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Less than a week to get the rules to us, thats optimistic. The rules for our game took 6 months to write, and we still find the odd loophole in them. If you’re planning to slap something together and release it I would advise against it, all that will do is make your game look like something that was slapped together and released and then you will have alienated your target audience.

My advice, you have come out far too early, but if you admit that now you can still go away and actually write your game and come back in a couple of months with something to show – if you keep going the way you are at the moment then people will just stop following your thread and put you down as yet another bedroom rules writer.

6 months? I've been working on one ruleset for 6 YEARS lol. Granted, I'm an engineer type, so the rules are complicated and I've had to do a lot of number crunching on things to work out probablistic outcomes, height-range conversion tables, etc.

well, 6 months and counting - my point was that if the OP thinks he can write the rules in 1 week they are either not going to be very good with massively imbalanced forces and full of loopholes, or he'll just pack it in when he realised that after a week all he has written is the rules for how you select a force.

I don;t want to discourage the OP, I just think that he has made the mistake that a lot of games designers these days seem to make and come asking for advice far too early.

Stranger83 wrote:
Less than a week to get the rules to us, thats optimistic. The rules for our game took 6 months to write, and we still find the odd loophole in them. If you’re planning to slap something together and release it I would advise against it, all that will do is make your game look like something that was slapped together and released and then you will have alienated your target audience.

My advice, you have come out far too early, but if you admit that now you can still go away and actually write your game and come back in a couple of months with something to show – if you keep going the way you are at the moment then people will just stop following your thread and put you down as yet another bedroom rules writer.

well this game is going to be very raw and bloody when I have the basic rules ready by next week. the reason I'm getting it out there is so that people can pick this game apart and find those loopholes. consider this an open alpha test of the rules, because I wholeheartedly believe that the more eyes are looking at it the more loopholes will be found and the better the final product will be.
also if you're wondering how I can write a game engine in one week, well the ideas are there, all I'm doing is getting them on paper. also the massive amounts of caffeine and the knowledge that I'm doing this for my friend help a lot.
here's the first part of the basic rules that will be updated as I go along:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1FYr0DTS6ktOByCizrIAUH95xr6YC-EDW8tSCtbzSQNk/edit?usp=sharing

Might I suggest something... Don't get the people in the public to playtest your rules until you have the rules hashed out, and you feel comfortable seeing people tear it apart.

The plan I'm going on my game is 1 year to write the rules with internal playtesting, 1 year for public and the all important blind playtest (that's where you set the people up to play the game, giving them ONLY the rules to the game, no input or clarification from you and then they stumble their way through the game), and then you might have something resembling a solid and well hammered out ruleset.

The problem that I see with this thread is that you've come to us with an idea, and given us a sack of skin that you are calling a game, and this sack of skin has only the barest forms of a skeleton, enough for you it's creator to see it "walk and live" but not enough for us, the people on the outside to see your sack of skin stand on it's own.

Designing a game is like constructing a building. You start with the foundation, the frame, and then give it the shiny bits that people ooh and aah about. No one looks at the world's tallest building and says, "man look at the skeletal structure on that thing, it must be amazing for it to stand on it's own like that." But without that internal structure, your building (and likewise your game) will fall flat on its face without any substance to it's build.

 yeri wrote:
also if you're wondering how I can write a game engine in one week, well the ideas are there, all I'm doing is getting them on paper.

No, you're just wandering around aimlessly. You don't seem to have any structure to your project, and throwing random rules on paper doesn't give you a functioning game. Before you start writing any rules you need to step back and define the high-level concepts like the setting/general gameplay type/etc.

here's the first part of the basic rules that will be updated as I go along:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1FYr0DTS6ktOByCizrIAUH95xr6YC-EDW8tSCtbzSQNk/edit?usp=sharing

Stop posting random fragments of rules. Presentation matters, every time you post some random bit of generic rules (yes, you have a 40k-style FOC, show me something interesting) you do a little more to convince everyone that you aren't taking the project seriously. Don't post anything until you've completed it to a professional level, and that means a complete rule document. Being too eager to get something posted and sacrificing quality to do it suggests that you don't have enough patience to do it right.

Also, simplify your rules document. You don't need to give everyone a "funny" lecture on what a D20 is, this isn't a final document and 95% of what you write will probably be deleted and re-written. Strip it down to the bare minimum so everything is written as clearly as possible, adding in all the extra fluff just adds pointless clutter. Once you've got the substance of your rules working you can go back and make it pretty.

Know what I think when you say I got out on this too early, you were right. I've taken the rules down and you won't be seeing them until they are complete. but I do have an explanation as to why the rules are "funny": this game is not intended to be "serious business" it's a pulp WW2 game in space, I don't think you could play that one seriously if you wanted to. So the style of the game is lighthearted and "funny", kind of like a 40s/50s B movie.

 yeri wrote:
but I do have an explanation as to why the rules are "funny": this game is not intended to be "serious business" it's a pulp WW2 game in space, I don't think you could play that one seriously if you wanted to. So the style of the game is lighthearted and "funny", kind of like a 40s/50s B movie.

Yes, and it's reasonable to put that humor in the final rulebook (though it needs a lot of work). But when you're trying to make playtest rules clarity is important, you need to keep things simple and straightforward so that people can focus on the things that actually matter. Instead of spending multiple pages telling people what a D20 is just say "materials required: one D20 per person, pen and paper, etc". It communicates all the important information without the clutter, and you don't waste time writing fluff for a document that is going to see major changes before it gets anywhere near the point where you can publish it.

Hey sorry to drag this thread back from the dead, but I wanted to make sure some of the alternate history in the current version of the game was at least somewhat PC. a few points that I worry may offend people are the part where an alternate Germany starts a war with Brittan by basically saying "there are a lot of German Jews, and you are occupying their homeland. give it to us so we can give it back to them." starting a war where the Germans back the Jews and Brittan backs the Arabs. what worries me is that it may be perceived as insensitive to have Israel on the side of the Germans, but it's the only way it makes sense in the story. So should I cut this part and remove the Israeli forces from the game, or should I keep them?

 yeri wrote:
So should I cut this part and remove the Israeli forces from the game, or should I keep them?

Who cares? Either this is an important defining part of your setting and you should include it no matter what anyone says, or you're worrying about trivial details again instead of doing anything useful. In either case polling some random people about it isn't going to help you.