Community Survey + New Diagrams

Hi everyone,

Today I'm really excited to provide you with early results of the community survey that we launched last week, because as with our last survey these results will act as a rough road map of what's going to be coming to the project next.

If you haven't taken the survey yet, you can take it here:  https://forms.gle/WCvXCSbTLMarM1rP8 

OPR Game Jam

Right now 71% of players said they're interested in a game jam, of which 60% are actually interested in participating, which is super aweosome.

These results have given us a lot more confidence in pulling this off, and if more people from outside the dedicated OPR community join in we could well have over 100 games submitted to the jam!

We'd like to organize the jam for some time in the spring or summer, but honestly having never hosted one we'd like to take some time to properly figure everything out before jumping into it, so no date has been fixed so far.

Settings for New Games

This was an interesting one because we made this list first thinking of what players would like to see and then sprinkled in a few settings that would be our favorites to work on, and were just hoping players would pick those ones. :P

Luckily for us it seems that other players are also excited about the same sort of things we like, and here are some of the top results from the list:

• Post-Apoc
• Gritty Fantasy
• Cyberpunk
• Space Battles
• Lord of the Rings

So yeah, you can definitely expect us to be working on these settings in the near future, for all sorts of games. What we'd like to do is create a couple of new game engines, and then see how they fit together with these themes whilst also modifying them for the specific quirks of the setting, but we'll get into that another time.

Even thought they didn't make the top of the list we're also really considering working on at least one historical game and one small-scale (6mm/15mm) game, because we feel that there's people out there that would love the style of our games but simply don't try them because they're not historical or small-scale games.

Printable Paper Miniatures

Here we got a 58% interested response, which honestly is much higher than we thought it would be, but I guess it's in line with the fact that there's lots of paper miniature projects on patreon.

Right now we're actually already working on some paper miniatures + terrain for GF and AoF, to provide new players with a sort of "starter kit", but seeing so many people interested is making us think about a lot more things we could do in the future.

For example we could provide a basic set of paper miniatures for all of our future games, especially for settings that don't have a huge selection of miniatures out there or that not many people already have miniatures for.

It could also be really interesting to start a new project fully dedicated to a game that comes with new paper miniatures and missions on a monthly basis, though that would probably have to be separate from OPR...

Physical Miniatures

No surprises here, 74% of players are interested in physical miniatures, however what is interesting is that in the comments lots of players said that they'd be interested in 3D printable miniatures for higher patreon tiers.

I can't make any promises, but I'll be getting in contact with different 3D model makers regarding that to see what's feasible to make within our budget, so look forward to more news on that.

About the actual physical miniatures, we've gotten a few comments from people that are worried about us making games that could only be played with our own miniatures, or that we start yet another competitive wargame that then just dies like many others.

The answer to these concerns is a definitive no and no.

Right now the idea is to make a game that can be played with any miniatures, and we'd be providing our own miniatures for those that want them. So if we fund it on Kickstarter you could imagine that there would be 3 pledge levels: digital rules only, digital rules + physical book, and finally digital rules + physical book + physical miniatures.

Also the game we're thinking of making would be developed to be played as a narrative campaign like rangers of shadow deep, as an open ended campaign like mordheim, or as a single skirmish encounter like GFF or AoFS.

We want to give players something that they can play solo, coop or versus, and that doesn't rely on continuously pushing you to buy more models. At the end of the day we're good at making rules, so that's always going to be our primary focus, and cool models are just a bonus.

Expansions for GF / AoF

Last but not least, this was a question related to our currently available games, and it was very interesting to see that 70% of players are interested in Narrative Campaigns over anything else (most other options only got 30%-50% of votes each).

Since our games are so light on narrative we're going to have to experiment a little with narrative campaigns, and are currently thinking of doing a first "test" campaign that is released in multiple single-mission episodes.

This way we can collect feedback as the missions come out and improve our format, instead of committing to something that might not work and wasting a lot of effort on it.

Now let me say one thing: I'm not good at writing stories, and I think that's very evident from the little lore we have in the game. :(

Because of this I'm going to be looking for some writers that can help me out, and soon I'll be making an announcement for people to recommend writers or apply as writers for our narrative campaigns. So if you know anyone that might be interested or would like to do it yourself, then you'll be able to apply for the position soon.

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Apart from those questions we had an open suggestions box at the end which I'll need to analyze further since we got a TON of replies in there, but rest assured that I'm reading all of your comments and will provide feedback soon.

In the meantime Brandon has been working on some brand new illustrations for the diagrams in the rulebooks, and I thought you might enjoy a preview. ;)

That's it for this week, now that I've got my new pc here I'm slowly getting back into the rhythm of things so next week you can expect more content updates, as we have a fairly large patch coming to fix different things across the board.

Cheers,

Gaetano