17: Where The Heck Did November Go?

So I'd like to apologize for the lack of updates to the blog, specifically because I said that there were going to be a lot of updates... I feel really bad about that.  Sorry.

I have had to pick up a second job because money has been tight and that has eaten into project time.  Throw a few illnesses (first John, then me) into the mix and the holidays and time had been passing by at an astonishingly fast rate.  I won't go ahead and promise lots of updates soon or in the future because it's already apparent I can't accurately predict my ability to do that.  However I will say that progress is being made, more slowly than I would like, but it is still being made.  Hopefully by the end of December I will have some shiny new prototype images to show.

Our goal of a December 3rd launch date for the Kickstarter has of course come and gone and we're looking at Mid-January at the moment.  This is an optimistic prediction but far from an impossible one.  In the meantime I've got work to do on Space Frontier and hopefully some more stuff to blog about in the near future.

-Aaron

16: November - State of the Prototype

Those of you who have been reading this blog for a long time or perhaps those who have been looking through the archives will notice that the date of this post is November 3rd.  Originally, that was going to be the launch date for our Kickstarter Campaign but for many reasons it is not to be so.  The largest of which was, Space Frontier was just not quite ready.  Other reasons include the vacation of Undeadviking which would have brought him into conflict with out launch date and unable to have a review ready.  I also discovered a cheaper but more labor/time intense printing method that saves John and I a lot of money, but isn't nearly as convenient.  We've chosen to go with that because we are so desperately low on funds.

I wasn't nearly as prolific with updates in October as I was in September, but that was not because of lack of update material, rather the opposite.  There has been SO much to do this last month that I've had little time to spend on the blog.  I'm going to try to rectify that for November, but in the mean time, the prototype has continued to advance as the last pieces of art from Chris Pritchard pour into my inbox.  While there is no new printed map or cards yet, they are in the process of being finalized, and there are also fantastic pieces from the mundane ore and asteroid to header images that are just plain beautiful.  See the images below the break.

15: Making The Game More Fun

So there hasn't been an update for 3 weeks and that is not at all because there has been nothing to talk about.  Rather the opposite.  The last several playtests of Space Frontier have revealed that our theme isn't as strong as it could be, and the game needs more player interaction.  The game is just not as fun as it could be right now and John and I have been very hard at work to spice things up a bit.  This has unfortunately delayed our launch schedule, but hopefully not by more than a week or 2.

14: October - State Of The Prototype

So it's been about a month since I started this little blog and this is a halfway point.  The plan is to have our Kickstarter up and running on November 3rd, about a month away.  I haven't shown a tremendous amount of what the game is or actually looks like on this blog yet, always hoping to have a better version soon.  In the last month the prototype has seen a lot of play-testing, tweaking, and upgrades.  This post will be the first of what I hope to be monthly such updates that details the changes and improvements that Space Frontier has seen since the previous month.

Without further introduction, have all the pictures.

13: Awesome

*Zhap pew pew*

*Shoooooom*

*explode*

12: A Day Late And A Dollar Short

So if you read the last post you'll notice that our goal was to have a post over at BoardGameGeek by Friday September 27.  And then we didn't.  While we were a day behind on that, John and I did get a chance to meet with Chris Prichard today and talk about several things, including but not limited to card templates for command missions as well as box cover specifics.  Afterwards John and I worked for about 5 hours tightening up the rulebook and preparing our BoardGameGeek post.  We may have been a day past schedule, but we got it done and up.

Here it is! Space Frontier over at BGG!

11: Kickstarter Timetable: Fighting Against Doubt

So I've talked a lot in previous posts about Space Frontier's Kickstarter Campaign and how it's going to happen "soon."  I don't think I've stressed though, just how soon.  I touched on it briefly in post post #7, but I wanted to emphasize just how tight the upcoming schedule is for John and I.  A few days ago, we sat down and hammered out a timetable of what we had to get done and by when, and I think it shocked both of us just how fast time has been moving and how little of it we have left.  Here's the resulting calendar.

9/23/2013	Meet with Chris Pritchard and finalize art requests
9/27/2013	Start post on BoardGameGeek.com Keep it contiuously updated and involved
	Playtest Playtest Playtest and tweak game/rules
10/1/2013	Contact 3D Artist about asteroids and 3D ships
10/6/2013	Update Blog and Facebook Page to look betterer
10/13/2013	Get asteroids from 3D artist. Inquire about 3D ships
10/14/2013	Have prototype game finished. Begin uploading templates to Gamecrafter
10/19/2013	Order Prototypes from GameCrafter
10/27/2013	Kickstarter page approved for Launch
10/27/2013	Kickstarter Video finished and ready to go
10/28/2013	Contact Richard Bliss Game Whisperer about Campaign
11/3/2013	Launch Kickstarter Campaign
11/4/2013	Launch Banner adds on various game sites
11/10/2013	Have 3D Ship models from 3D artist. At least 2. Hopefully 4+.

10: Opportunities On The Horizen

So in the last few days several very interesting things have happened and I thought "why not blog about it?" Alright; here we go!

09: Taking The New Combat System For A Spin

So on last Tuesday night, John, myself, and a mutual friend of ours got a chance to sit down and play Space Frontier together.  This would be the first time that the new combat system was tested with all the custom dice that I'd painstakingly created.  Overall the game was fun and our friend, who had never played it before, enjoyed it.  The play-through tested a lot of rules besides the combat system that hadn't been employed together in a single game, and the amount of useful input was staggering.  Here's some thoughts on the game and how it plays so far.

08: Inventing a Space Theme

So... Space.  It's been done before.  Lots of times.  Probably the biggest names in terms of Sci-Fi space are Star Wars and Star Trek, but there are Thousands of different fictional realities that have a space setting in modern media.  Just like most any other setting, all the most basic story plots have just been done before, so making yourself stand out among the multitudes as far as board games goes can be difficult.  Just about every mechanic has been done before.  Just about every theme has been done before too.  So how is Space Frontier unique?  Well like many before us, John and I have taken elements from things we liked and tried to discard what we didn't.  Plus, some little spins of our own.

07: Managing A Schedule With No Time

So last blog post I put forth my worries about finances, but perhaps even more pressing is the scheduling of time.  Because there's not enough of it.  But of course there wasn't enough money either, so they share that similarity.  Let me cover just a few ways my time is being split in all directions right now.

06: Managing a Budget With No Money

John and I knew from the beginning that the biggest hurdle to developing our own board game was going to be money.  John is a poor college student and I have been struggling to find work in this economy until only just recently.  Scrounging up what little money I could, I put forth about $250 and John generously matched that.  This represented my entertainment budget for about 3 months and I had to make many sacrifices, but with the greater goal of a completed Space Frontier, it was one I was willing to make.  Now, approximately 6 months later, that money has long since run out and we've once again scrounged together as much as we can in order to launch our Kickstarter.  And as it turns out, launching a Kickstarter is expensive.

05: Always Improving, But Seemingly Never Finished

One thing that I didn't quite grasp before I tried designing an entire game from scratch was just how much things change during development.  I had the notion in my head that a game starts as a good idea.  The designers would then work with that idea and continue to tweak it until it was perfect and the game was fun. After all, it was so easy for me to see the "right" answers to the shortcomings of other games and how to fix them, the answer should be obvious for my own creations as well. Well that's just not how it works, at all.

04: Designing a Combat System: Fun Dice-Rolling

So when Space Frontier first started out, John and I decided that we wanted ship variety, but not so much that it would be overwhelming.  I came up with 3 basic ship archetypes, the fighter, the frigate, and the cruiser (which was known as the "capital ship" for a while until we changed it for thematic reasons).  So we had our 3 ships and we wanted each to have their own style.  The fighter was supposed to be cheap, fast, and maneuverable.  The frigate was supposed to be slow and heavily armored, with tracking turrets that easily took care of fighters.  The cruiser was supposed to be a behemoth of firepower and doom, but unable to effectively bring the full power of its weapons to bear against the agile fighters.  I say things like "fast" and "slow" but how do you even represent that in a turn based game?  Well there are a lot of ways, and this blog post is about where Space Frontier's ships to ship combat started and where it has ended up as of this post.

03: Art is Hard When You Can't Draw

Neither John nor I have any noteworthy 2D artistic skill, which of course poses a problem when you're trying to make something as visually based as a board game.  I mentioned in my first post about our artist Chris Pritchard, but I didn't find him until months into the project.  At the start, John and I were on our own.  Even if we had artistic talent, we still needed to decide what the game would look like.  Not just how would it look but how would it feel?  What would be its style?  John informed me that the board would have to be hexagonal shaped and when I asked why he just told me that just about every space game in existence uses hexagons.  Turns out he was right.

02: How Does Space Frontier Play?

So I've given you a brief overview of how Space Frontier came to be, but not really much more about what it's actually like other than "space game."  Well I've been working on a summary of what the game is, what its all about, and how it plays, and this is what I've come up with.

01: Humble Beginnings in Space Exploration

About 6 months ago I was in a phone conversation with a friend of mine named John.  John loves board games and had recently gotten me to try out several types of games I'd never played before and I really enjoyed them.  It was no surprise then when our phone call topic turned towards board games and John suggested that we design and make our own.  I was a bit taken aback by this.  "Can you even do that?" I asked him, to which he responded that he really had no idea.  So we did some research.