakup during challenge 5, so I kind of lost track of the time. That won't happen again, straight up.

I'm going to attempt to explain why this happened, but I want to state that here and now that I apologize for the pacing problems because when I designed the game I kind of threw pacing out the window.

Now, what caused me to throw pacing out the window? The purpose of this game was very much so to take a very long time, because when this game hit the queue we had no games that looked like they'd be ready for MONTHS. Keep in mind the game we had closest to finishing was Pantheon, and that had hit at least one major design snag and had stopped since at least the beginning of KYE. So I got talking to Pine, and we came up with an idea that eventually became this. We got Meme on board not long later, and had scheduled ourselves for a 3 week design period. Was that smart? No. Did I figure it was doable? Yes. I know my own limits, and I figured that even with Meme busy with school, I'd get Pine's assistance to make this happen.

Then Pine caught COVID and spent the next few weeks trying to keep his household more or less afloat, while I desperately struggled to put this thing together in three weeks largely by myself. It was more or less a nightmare. Meme got the board up, and I spent the next few weeks coming home from work and throwing myself at this, slowly losing it over the Christmas season at my work place. Between art, theming, challenge design, and all the other knickknacks that come with putting a game together, something had to fall.

And that was our pacing. I sincerely apologize for that, but I don't think that given the problems I faced putting the game together that I had the time to look at the challenges and go do the normal quality checks that one normally could do. I deeply apologize to those that got burned out by the incredulous length combined with the shitty pacing because I really, really didn't want that. Next time, I take things a bit slower than that and give everything the attention they deserve.

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I want to also quickly touch on the sheer number of items in this game and the mechanics because some of the hit the mark, and others didn't.

In terms of what really hit the mark, the Merge Splitter was FANTASTIC (The item itself was my idea, but thank you Pine for the sci-fi board idea, and to Meme for putting this together with me over literally a night). I also believe the returnee mechanics themselves were very solid, and the Big Brother Hole into Outcast tribe felt fantastic! The sudden death Flatzone had a different feeling and generally was pretty cool! 

I think the Grogu/Ranger vote off could have been better handled, they seriously didn't need two rounds of Immunity. They could have had the challenge to talk to each other and entered that round's TCs with Immunity instead of being absent for an entire round and immune the next. Post-RI was handled very poorly here, and that could have been directly improved.

I also believe that the Returnee items needed more direct limits - the trading of coins probably should have been disallowed or there should have been direct limits on how many of one item a player can hold, as the first problem. Plagueis seriously did have 4 Safeties Without Power by abusing the two of these together. I also would have liked to put round limiters on the items, to force them to be used faster and not just hoarded for 3/4 of the game, but that's more a personal problem with the item design in this game than a logistical one, I think.

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Oh boy. Some of these challenges were real bad, some of them were fine, others were misplaced, yet others still functionally didn't work! The easily was a large stumbling block.

Let's take off the big wound first - Challenge 5 was completely miserable and I SINCERELY APOLOGIZE. I was going through a shitty breakup at the time and was kind of out of it for this time, but this totally didn't work as we expected in any way shape or form. The original didn't work because the parameters were just not there, and the revamp didn't work because we didn't expect people (plural!) to build robots from code to do the work for them. On top of that, this challenge shouldn't have been redone and a replacement should have been found. This was just bad. Once again, apologies.

Challenge 11 I think missed a single parameter - not allowing multi-stage puzzles.  In the end, the Pipes challenge was only solved by a single person who did pipes challenges for fun daily and knew the way around it because of this.  The Tetravex challenge was almost in the right ballpark, but the last minute addition of another puzzle threw it just over the dooable range for people. The main reason this happened, at least from my point of view, is because both tribes had only their best puzzlers testing these. Overall, this challenge was really close to working but missed the mark just slightly and it turned bad.

If you decided to read only this part and not the pacing part, I'd like to apologize again for the soreness of the constant 48 hour challenge rounds. That was a definite problem, and it won't happen again, because next time I'm not going to put the game together solo in weeks and I probably won't touch challenge design myself because I'm notoriously bad at it!

The original challenge 14 was scrapped mid-game because it was bad and the original challenge 42 was scrapped to not murder our pacing anymore. Ultimately, the game is better for both those things, even if our replacement 42 didn't hit the clarity mark it probably needed to. Even if I think it was just a bit off, and not as far off as some people think? Adding the sentence "LOOK CLOSELY, THINGS ARE NOT WHAT THEY SEEM" probably gets people to think about the puzzle properly and not whiz through it incorrectly. 

I think Challenge 18 ended up being my personal favourite because I was surprised at how well it worked. We made a couple of last minute clarity additions to it after we learned from challenge 42 that we had missed the mark on clarity for that one. Bonus points for a quick turnaround, I guess!

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Good question. I don't know. I'm probably going to take a bit of a break after modding this, and come back with something far more polished in the future. I've got two games in the works, but neither will probably be ready any time soon.

Personally? I'd like to host a music themed game, and really take the time to make it shine like it should to show what I'm really, truly capable of. This game was a test of scale and scope. I want the next one to be a test of quality.