I have returned from the best four days in gaming.

Black Hats' banner waved all convention long in the First Exposure Playtest Hall, calling any and all to "Hack the Planet!" with us on GameFound this September the 17th.

It was an incredible opportunity to get our game in front of fresh eyes. The game has evolved significantly based on our first round of GenCon feedback and our subsequent Discord league.

The players at our table responded exactly how I would hope as a game designer.

We heard none of the complaints that we did in our first year, replaced by a newer (smaller) set of design challenges around the new player experience that we can tackle prior to our launch in September. All programmers know that swapping one error message for another is progress!

​I may have buried the lede here in my excitement over quality feedback, so one more time for my people in the cheap seats -

Black Hats will be launching on GameFound September 17th, 2024!

If playing via our Tabletop Simulator Mod isn't your thing and you just need that meat space real world copy of Black Hats in your hands (and hey, who doesn't?) you will be able to chip in your hard earned credits to make it happen next month. This trip is only going to peak with your help!

And one more thanks so much to all of our play testers at GenCon! Your positive feedback feeds our passion and your negative feedback stokes our designer brains to do better. We won't stop working until the best version of Black Hats we can make is sitting on your gaming table.

Hello World
If you were only keeping tabs on Black Hats via this blog, I would forgive you for thinking that Erik and I had suddenly gone missing on a transatlantic flight. Or perhaps we’d fallen into a wormhole, or for some other tragic reason stopped working on this game. Rest assured, we remain as corporeally bound to meatspace as we are dedicated to Black Hats.

Of course, you’re probably already a member of our Discord community, so you would already know that we’ve been kicking the tires and adding fresh coats of paint to Black Hats since our first appearance at Gen Con 2023.

But maybe you’re the sort of incredible person who likes “reading” and “concise information” - in which case I apologize for how I write (I am told it is an affront to both readers and conciseness). I’m going to break it down into a three part series.

This is Part 1 and lays out everything we have been up to since our update last year. Part 2 will share our plans for Black Hats’ future leading up to our crowdfunding campaign. Finally, Part 3 with our ambitions for the far future of Black Hats.

Total Visual Overhaul
If there is a single reference point for the general art direction I try to provide, it would be the Neuromancer game for the Super Nintendo that never existed. There is a kind of retro-future technology presented in early cyberpunk that grabbed at the right direction that our technology was headed at the time. What they predicted correctly was the function of how networked computers would evolve into every facet of our lives. Less accurately predicted was the form that technology would take.

“Case, you want the fifth socket from the left, top panel. There’s adaptor plugs in the cabinet under the console. Needs Ono-Sendai twenty-point into Hitachi forty.” ― William Gibson, Neuromancer

The original cyberpunk aesthetic is chunky. The world of William Gibson’s Sprawl is more analogue than what a person in 2024 could consider futuristic. That world doesn’t run on solid-state drives, it runs on tape-decks. It doesn’t use touch screens, it uses thick mechanical keyboards. The cyberpunk of the 90s could not conceive of wireless technology. Everything must be cabled, the thicker, the better. As late as 1999, The Matrix was still conceiving of a world dominated by a connected phone line system.

That vision of the future is largely consigned to the dust-bin of history alongside the chrome plated flying cars of 1950s science fiction. But for me, I just can’t fall out of love with the clicky button cable laden CRT monitor-driven aesthetics of those works. I’ve done my best to work with the artists I commissioned to bring out that aesthetic flavor all over Black Hats - from the characters to the cards and tokens.

As you can see from this handy graphic, every token in the game has been re-designed to be more thematic and have a better game feel. Our community of play testers weighed in their feedback as well to make sure the game elements were presented clearly.

I just love how the game feels in the hand now. Fanning through a pile of rigs feels like looking at a little pile of pixel microchips. Rig and runner cards have an aligned texture showing where they “plug” into each other. Going through the executables, their fonts and coloring, gives the effect of peering into a little command terminal window with a dull CRT glow. When a runner has taken their activation they now exhaust to the classic hourglass icon sprite as they await the round end.

It all adds up to a distinctly pixelated-analogue-cyberpunk look when it hits the table that makes it just a joy to engage with for this old millennial cyber cowboy.

More Characters!
Since Gen Con we have commissioned art for three additional runners, now 50% of the runners in the game have their art and tokens!

A Play Test League!
While the art was cooking, we organized a playtesting league among several of our discord players to search out anything too broken to hit the printer. The results of the league gave way to our last big change to how scoring and the end game worked. Gone are the semi-confusing 3 points ahead rules, but they have been replaced with a new variable scoring system which bases points earned for data scored on the damage values of your deck. This change reinforced the value of damage numbers as a balancing force against a cards primary effect text, which helped to reign in some of the abusive strategies that emerged in the league.

​Here are some prizes our players earned caught in the wild-

Hi, Erik here, long-time reader, first-time poster.

A couple years ago, shortly after we developed the "subnet" mechanic that would become the core of Black Hats, I came up with a card type called a "daemon" that would be played permanently onto the board with a corner of the card touching a system on the outside border and would thereafter apply an effect to that subnet. It was unique and fun and it sucked and now I feel a deeper connection to Travis Coates.

Ray is the hero behind Black Hats, but this was the start of my villain arc.

Since then, I have made it my life's work to critique, rework, and cut as many other mechanics and cards from Black Hats as I possibly can in the name of my beloved daemons. I'm writing this post today to boast about my latest victim: the rootkit.

I already don't miss it.

During the Gencon games, no other rule or mechanic was responsible for half so many mid-game questions and requests to be reminded of what it even was. Countless runner activations passed where the players forgot it was even a thing and, if I may be perfectly honest with you, after years of working on Black Hats, I also frequently forget about it.

Removing this would, of course, require reworking several runners, executables, and even one of the rigs. It's telling that it only took me about an hour to come up with alternatives for all of them and I already like 95% of them better than their rooty predecessors.
​
The real winners, though, are me and Ray and any of you who might one day try to teach Black Hats to someone else: no longer must you say "well except for the allied rootkit token" after the handy mnemonic of "you can't hack anything with a piece of cardboard on it".

WOW!

The response that Black Hats received at GenCon was greater than we could have hoped for. In addition to the 24 players who played with us in the First Exposure Playtest Hall, we were able to run 8 demo tables in Lucas Oil Stadium which were attended by a total of 35 more!

Over 50 gamers decided to spend some of their limited time at GenCon playing Black Hats. With so much to do and so many other games available we consider it an honor that anyone would take a chance on us. For those who did take that chance, the feedback we received was overwhelmingly positive.​

This was not only our first time bringing Black Hats out in to such a public venue but also our first time running events at a convention ourselves. We were absolutely wiped by the end of the day on Sunday but it was so worth it to see so many people having fun with the game. Every time someone had an audible "aha!" moment when they found a new line of play with their runners was more fuel in our tanks to keep working hard on this game.

I think as a game designer, if your goal is to make something that feels unique and new, it's important to somewhat work in isolation from other games. At least for my own brain, I find it too easy to let other games bleed too strongly into my own work. There is something to be said for not being too strongly steeped in genre convention.

For the same reason, I think it is also important to be extremely judicious in parsing player feedback. There is a balance to be found between letting players make design choices for you and being too stubborn to kill your design babies when you are told they don't work.

Okay, but why am I going on a random diatribe about authorial intent in game design... Because for over 2 years we worked in that isolated bubble on a game that we were growing to love, showing it to handfuls of very specific players at a time and we had no idea if anyone else was even going to like it, much less love it.

If we came out of this design with a game that only ever got played on the kitchen table by ourselves and our friends, that would've been enough. We thought Black Hats was good, but we had no idea if you would. It is both humbling and inspiring that literally dozens of strangers told us to keep going after getting their hands on it.

So that is what we are going to do!

Black Hats will be at GenCon 2023!
Schedule Here: https://www.gencon.com/events?search=Black+Hats&opt=ta&opt=hh

How we got here:
Something like 6 months ago, we decided to bring Black Hats to Gen Con in August 2023. This has coincided with what I think people with different degrees from me might call a “soft launch”. Along with trying to spread the word of the game and get players running matches on discord, we committed to physicalizing the game for Gen Con.

The game has existed as a tabletop simulator mod for long enough that we didn't want to lose sight of actually printing the game. In retrospect, it sounds reckless, but for over 2 years we never actually played a game of Black Hats within the confines of meat space.

We had taken efforts to only play the game in tabletop simulator, unassisted by newfangled scripting. We had a level of confidence that the game would work on paper that was almost entirely unjustified, given our experience with producing quality game components. Bolstered only by the fact that the game wasn't particularly annoying to play with TTS.

Through the power of human will, money, and thegamecrafter.com we have completed a summoning ritual, bringing forth three copies of Black Hats from the ether...

​After dozens of paper plays of the game, our tabletop simulator testing largely paid off. Along with my years of meme making in photoshop and making painfully mid sprite art, we were able to pull together a really nice set of prototype Black Hats copies.

And those copies are coming to Gen Con with me next week!

It has been a challenge to get here. While I have been to Gen Con numerous times as an attendee, this is my first year running events of my own, making sure everything was ready to bring on time has been stressful but incredibly rewarding as for the first time we held the game in our real hands and are prepared to get into the hands of as many gamers as possible.

We hope you will join us at Gen Con for some exciting games of Black Hats!

As we drag this game kicking and screaming into the light of public criticism I thought it an appropriate time to look back on the nearly three year long journey to get Black Hats to the state it is in today.

It all started with an innocuous google chat:

The pitch that followed was a little rambley but the seed of Black Hats was there from the beginning. Spawned out of late night Yugioh anime binges and a desire to see cards having sweeping effects over the environment of the battlefield.

At that point we were off to the races burning through iteration after iteration of the game. The initial prototyping cards that I was coming up with looked like this:

For much of the early development we had in our head a fantasy style game where hexes denoted types of terrain. We were aping off of magic's core types with hexes for plains, forests, mountains, etc.

Flipping cards for damage and effects was integrated early in the design as a way to get rid of dice and lean into the card game feel we wanted. Our bigger design challenge at the time was how to handle the board.

Ultimately having too many types of terrain with too many unique effects baked into them made the game extremely complicated to play. At the time we were also using upwards of half a dozen different tokens to denote different status effects and buffs.

You can see at this point the board was still MASSIVE in comparison to the iteration that we settled on. There were simply too many hexes for the board to be easily readable and subnets were not yet well defined in the game. Most tiles began the game in a "neutral" state still which no longer exists in the design.

Ultimately the concept of subnets, infinite range within them, and slowing movement between them, allowed us to drastically reduce the number of hexes needed down. It made the board easier to read and there was less to learn before you could hop into the action.

At this point with subnets and movement integrated, we started ruthlessly culling every mechanic that wasn't essential to the core vision of the game and added needless complexity. In the screenshot above you can see we still had two resources represented by hex tokens.

"Crypto" was a resource akin to mana or energy and was used to play cards from hand while "Exploits" were a resource that could be used for generic hacking actions. Crypto was ultimately just an unfun and needless mechanic for our game while exploits were wrapped into the cyberdeck, allowing players to decide how much they wanted to emphasize hacking in their builds.

The board got smaller and smaller as we continued to trim the fat literally and metaphorically from this turkey, but by this point in the prototyping we were down to fussing the fine details. Neutral systems were completely gone and we started experimenting with different starting configurations for the board.

And with that we reach the current, although certainly not final, version of Black Hats. We could not be prouder of the core gameplay loop that we have forged over these past years.

In just a few images you can get a peek into the evolution that the game has gone through, while at the same time remaining absolutely true to the original vision for the game that we started chatting about on day 1. At this point I'm just excited to explore the tactical space we have set up and jam out more games!