(06-19-2012, 09:44 AM)Shad Wrote: ...tell us some good war stories!- favorite PG game to develop?
- design disasters?
- best unpublished idea you've had?
- whatever comes to mind!
Well, if you insist! Mind you, I just got back from singing sea shanties and pub songs at Merlin's Rest Pub, so my current drunken condition may make this a bit free form
1) Road to Berlin was a lot of fun to develop because it was the game for which I wrote the 3rd Edition rules. At last, I was able to cut through the crap that had been inflicted on the system by previous designers and formulate a coherent set of rules that had everything in the right place where you could find it, and that explained things that had never been previously explained (like safe hexes etc.). Beyond that, I'd say Cassino was the most fun because it introduced terrain types I'd never had to work with before, the diversity of the units involved was beyond anything we'd done before, and because the campaign game system took PG to a whole new level where planning and logistics became prime concerns.
2) Yes, we had some. I don't want to get specific here because those involved may frequent this place, but I will say that I almost had to eat my words on a couple of occasions. You see, by a certain point in my tenure at AP I got rather cocky; I had developed so many scenarios that I believed I could fix anything. I was wrong. On a couple of occasions I was presented with a product and said no problem, I'll develop it, but when I got into it I realized the designer was utterly mad. This was of one or more of the following: (a) the scenarios read like historical re-enactments rather than game scenarios in that they were pointless because one side had no chance of winning, (b) the special map rules had almost everything standing in for something else, and © the designer had provided a litany of special rules at the beginning of the product and/or in the individual scenarios that basically rewrote the whole PG system; this required me to deconstruct each scenario to make sure that it was actually designed for PG and not something else, and that it was therefore playable in PG. In most cases I was able to rescue the games or scenarios involved from oblivion, but some scenarios had to go because they were beyond saving. Here are a couple of examples from my development notes:
DELETED SCENARIO: This one is ludicrous; seven unsupported German tank platoons plus some armored cars attacking twenty-four infantry platoons who are dug-in along a railway line bristling with AT guns. The Germans have no incentive to even enter the board, so I nixed it.
NEARLY DELETED SCENARIO: Here he completely lost it, using different maps to represent the same terrain he included in the previous scenario. Oddly enough, the map he uses in this one to represent a town is the same map I replaced his maps with in an earlier scenario involving that same town. But he has the map pointing east-west, which makes no sense since the river runs north-south there. So I trashed his dog-legged eight-map setup and replaced it with a nice two-mapper, which is all this little scenario needs anyway. Despite the small number of units, I had to keep it to 30 turns because the only way the unsupported tanks can wear-down the Germans is by firing at them again and again for a long time until they break. And I had to skew the victory conditions in the tankers' favor too.
3) I had a lot of good ideas back when I was just a playtester, but of course, only a few of them made it into the final product. That changed when I became a developer; there wasn't much AP could do if I decided to put something into a game since they didn't know what it'd do to the system if they deleted it. Plus, Mike was always desperate for Daily Content, so if I sent him something bizzarre he'd just use it for DC and leave it at that. The only things I designed that never got published were some GWAS alternative-history scenarios and a sci-fi game proposal that didn't pass the marketing test.
That's all that comes to mind. More will no doubt after I finish sobering up. Cheers!
-- Doug
