Just a little praise I think OML needs

[garcia1000]

Here's a real thing that happened. For those of you who don't know, I'm a full-time game designer. A week or so ago I met up with some of my game designer friends, most of them are working on puzzle games like Bejeweled clones, but some of them are FPS technical designers and one of them works for an evil Skinner box type game. lol we make fun of him for that all the time.

Anyway I told these guys about Outwitters, and I praised the elegance of the design. Like everyone knows that hex-based games are usually poison because of the association with grognard wargames, but I said this one was great! And I described the system to them and they agreed it was interesting. Some of them thought that the wit resource was overloaded since it's used for everything, and makes the system too interconnected and hard to 'turn the dials' but I told them that in practice it works really well, the small maps make things interesting and so that movement doesn't become too much of a wit hog, etc.

Then they asked me, this is basically the verbatim conversation as it happened, as best as I can recall:

"Sounds good, did they balance second player through map design or through wit levels?"

"Well... at the moment nothing. I'm not sure if they are going to do anything about that."

"Wait, you mean the second player gets nothing?"

"Yeah."

"What? Are you serious? The first player's starting situation strictly dominates?"

"Yeah..."

"It doesn't take rocket science to see there's an easily fixable problem here man. Are you sure their game design is great?"

Then they sort of looked at me in disbelief and laughed a bit. After that they quickly lost interest and we discussed other boring stuff lol. Anyway I was sort of embarrassed. Next time I see them I will plan out what to say to convince them, I'm sure they would like the elegance of this game system


Edit: I am glad I didn't have to mention 1P queue stacking, lol