Update #01 - You Can (Not) Prototype

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.

After taking this version of the game into playtesting discords we realized we had overshot our complexity marker by a mile, turning what we hoped would be a skirmish game you could complete in 60 minutes into a 3 hour long wargame played with cards.

At this point is when we had the idea of reducing the number of hex types down to four and removing all of their built in unique effects. This drastically reduced the amount you had to learn BEFORE the game started and allowed for more interesting complexities to evolve during play.

We continued on with this concept for a while, this was the earliest version I could find of the game once we had made the switch conceptually to hackers from a fantasy system.

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!