Playtest 3.0 insights and future direction
We released the third iteration of the playtest a couple of weeks ago, which also saw the longest playtime so far by our players. We feel like we finally found a gameplay that is original enough without being too difficult to balance or to create content for. For the 4th playtest we'll likely do the last "major" gameplay changes, but more on that later, let's unpack playtest 3.0 first.
Playtest 3.0
Playtest 3.0 introduced 4 elements, green runes, traveling, merchants, and new dice types. This post on Steam already does the job of describing these new features, this post will be used to explain the why rather than the what.
Green runes
Whereas yellow and blue runes apply to support and ability dice respectively, these ones belong to a broad category of miscellaneous effects that couldn't be covered by cards or dice, i.e. immediate effects that can be "used" at almost any moment, and are rather flexible when it comes to what can be done or not.
Traveling
Since Path of the Djinn is a game about traversing the desert, we needed some form of movement that allowed for different and/or random scenarios. We've always liked the way Banners of Ruins does it, so the traveling system is pretty much inspired by it, with some incremental changes like scenario modifiers and the possibility of "rerolling" scenarios through the use of runes.
Initially, we envisioned a travel cards deck that contained the scenarios you could find, a deck that the player had control over, e.g. the player could remove cards from it, add new ones, etc. While we still like the idea, we think it would be more difficult (hence time consuming) to balance, so we opted for leaving that out for the time being. As aforementioned, green runes and other gameplay elements still give a bit of control over scenarios, but in a way that is likely easier to balance.
Merchants
I guess it surprises exactly no one that Path of the Djinn has merchants where you can spend hard-earned gold on items, cards, etc. We aren't actually done on this front; as of now, merchants just sell water, runes, and cards, but we'd like them to, possibly, sell dice or abilities. Aside from the turtle merchant, Anton has also drawn some beautiful Ammonite and Crab merchants that we might use to respectively sell dice and abilities.
New Dice Types
Not exploiting the chance of having different dice types would be a bit of a waste, both from the eye candy POV and gameplay. Playtest 3.0 has 8 different support dice types, some of them we're rather happy about, while some others were done in a "throw and see what sticks" approach; they might not survive the next iteration!
Planning Ahead
In the Playtest 3.0 Steam post we mentioned that we were toying with the idea of making it so that you play a single character at a time, and we actually pulled the trigger on that. The trade-off was just too lopsided in this case, aside from making the narrative worse, everything else is pretty much better for it.
A single character allows defining run-altering powers specific to said character, moreover, with all ability dice belonging to the same character, players can push deeper into a particular "build", something that couldn't really be done when each character had its own dice.
We're trying really hard to get Playtest 4.0 out for the 19th, along with a new Steam page that reflects the current gameplay, stay tuned!
J&K