Throwback Thursday #4: Rapid Prototyping

There is a phrase I hear a lot in the context of game development called "rapid prototyping". Even now I'm not totally sure of its precise meaning, but it seems it could reasonably describe the period when these three iterations of the game were created. Versions 4, 5, and 6 are shown here, and they were all drawn up within a few weeks of each other.

Version 4 is the first time the names of actual craters on Callisto appear, which means the theme was starting to fill in. Other than that it isn't all that different from version 3. There are few tweaks to the size and arrangement of some of the craters, but they are still clustered into four groupings around the central Valhalla Zone. You can even see the pencil lines delineating these regions. I liked this clustered model. Each of the four areas presented a different puzzle for players to optimize. The map forced players to choose which areas to expand into, and which would remain unexplored. The problem with having these areas isolated from each other, however, was that in a given game there would either be a whole lot of player interaction or not much at all, depending on whether players headed in the same directions or not.

So in version 5, the craters are a bit more interconnected, in addition to being more numerous. This gave players more freedom to expand into each other's territories, but didn't force them to. It's interesting to look back at the oddly diagonal meridian line that appears in all three of these prototypes. For some reason it neither bothered me, nor did it occur to me to fix this potentially confusing rotation of the map.

The sixth version of the board, made less than two weeks after its predecessor, differs mainly in some slight monkeying around with crater arrangement. Either there were some minor issues that came up in playtests with version 5, or else I was just enamored with my new set of markers and circle templates. (Although you can see I'd become progressively lazier about coloring in the background!) Also new are the die pips included at the top of some of the craters. This was the beginning of the AI mechanic. As a way to create variation from game to game, the placement of the AI cubes were determined by dice rolls during setup. The number of AIs used in the game has increased significantly since then, making this sort of randomized placement too tedious. But it worked fairly well back then.

The most interesting detail in this board is perhaps the turn order "crater" in the lower left corner. Worker cubes could be placed into this crater instead of on the main map. The player that most recently placed here would go first in the following round. You could even place a second worker in this crater if someone else placed after your first one. The whole mechanic was too complex. Moreover turn order was not yet important enough in this version for it to be worth using a worker to manipulate it. It's a reminder of how long designing the turn order mechanic remained a struggle. It also occurs to me now that while this turn order mechanic didn't last long, it was the first instance of a crater that tracked the order in which workers arrived. This would ultimately become a core feature of all of the craters in the game.