Today, my eyes are sore from staring at the cards, checking and checking and checking again.  In some ways, this is the part of the playtesting process that’s most important; or at least, if not most important, then it’s the place where mistakes are least easily forgiven.  A typo in the rules would be irritating, but wouldn’t upset the apple-cart too much.  Ah, but the puzzles, there’s a place where you really don’t want anything to go wrong.

I’m thinking of the puzzles as a game between me and the player, and as with all games, it’s no fun if one participant in the game finds its too hard.  Although I won’t be there to see it, there is a sense in which I, as the designer, get a kick out of the player having a “eureka!” moment.

I’ve been testing the puzzles in various ways.  I can do very quick first-pass checks of a lot of the puzzles on the computer: another benefit of using the computer to render the cards in the first place.  By my method of counting there are ten puzzles, or eleven if you count figuring out what the overall objective is (but don’t put too much store by this, because some of the puzzles are related and you might reckon it differently), and the computer checks all but two.  But that said, this testing assumes that there are no errors between generating the card images and getting them printed off.  So even after the computer checks, it’s necessary to get a physical copy and go through the puzzles “in real life”.

The computer checks can be gone through in about 15 minutes, but doing it all physically takes longer - maybe an hour and a half.  So I do the computer checks quite often, at least with each new rendering of the cards, and I do the physical checks only at strategic milestones in the development process.

Um, I don’t know what else I can tell you without giving too much away.  You’ll need a bit of space, I think.  Our kitchen table wasn’t quite big enough to cope with some of the puzzles.  Also, I’ve been running through the puzzles in a particular order, but only because I was being systematic about it; you might find yourself figuring out in a different order, and that’s fine.

Today Paul sent me the final Army Of Zero character, a really quite beautiful piece of work.  Here she is.