Tracon Hitpoint is a mid-sized gaming convention, named after its sister event: the huge fan/anime convention Tracon. To us the convention served as a perfect small-scale test-bed for the project and our ideas for the game.
We had two concrete goals for the event. Firstly we wanted to talk about the tech we have borrowed from the story games and the Powered by the Apocalypse movement. And secondly, we wanted to have a first public demo for the game.
Shortly put, both goals were achieved – and the feedback was overtly positive.
Short comments from Ville and Petri below:
Petri
For me, Tracon Hitpoint was shaded in the colour of flu – I nearly had lost my voice on the previous week so I was really hoping for the best for our presentation. Which went quite fine, considering I was very much under the influence of cough drops while talking.
What was the most encouraging thing for me was all the positive response people had to the character concepts and the premise of the game. We’re on to something here with this. “I will totally back that when it hits crowdfunding” was a statement I heard more than once during the time at the Con.
Also, it was really a wonderful eye-opener to do a lot of research on the history of structured GM moves and tracks for the presentation – lot of what we learned from the history of what we’re doing gets a practical application in the game, and we’ve already done some fine-tuning to the rules based on that.
What a time to be alive (barely, thanks to the still ongoing flu)
Ville
Public demonstrations and talks are the best motivator for me to do the research and groundwork for stuff. When it comes to the presentation on Structured GM’ing I really need to agree with Petri. The work we put into the presentation helped me a lot with both the rules and how they should be adapted for the game. Now all I want is to redo the schedule and start writing the tech! (Actually, I want to write a freeform game using the Fate Moves concept from our presentation, but that’s another story altogether…)
In addition to the relatively popular talk we held, I GM’d a demonstration game “The Tree” developed just for this event from old game testing material. The scenario is not the most strongest one I’ve written, but it does demonstrate all the tech we are using and let us to test the character concepts or Archetypes we had re-engineered from the concept game.
The premise of The Quick is really powerful. It’s easy to communicate and drives the game drama beautifully. The 5 example concepts or Archetypes used all worked better than I thought, and the whole game group had great fun during the 2 hour demo. Only things I’d fix were the lack of openly available GM moves or story track sheet and a quick sheet for player moves. To me this all tells of the promise of the game. Even with my mediocre scenario, the game managed to shine and to produce a character driven dramatic Nordic Noir narrative.
What’s next?
We just had the first images from our illustrator, and created a rough scetch for the crowdfunding with Sope. We’ll try touch both of these topics on the nex developement diary in two weeks.
Vastaa