Now that the Baldie Challenge has come an end, I'd like to invite you to a little Backstage Tour of our second planetary challenge. I'll take a look back at how we came up with the challenge and what our main goals where with this second iteration of the planetary challenge. I'll give you some insight on how encounters were built and how they did work. Afterwards I'll talk a bit about the things that worked well as well as about the things that did not exactly work out like I had hoped. In conclusion, I'll talk a bit about what we hope to do next.
In case you have no idea what I'm talking about right now, the Baldie Challenge was a community contest for the upcoming trading card game eXode. If you want to read up on the challenge, here is the initial post and here are the links to each chapter: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.
The Idea
So how did we come up with the Baldie Challenge? After our first contest was done, we took a step back and looked at the result. Overall, I was pretty happy with what we had achieved but it obviously had some shortcomings that we wanted to address for our second challenge. There were two key issues in my opinion:
The winners were selected by @balticbadger and myself by reading and comparing each article. We each took notes, compared our findings and decided on the winners. This took a lot of time and at the same time was not very fair. We obviously did not actively favor anybody, but in the end, there were no comparable criteria for our decision. We just concluded who did the best builds in our opinion and they were the winners. For the community, there was no way to retrace our decisions, so you guys had to just trust in what we decided to do.
The whole process was not very engaging for the community. Once the contest was over, it took us some days to decide on the winner, we announced him and it all was over. If you were not in the top 4 you did not even get any active feedback on your build.
To deal with these two problems, we came up with the idea of having several events (later called encounters) and checking each contestants build against these. This way we hoped to make the process both more fair and transparent as well as more engaging for the community. Even if you did not submit a deck, you could still follow the journey of each Captain. If you participated in the contest, you got direct feedback in each step. Initially, we toyed with several different ideas for scenarios but finally settled on the Baldie Challenge for two reasons:
Since we required everybody to bring their own cards, going with a Common ship with restricted space would give more of our Captains a fighting chance.
By using the Baldie, we limited the amount of cards everybody could bring to something that was actually manageable for us.
The added bonus was that the Baldie forced everybody to really think about every single pick they made instad of just throwing a bunch of legendary and epic cards at us.
The three different locations were something I only came up with while writing the announcement article. I thought it would be cool to offer some choice and provide different story lines for each location. The ocean world was to provide a more standard colonization gameplay with different, not necessarily connected events thrown at the players. The moon and the asteroid were to receive a cohesive story each. I'll get back to that topic later on in the article, but let's talk about the events first.
The Events
So how did the events work? If you followed the challenge, you already know the basic idea. Every day we covered another 15 days on the story line and had at least one, sometimes several encounters for each of the three destinations. I first wrote a basic story line for each destination and then designed the encounters corresponding to that.
For each encounter, I was checking whether a crew had certain traits or not. Sometimes I also checked the amount of characters with a given trait. Let's look at an example.
In part 5 we had these nasty tree sucking crabs that ambushed your crew. There were several ways to beat that encounter:
- One of your crew has tactical and you have at least one character with shooting -> Your crew gets away unscathed
- At least two of your crew members have shooting -> Your crew gets away unscathed
- Only one crew member has shooting -> One random crew member without shooting and without awareness gets hurt
- No crew member has shooting -> All crew members without awareness or speed get killed (likely game over)
- No crew member has shooting, awareness or speed -> All crew members get killed (game over)
So as you can see, there were several traits checked to succeed in the encounter and additional traits checked to see how bad it was failed if the right traits were not present.
In addition to that, many encounters had bonus objectives that required very specific traits to be present. If you had them, you did not only succeed but you'd also get some bonus health.
On top of that, there were quite some encounters that had special events/story lines for certain cards. The most prominent ones hit were the Special Infiltration Agent @veryanprime had brought to the moon base and the combination of the Rebel Leader with any Pro Federation card @nockzonk entertained us with.
The Good
All things considered, I'm pretty pleased with how the contest worked out. I'm proud that I managed to deliver a new episode every day without any delay. Writing the articles was more work than what I had anticipated. Getting everything ready for release took me about 4 hours each day, but I feel like it wouldn't have worked quite as well with a single episode just every two days.
Looking at the numbers, we had a constant interest in the articles, with the last two episodes receiving the most upvotes. So I think we definitely managed to make that second contest more engaging to the community. There was a lot of discussion going on for the different chapters and I was really happy to read what everybody was thinking about the turn of events.
Having everybody face the same encounters helped a lot with making the contest fairer and thanks to each Captains story I think it was easier to understand for the community what worked and what didn't. Transparency was better as well because of that, although you still need to believe me that the events were predefined and that I did not write them to only fit @raudell's build.
While there obviously was some luck involved with choosing the right destination, I feel like the best builds did actually win the challenge. Providing several options to choose from definitely helped to make the contest more interesting. Next time I'll try to give some more details on each possible location, as most Captains obviously expected something different from the moon. While that's fun as well, it was a little sad to see everybody eliminated before the end of the contest.
The Bad
I'm happy to say that there was nothing that I considered to be really bad so it's more of a the not so good. Still, there's always room for improvement. So for example you might have met that lady:
Honestly, I was quite surprised how many challenges were solved by simply having Eliza in your crew. She combines so many good traits that she feels like an auto include for any deck in hindsight. While that's not necessarily bad, there could have been some more balance in traits checked. When I created the encounters, I made sure that there are plenty of different traits tested during the contest, but I did not check how these traits were distributed on the different cards. This is something I'll definitely will be looking to improve next time.
Another issue was the topic of only looking at the cards from the deck builder vs. looking at your actual articles. In our first contest we only looked at what everybody presented in his contribution and the idea was to only look at the cards in the Baldie Challenge. This did work out well most of the time, but there where some problems with it. The most apparent was the Underground Construction used by @apshamilton. He explained in his article how he was going to scrap the Baldie to use it to create a shelter in the Underground Construction. The reasoning was sound and so I went with it. Had I only looked for the cards, he would have been dead because he had no shelter for both the flood and the radiation. This is something that needs to be addressed for the next round so that everybody knows exactly what we are looking for and what not - and obviously I need to strictly stick to that as well.
At the same time the Underground Construction was like the Eliza of Prefabs. This card alone helped to solve half the encounters by simply avoiding their triggers altogether. It was obviously a really smart move to bring it, but as with Eliza before, I want to avoid having a single card that solves half the encounters on its own so I'll need to make sure to make encounters more diverse next time.
All in all I really liked how the story played out. Each location was to have its own story line but I wanted to have some themes shared across all destinations. While I think that did work pretty nicely, there were some issues with many possible parts of the story not being explored. I had about 30 special arks/solutions for the locations but most of them never got hit. So for next time I'll try to have more ways to unlock special story parts. Luckily I can just reuse a lot of what hasn't been used this time in the next challenge. The other problem was that some of the possible solutions to an encounter where to actually do nothing. While this obviously often is a good idea and just the right thing to do, it's not very entertaining to read about how somebody is just doing nothing. Because of that, I'll try to come up with more story elements that feature some action, no matter how an encounter plays out.
One last thing that didn't really work out the way I had hoped was Colony Health. While it was okayish for the ocean world, it felt pretty meaningless for both the moon and the asteroid. Most of the times Captains had quite some health left and then just got eliminated in the next article. That made Colony Health feel even more arbitrary than it already was. Actually not a single Captain got eliminated because of his Colony Health hitting zero without an actual game over event. I don't have the right idea on how to fix that yet, but I'll need to come up with a better solution to it for the next event.
In Conclusion
I invested about 40 hours total in making the challenge over the course of roughly two weeks. This is definitely something I need to monitor for the next challenge and I won't always have that kind of time available. I could have more uniform story parts to reduce the required effort but that would probably make the stories less interesting to read so I'm undecided on how to proceed on that one.
Like I already pointed out, ultimately I'm really happy with the Baldie Challenge and I consider it to be a huge success. I'll be on a cruise next week so Captain Khazrakh will be gone from Hive and Discord for some days. When I'm back, we might already be playing version E of Evacuation but I fully intend to do at least one more of these challenges until @elindos lets us play the real deal.
Until then, I'd love to hear some feedback from you guys. What did you like about the challenge and especially, what didn't you like about it? Feel free to DM me over in our Discord if you want to discuss anything specific.
Once more, thank you all for reading and see you soon Captains!