At the core of Aethermon’s experience is a journey that includes the growth of the player’s character’s: Players begin their adventure battling the lowest of opponents; by the end of 1st chapter they are challenging for the junior championship; by the end of the 2nd chapter players battle for the fate of humanity.
Just typing that story gets me hyped. If that experience took 4 hours per chapter, it would be 4 hours well spent. But if that macro-experience took 3 hours I would be no less impressed – but would also have a spare hour to play another game 🙂
In order to compress the experience of Aethermon into a 3 hour window, a trend quickly developed – give the players more stuff, remove the things that slow players down.
The penalty for defeat is a great example of this. The intention was always that players could continue their adventure after being defeated, but with a XG per turn penalty. The original penalty was all the XG you would acquire on the players next 2 turns. Given XG directly translates into battle competence – ie. the game’s ending condition, 2 turns of XG slow down the game by 2 turns per defeat!!! Way too long.
The current system is a simple 1XG penalty. Assuming an average of 2XG per turn, this is a difference of 3XG per defeat (previous system cost a total of 4XG per defeat, the current system costs 1 XG per defeat – 4XG – 1XG = 3XG); if the player is defeated on average 4 times per playthrough that is a 12 XG difference or 6 turns. At an average of 3 minutes per turn, 18 minutes are saved per game!!!
Over the next few weeks we’ll do a deep dive into a several other time cutting measures taken in Aethermon!
Be quick AetherRen
