Spirit Fire Update #18: In-Depth Development Dive!

Heyo!

It’s been a heck of a month ‘round these parts, so many things are happening.

But first—

 

None!

Well, that was easy. Okay then. Let’s get into it.

About a million and one things are happening with Spirit Fire right now. On a high level, things are happening on multiple fronts, namely: game design (adjusting the game’s mechanisms), game content development (making more cards, building out the realms, writing story, illustrations, and so forth), playtesting (playtesting), support media (how to play videos, and the like), and product engineering (all the little details about the actual physical components and getting them made).

There have been plenty of developments in all these areas, here are a bunch of them, presented in no particular order whatsoever! 

Graphic Design Tweaks

You may recall that our studio has a multi-decade history with design and visual language development. (As in, that’s what we did before we made games). Which means folks here are hardcore, grizzled design veterans who take this stuff VERY seriously. Which means that (to an almost ludicrous degree) everything graphic design-related is infinitely subject to change. And by “folks” we mean Marc, and by “infinitely” we mean “INFINITELY”. The guy is never not tweaking and refining things in his pursuit of . . . well, THE PURSUIT. If you’ve ever worked hard on something you’re passionate about, you know what we mean.

With graphic design development, sometimes the goal is to just make things look nicer, but most of the time there’s a functional result that we’re after with each pass. How can the game’s entire design language feel more cohesive to better communicate its purpose, personality, and tone? How can the design guide the experience in an invisible way? How can things be made more clear and intuitive? How can we enforce a rule or mechanical structure through the visual design so that players don’t have to do the work of learning or remembering? There’s more, but you get the idea. Graphic design is functional at least as much as it is pretty.

Anyway, here are a few examples of components that have been adjusted lately:

With each pass, the playtest data indicates a more intuitive understanding of how things work and a stronger emotional connection to the events of the game. You can imagine how addicting that is, and how strong the instinct to keep taking things just a little better can be.

Just to belabor the point and celebrate Marc a little bit further (and make him uncomfortable), let’s look at a few card designs with all the die cuts, words, and supportive elements removed

Ridiculous.

Capacity

Alright, let’s swing into some gameplay weeds. Throughout testing, we’ve been experimenting with an adjustment to the number of card slots in your capacity. Specifically, reducing it from 10 slots to 8. That has gone very well and we’re currently building the game around that count.

A refresher: your capacity has two columns that you play cards into from your hand. Often these cards combo and multiply off the spirit fire aspects (think: suits) of the cards already in the columns (among other things). Some cards have auras, which are effects that are active so long as that card is exposed (not covered). There’s more to it, but those are the basics.  

The move to adjust from 10 to 8 has a lot going on. Some of it is just a matter of finding the right cognitive load. Two fewer cards in play means two fewer cards worth of icons to track for combos and multipliers. That's nice. Meanwhile, if your capacity is full, you cannot play any more cards and must rest, so having fewer slots makes the CLEAR action (removing cards from the capacity) more important. It also has some minor effects on how often people typically rest, the difficulty of skill checks (challenges in the book), and a variety of other things. Plus you get to see more of the card art, which, no complaints from us on that.

Also, we’re at that point in the design where every time we trim something it just . . . feels good. :-) Nothing is more satisfying in game design than trimming something and having the game get better, not worse. Sooo satisfying. 

As you’re seeing, this seemingly little change has an impact on a multitude of things. So as you can imagine, playtesting is the name of the current season . . .

Local Community Playtesting

Playtesting is ongoing and ramping up. Right now testing is being held with our local groups (and with our team, of course). We were hoping to have broader print & play and Tabletop Simulator testing going at this point, but that requires some elements that are still coming together; a reliably complete (and up-to-date) version of the rulebook, and the story and art for the realms being in a more polished state. Until those things are ready, playtesting is a bit more manageable with members of our team present to fill in the blanks and teach the game. Ultimately, we’ll need testing without us there influencing things, and we’re looking forward to getting to that soon. The reason we haven’t been able to prioritize some of those items is that a lot of our attention has been on physical engineering and component proofing because getting all of that sorted is more crucial to the overall timeline because our manufacturing partners need a decent lead time with all that stuff. The rules and realm designs have been changing a lot during this stage of testing too, which adds to the turnaround cycle quite a bit. 

All that being said, testing is going very well. The card play puzzle is fun and begs for satisfying amounts of creativity, but isn’t too complex. The challenges you face have benefitted the most from testing (more on this in a moment). Honestly, everything always benefits from more and more testing. It's sort of hard to itemize or capture the impact of testing, so just . . . hear that the testing is being productive in ways that make us excited, and positive in ways that make us feel comforted and secure that we’re on to a good thing with this one. The feedback is absolutely what we're hoping for.

Dashboard Refinements, Mat Layout, Flicker Pad Resizing

Speaking of physical engineering, if you’re legitimately into the development of these things, come along on this little journey into how we spend our days! This part is going to get into granular nonsense; read at your own risk, only if you’re into that kind of thing!

Okay. So. We have swapped around where some of the cards are on the playmats. Namely, we wanted all the cards that contribute to your attunement (see the previous update) to be grouped together. This made the most sense on the right side of the mat, because that’s where your spark deck is (spark also contributes to attunement, so having those cards next to it matters).

Anyway, since we wanted to keep the spark box and identity box on opposite upper corners of the mats (for balance of the space and where they’re the most out of the way), and because there are reasons to have the identity box on the left, we moved conduits to the right to join spark and your capacity in an easily referenceable area. 

Well, this meant moving your pursuits and rest cards to the left. We want your pursuits to align with the flicker pad so you can easily reference what you’re trying to unlock, and we want your rest cards to align with the resolve wheel, since those two things are related in function as well. This meant inverting the dashboard to move your spirit fire pool to the right and the resolve and flicker pads to the left.

If none of this makes sense right now, don't worry about it. The TL;DR is that we rearranged the placement of things on the mat in a way that makes things better.

Meanwhile, you’ll notice that the flicker pads are now narrower. This does several things for you. First off, they just look more unique this way, which we’re into. More importantly, though, we realized that if we adjust their size we can fit them into the color kit boxes differently (better) meaning we can get away with throwing a fourth pad in each (surprise!).

Annnnd meanwhile-er, you’ll see in the image above the backside of the dashboard where we have (of course) thrown some cool art, but also a diagram of your playmat and which cards go where. This serves as a reference during setup and means we don't have to print those words on the playmats. Neoprene is notoriously un-crisp when it comes to small text, so this was a great opportunity to keep the mats looking clean and gorgeous while not necessitating trips to the rulebook to remind yourself where stuff is supposed to go.

Wins all around on all of this.

Playmat Samples

Speaking of which, we’ve received a bunch of samples of the game’s various playmats. Check ‘em—

These are just phone photos, so the color and clarity isn’t exactly perfect, but you can see that they look gorgeous.

Character Box Engineering & Design

One of the unsung details about this type of project is solving the physical engineering riddle of the thing. How much stuff can we store in the box? What size is the box? How is stuff oriented in the box? How thick is every component? How is weight distributed through the box to prevent shipping damage? Does that mess with what makes intuitive sense for helping make setup smooth? What types of materials are used? What do things weigh? The amount of consideration that goes into these types of things is, well, a lot.

How a lot is “a lot”? Well, we have a ramble on that! If you’re not going to get any joy out of a breathless, kind of overwhelming behind-the-scenes ramble about the fun of measuring millimeters, please skip the next wall-of-text paragraph:

Okay. So, we build elaborate engineering files in which everything is measured to the tiniest micro-measurement so that as game design changes are proposed (or we run into hurdles with the factory) we can compare potential changes to the physical reality. For example: if we add two cards to a pack, does that hurt anything? What if we wanted to add two cards to _all_ the packs because we had a great idea and these two cards are going to make a huge difference to the experience? Well…how thick are two cards? Okay, what about the thickness of potential sleeves? Now, how does that butterfly affect through the entire box? Does the increase in cards influence the size of the packs? Does that influence the size of the little box that holds the packs, meaning we have to increase the size of all the little interior boxes of that size so they are consistent, meaning we now need to increase the overall size of the entire game box? What does that mean for the number of games that can fit on a pallet? Does that extrapolate to a massive increase in shipping and now we didn’t charge enough and we’ll go out of business and all our families will be disappointed and judge us? Oh, and all the art for all those things needs to be redone to fit the new pack and box dimensions, which will take forever and be expensive, that might be worth it, but the box resize and all the considerations there are too much to withstand, so, nevermind, this is unworkable. But, oh! wait!—if we resize this otherthing, we gain back a few mm and then won’t need to increase the box size. So, we’re good. We just need to redo all the graphics for the internal packs and boxes but we’re good on shipping. Okay great. Cool. But wait, did those extra cards push the card sheets coming off the presses onto whole new sheets? And those sheets are now only 10% used? Okay . . . how much did that cost? OOF. Okay. But it’s worth it because these cards make a big difference. But, okay, what about this 90% of unused sheets we’re now running with? We should probably make MORE cards to fill those sheets so it’s not just a waste. Hm. What will that cost in labor and illustration? Also…where are those cards going to go? Can we add another three cards to all the packs? Hold on, phone call. Hmmm the team wants to make the playmat one card wider. That’s such-and-such mm wide, which adds such-and-such thickness to the mat when its rolled, which adds such-and-such mm extra height in the box . . . which means— And so on and so forth . . . and yeah. It's not everyone's idea of fun, but we enjoy this. Well, except on the days we don't, but you know what we mean. 🙃

OKAY. RAMBLE OVER.

Meanwhile, on the subject of boxes, work continues on more than just the engineering, but on refining the aesthetic design. Here are some updated renders on the evolution there:

You’ll see that we are experimenting with a different box for each of the different spirit fire aspects, and we’re pretty pleased with how they’re coming out.

Map Trays & Realm Art

Also in the realm of engineering, we’ve been fussing around with the map trays, searching for the perfect weight and texture of material, tweaking sizes of things to make sure we’ve accommodated sleeves but not so much so that everything slides around stupidly if you don’t sleeve. Here’s a current rendering:

Not pictured in this image: little finger-hole cutouts that will make it easy to pop cards out without having to turn the tray over and dump it.

ALSO pictured here, is some updated art on the first realm! You can see the color of the map is built out more and some of the graphic design elements are entering a more refined state. Everything on here is strictly proof-of-concept to avoid spoilers, but we’re experimenting with the most clear (but non-intrusive) ways to display certain types of information. For example, some of these nodes have little icons on them that represent things present at that location like, say, a “viewpoint.” Many quests can be performed at any location that meets that quest’s conditions, regardless of realm, so if you have a quest that can be performed at a viewpoint (like, a quest where you talk to the clouds or something) then you can do that quest on any node in any realm that has the viewpoint icon!

Skill Tests

The biggest development from playtesting has been further refining the challenges you and your deck are pitted against. We’re going to get into this a little bit here, but with the caveat that trying to explain all the nuances of this in an update is sort of like . . . trying to explain how the entire game works, so please approach this with that in mind. :-) We’re going to talk about this with the assumption that you’ve watched some of the gameplay videos and have a vague idea of how things work.

Here’s a current mock-up of one of the challenge spreads, to give some context:

Note: Everything about this is a work in progress. In particular, all text is alpha wording for testing purposes only and has not been refined at all by our writing team.

First off, we’ve migrated away from calling these “challenges” and are leaning more toward calling them “skill tests.” This changes nothing about how they operate, but has helped people understand them more intuitively. Engaging with a skill test looks a bit like this:

• You have a quest you’re attempting that tests your adaptability. You turn to the adaptability test in the book. The adaptability test is a mini-game challenge that you undertake by playing cards into your capacity and attempting to manipulate the mini-game to the desired outcome or result. Typically there are rings and blocks and various whatevers used in the mini-game for you to manipulate with cardplay.
• The quest you’re undertaking adjusts some variables of the skill test (tailoring the test’s feel to fit the narrative) and the quest also typically dictates your goal in the test.
• For each of the skill tests you have “approaches” you can choose between for that test (see the two cards on the right in the above image. The number of these you have depends on your character's development). These are cards that tweak the mini-game and represent the way you’re bringing yourself to that test of your skill. Some approach cards make things easier—because you’re good at that skill. Some approach cards make things a little harder but they grant you extra bonuses and rewards—because you’re leaning into that experience to take away as much from it as you can. They all make it different—because each quest's goal is unique and your approach will want to be tailored to fit what you're facing. You select one approach each time you attempt a test, and different approaches will be unlocked as you complete quests and develop your character/story.
• You then play your cards to attempt to complete the quest's objective in that skill test.

Here’s another example of approach cards:

In the logic skill test, this “Argumentation” approach will grant you a pretty substantial flicker (xp) bonus if you use this approach (see the top left corner of the front of the card). Other approaches might be easier, but wouldn’t net you as much flicker. You'll also want to factor in whether the way that approach bends the test is well-suited to the goal set by the quest card. Also, you'll need to look at the state of your deck, your spirit fire pool, and so forth, and decide just how much you're capable of in that moment. There are lots of things to consider when deciding how you want to approach each skill test.

The more we’ve developed these tests, the more playtesting has indicated that we should reduce the number of them and make them deeper and more involved. Rather than having dozens and dozens of skill test puzzles that are more-or-less variations of the same mini-game, we are transitioning into substantially fewer that are each compellingly unique. This change has been met with resounding success and favor from testers. Ultimately, this all probably feels very similar to what we talked about during the campaign, as this is the feel and experience we’ve been after the whole time, this all is just us successfully honing in on how to deliver the vision. We’re very excited at how much this is coming together and feeling right.

Tutorial & Book Development

We’re hard at work on what is easiest referred to as the rulebooks:

We want to get these right, and we’re spending a lot of time on them. They’re still works in progress and we’re revising and refining them repeatedly as we go. When they are in a place we’re feeling good enough about to call “beta” we’ll be passing them to you for your absorption and feedback to make sure we’re speaking to a wide spread of learning styles and that there aren’t errors and the like.

The goal here is to provide the “sit down, open the book, start playing” type experience, where you learn the game while playing it through a tutorial, rather than asking you to absorb a whole big rulebook before attempting to play.

We’re also leaning into the success of the exhaustive glossary/reference portion of the Unsettled rules—which is frequently cited as being one of people’s favorite experiences with a set of rules—by trying to capture all that worked about that and take it further into an even better experience here.

Other Things

There are probably other things we could talk about. But we need to stop talking about the thing and get back to actually making the thing. So, we’re gonna wrap this up :-)

We’ve received some curious pokes about how the timeline is looking.

That’s kind of a tricky question for the way we approached this project (running the Kickstarter early in the process when the game design was still in development). Our approach is to keep working the game until it's everything you deserve it to be; the fullest possible realization of the premise and promise that you’ve aligned with and said, “I want to be part of that!” During this design and development phase, there really can’t be “issues” or anything like that. That’s not really a thing. There’s just testing and improvement. “Issues” are more of a manufacturing-stage concept, and we’re not there yet! So, be at peace, things are going really well!

For the sake of a timeline discussion though, if we looked at this thing solely through the lens of the estimated timeline thrown out during the Kickstarter, nothing has "happened", per se, to indicate that we will for sure need to adjust past our original December estimate. That being said, if we were to share our “gut feeling”, we would not slate this as a December release if we were to re-estimate today. The design stage is still yielding lots of fruit and we’re going to stay in that stage until it no longer feels worth your time. The more we get to know this design, the more we discover new nuances and opportunities we want to explore in the card play, realm design, narrative, and quest chains. And we’re going to explore those things and make this game as good as it can be. Timely delivery is an important part of our responsibility, but respecting your support of the game by delivering the best final result we can is always our main priority. So, no “issues” to speak of, but the little knower inside us says that we’re probably going to choose to go past December to deliver the most fully realized version of the Spirit Fire vision as possible. As always, if any troubles ever do pop up, we’ll share them immediately, and we’ll continue this type of transparency on what our gut is telling us as we go. Rest assured that we take our responsibility on these projects very seriously, that you’re always getting our most focused, most professional selves, that we work very hard, and that we’re very committed to honoring your enthusiasm and trust. 

We've got your back. Thanks for having ours too. 

The Wormhole

If you follow us on social media or through our newsletter, you’ll be hearing a lot in the next few weeks about our upcoming Wormhole event. We figure we should probably clarify what the heck that is in case you’re new to Orange Nebula.

Wormholes are live stream events we do a few times a year where we cover news and announcements on all things Orange Nebula, drop new releases, and then end with a big ol’ community AMA conversation.

This event will be different from our past ones (which we see as sort of having been trial runs for this upcoming event) because in the past all our product releases have been pre-orders. Not this time. This time, we’ll have the new releases already made and at fulfillment centers, ready to go out during the event. This has been our goal for a while and we’re really excited to have reached the point where that’s what’s happening. Our biggest curiosity now is to see how good we were at estimating quantities to produce. We’ll see how we did, first try on that, haha.

Anyway, as for Spirit Fire, we will have a news segment covering the current state of the game, which will mostly look like us talking about things mentioned in this update. That being said, our heart is to make sure that following these Kickstarter updates is all you need to do to be current on the game, so we’re not planning on any big Spirit Fire reveals or anything during the event (we’ll let Unsettled and Vindication have that particular brand of fun). That being said, the nature of us talking about these things in a live setting means we can ramble more and there will probably be some different angles taken when we talk about some of the stuff from this update. If that interests you, you should come join us!

And, as always, the AMA portion of the event is your chance to chat with us about absolutely anything.

Here are the event details:

Be on our mailing list to make sure you get a reminder and invite to the event when it happens.

Bye Bye and All the Feels

Thank you, as always, for being part of this project and for fueling it with your passion and enthusiasm. We love connecting with you in a more day-to-day way on Discord and are looking forward to moving into wider public playtesting so that those conversations can get even more involved!

Until then, we’re always available at groundcontrol@orangenebula.com or on Discord if you want to connect with us about anything, everything, or whateverthing.

Much love. Keep being awesome,

O-Neb