Sunday, July 3, 2016

CORPS 4.1.5 and CORPS into the future

As with any game in development, especially when trying new concepts, certain things are going to fail and other things will work.  CORPS has certainly been no exception.  We've had a number of things work for us and a number of things that for one reason or another had to be scratched from the game.  One thing I can say for sure is that the progress in the game has certainly been going in the right direction.  I mean that both in terms of completeness of the game as well as the goals we set out for the game in the first place.  CORPS was meant to be above all else a fun table-top role playing game.  As we developed the game we pretty much agreed that the real heart of the role playing game would be the combat and thus we have the acronym Combat Oriented Role Playing System.

The more time and effort we've put into the game the more I amazed at how we've been able to tweak things to really increase the level of fun and excitement we get while testing it out.  I also feel like things within the game are much more cemented.  I can't say how good it feels to be moving forwards with new development rather than going back and changing things that have already been done because they didn't work as well as you hoped the first time around.  Sure there are still minor tweaks here and there, especially in light of testing but the bulk of the game as it is now is how it'll be when we eventually move towards releasing the game as a finished product.   That time is still a decent ways away but I am more of the mind that we'll know we'll be getting close as we wrap up the last of development and start working on a kick starter campaign to raise funds for hiring an artist who can turn our ideas in to bold images to describe things as we see it.  Of course that is as I said, a ways off.

One thing I did think of as I was going through our older and infrequent blog posts is that despite talking about CORPS so much, there is a lot of stuff that had been previously introduced in prior years that is totally irrelevant or just out right wrong now.  I had thought about putting together another list of blog entries that would reintroduce CORP to the readership of this blog but the time spent writing to the blog is time that I could be spending towards the actual development.  Since this is all a side project it pains me to manage time so closely but life comes before hobbies unfortunately. Still I think it would be a good idea to reintroduce the game with the changes that we'll most likely go live with. The game really has come a long way since we started and even more so through all the various major releases we've gone through.  I plan to in the near future to begin taking this game to comic bookshops to try to run people through an actual demo of the game just so I can start getting candid feedback on how the game plays out.  The thing is, and this is why I primarily am bringing it up here on this blog, up to this point nearly all of my testing of this game has been done online.  It stands to reason if someone actually reads this post and has some interest in the game, even if it's just mild curiosity, it's someone like that that I should be reaching out to in order to have them test out the game.  So I'll just keep this short and say that if you are interested in helping us test the game just reach out and let use know on my website: http://www.nortain.net/corps-contact-us.html.  If you're curious as to what we are using to test here is a list of the software we use.

Mumble (VoIP)
MapTools (Tabletop sim software - requires java)