Rescue Reptiles Postmortem: The Road to IndieCade

Indiecade

IndieCade is a California located 3-day festival to exploring independent artists and highlight innovation & artistry within game development and interactive media.

Required submissions for a board game include a single copy of the game postmarked by the submission deadline as well as a gameplay trailer.

Rescue Reptiles

The Pitch

The weather has gone crazy after the 2012 apocalypse. Highly trained Rescue Reptiles serve as the last line of defense for rescuing children from turbulent weather. Each player controls a reptile in the frozen wasteland of Miami. Rescue 3 children first and your reptile is named Employee of the Month, winning a paid vacation to the warmest place on earth – Russia.
Reptiles harness wacky equipment and boosts to reach the children first while delaying others with traps and obstacles.

Needed Prototype Components

• 1 Game Board 18 inches x 18 inches
• 16 Zone Tiles (~3 inches x ~3 inches)
• 35 child game pieces
• 6 player avatars
• 100 Action Cards
• 16 Zone Cards
• Rules inserts
• Game Box

Goal

The late deadline for submission was June 1st. I decided to submit Rescue Reptiles around May 17th or so, just after Finals week had ended.

This gave me just around 2 weeks to prototype, proof, and submit Rescue Reptiles to IndieCade 2015 for review.

Why Submit?

Rescue Reptiles has two major design successes: the modular Zone Tiles & the movable obstacle mechanics.

Zone Tiles

The game board has 16 empty spaces where the 16 zone tiles are randomly placed & rotated. The players then moving across the game board and zone tiles.

The core design strengths of the zone tiles:

• Improved replayability with random or crafted board layouts.
• Provide a fair distribution of random locations for player starting locations and child appearances.

Action Cards

The Action Cards in Rescue Reptiles are divided into five distinct types:

• Boost – Temporary self benefiting movement effects.
• Trap – Temporary offensive effects played on opponents.
• Obstacle – Single use repositioning of movable environment pieces.
• Equipment – Lasting positive effects. Vulnerable to traps.
• Strategy – Unique cards with powerful game changing effects.

The Obstacle cards have been universally well received. They are powerful, encourage thoughtful play but are balanced by the other types of cards.

Challenges

Trailer

A required part of an IndieCade submission is a trailer highlighting gameplay and general tutorial information. I didn’t learn this until dangerously close to the deadline.

This was the largest single challenge. I went through multiple iterations of planning, recording, and editing. Each time I was rebuffed and began over again. I finally settled on a time lapse featuring setup and basic play.

This is the trailer the game settled on:

This trailer still has problems in its final iteration.

• It lacks explanation of the fine rules for what is an allowable obstacle placement
• It doesn’t show how to handle Strategy, Traps and Equipment cards.
• It speeds over the text giving too little time for the viewer to read without pausing and playing repeatedly.
• It fails to explain the intended narrative and comedy of the game.

Construction

The overall construction of the components went well. It was time consuming to say the least. Much of this was caused by attempting to prototype with Foam Core, which was much harder to work with than framing mat. Using a mat cutter increased the rate at which I could cut out the tiles, board pieces, individual cards and rules inserts.

Another complication to this was learning that physical submissions for IndieCade are only required to submit one copy of the game. Initially, I was prototyping three different copies simultaneously. Despite the time cost of prototyping additional copies I would do it again, as the end version I submitted was of higher quality.

In addition to the game components, I provided rules inserts, which served to convey the game’s instructions. There were three large inserts which covered rules in greater depth. Two of these went onto opposite sides of one insert.

The rules inserts were an excellent touch. They had a strong tactile feel despite the lack of visual interest caused by no dedicated art.

The only disaster of the construction was the game board I submitted. It was a quad fold board but the paper taped to it didn’t fold well. In hindsight I wish I had submitted my earlier prototype card stock game board even though it lacked color.

Content Proofing

A major component of my submission was an included write-up of the instructions and specific rules. I managed to include the bulk of the instructional content without requiring the reading of a large booklet. I do regret not spending additional time creating diagrams and example layouts to help give players a more guided experience in the game.

Moving forward I need to provide more blind playtesting to evaluate how well players understand the rules I am currently providing. It was not feasible to include this in the given time frame.

Mistakes missed (and submitted)

Despite my attention to detail, few mistakes still made it through the cracks

• The ‘s’ in the URL on every single insert
  • This was a massive mistake. Thankfully, my hosting auto-corrects the missing s to the correct website.
• Benefitting was spelled wrong on the Action Cards Insert
• Flavor text was missing punctuation
• Falling Anvil Trap was Failling Anvil Trap
• Colossal Punt’s effect text was ambiguous if it moved an obstacle to within 5 squares of your reptiles, or if it moved an obstacle within 5 squares to another location.

Costs

Costs of Submission

Submitting to IndieCade was decently expensive. Here is cost breakdown.

• $110 Late submission fee (didn’t decide to submit till the last month)
• ~$30 package mailing with return postage
• $10.99 for 15 page of sticker paper
• ~$8 for 10 more pages of sticker paper
• ~$25 for 20×30 inches of foam core
• $9 for 100 UltraPro green deck protectors
• ~$6 for letter stickers to label the box
• ~$12 for flat plastic storage box

Loose Total: $211 to submit Rescue Reptiles

Uncounted Costs

A number of the materials and supplies I had access to weren’t accounted for.

• High quality mat cutter
• Decent color printer with ink & paper
• Mounted razor blade knife knife (similar to an Exacto)
• Green duct tape for putting the board together (Estimated ~$5)
• Packing tape for sealing the board (Estimated ~$5)
• Large framing mat for game pieces in place of foam core (Estimated ~$9)
• 16 White DragonShield sleeves (Normally ~$11 for 105, estimated $1.68)
• ~30-50 hours of my personal time preparing the rules, components and proofing
• ~10 hours worth of shooting, editing and trying to get a working trailer.

Lessons Learned

BULLET-POINT List

• Trailers take time. Learning about needing a trailer last minute exacerbated this issue. A good trailer excites players and sells the game.
• Physical prototyping turns out best when doing multiple iterations.
• The lack of a quality game board was my weakest point.
  • Using TheGameCrafter for my upcoming game boards is a step in the right direction.
• Including diagrams in the instructions could’ve helped if I had the time.
• Art is critical.
  • Moving forward Rescue Reptiles needs art to deliver on the concepts and enhance the player experience.

Final Word

Submitting to IndieCade was a fantastic experience despite the various costs. Ultimately, it was more challenging and expensive due to my submission being such a late decision (after finals week had concluded.)

I would recommend it to others but plan further ahead of time.

 

I hope to update this postmortem when/if I receive feedback or acceptance into IndieCade 2015!

Thank you for reading!