The search for a worthy successor to Outwitters continued, and the Ow: Skirmish prototype evolved into Ow: Skirmish 2, where we experimented with a fresh take on the minions’ role.
In Skirmish 2 you still selected 2 heroes, but now their moves were set in stone rather than being customizable. This gave players less reading to do up-front and made it easier for us to make more characters.
The minions were totally overhauled, and they were no longer tied to specific heroes. You could pick any 3 minions you wanted to bring with you: 2 runners and a soldier; 3 soldiers; a soldier, a heavy, and a runner. They were designed to work interchangeably.
On top of that, minions were immortal. When your minion was defeated, your opponent would choose a checker space to respawn them on, and their max HP was reduced by one. So as the game went on, you had to rely more and more on your heroes to get things done.
The goal for victory was the same: Defeat both enemy heroes or control all four flag spaces to win. So much havoc was going on with this prototype that the Victory Points from Skirmish 1 weren’t really necessary to keep the game lengths in check.
There was really nothing wrong with this one. It was fun, it was frantic, and it met pretty much all of our goals for a worthy successor to Outwitters. It was actually a contender to be developed instead of Space Food Truck, but for scheduling and financial reasons we thought SFT was a better project for that time. This is back when we thought SFT was a 6 month project, lol.
So after a few months away making Space Food Truck, we came back with a fresh perspective and sort of blew the whole thing up. We remixed the pieces we liked from every Outwitters prototype we’d done, then we added some fresh ideas on top.
The resulting prototype is Game 6. It’s kind of like this one, but not really. The core idea was: what if instead of weakening as the match went on, your characters got stronger? For my money, it’s the best of the many PvP strategy prototypes we’ve done. It’ll also be our first 3d game!
Want to know more about our upcoming Outwitters follow-up? Stick around! We’ll be posting lots of artwork and details here weekly. If you haven’t already, be sure to sign up for our mailing list to get email reminders when we hit big milestones, like the launch of our Kickstarter, Early Access/beta, and the official release.