Hello residents of Scoville! I decided to go a little more in depth about the evolution of Doomsday Peppers today. It’s been through a LOT of changes in its development, and I’d like to tell you more about its growth.
When my brothers and I first set out with an idea of what Doomsday Peppers would be, it was a very different game from what we’re playtesting today. We knew we wanted a game in two parts: prepping for the apocalypse and surviving after the apocalypse begins. We also knew that we wanted the apocalypse to take different, random forms so that the game had some unpredictability to it. Other than that, however, we had a lot of blank space to fill. DdP started as a competitive game of who could be the best “prepper.” There were fortifications to build, survivors to move into your house, and equipment to hoard. All of these gave advantages, so that when someone drew the “Doomsday Pepper” and all heck broke loose, you and your friends could duke it out and see who could end the apocalypse first. The problem was, when other designers tested it, all heck never broke loose! It sounded great in theory, and it worked for my brothers and me. We were cutthroat. Attacking, stealing, all that. Then we shared it at Protospiel, and it fell flat when other designers tested it with us. The apocalypse started and no one attacked each other. Not once.
(I’ve mentioned Protospiel online before. For those who aren’t familiar, it’s a wonderful group of game designers, publishers, and enthusiasts who hold an online “convention”. Anyone can bring their game designs to be tested by people who really know what they’re talking about. It’s great.)
Now, it was surprising, but do you want to guess the main reason that our playtesters weren’t attacking each other? I’ll tell you: Faced with the end of the world, our playtesters wanted to work together, and our game broke because it wasn’t made for that. I’m not sure if that says more about humanity being basically good or my brothers and I being horrible people, but either way, it meant we had some work to do.
The first major change I tried was to make Doomsday Peppers a hidden traitor game. If everyone’s instincts said to play cooperatively, I’d let them, except for one random person. It was a huge shift, personifying the cultist instead of letting them just be in the background of the game’s theme. I wrote the rules to say that the countdown to “The End” advanced once per round, and once for every Pepper uncovered in the “Community Garden” (where everyone took seeds from). Everyone had a few Doomsday Peppers to start with, like they had “shown up in their gardens”. That way, the cultist wasn’t obviously the only one with peppers. The idea was that the cultist would sneak peppers into the community garden, face down, so unsuspecting neighbors would come across them and they would cause havoc. It kind of worked, too. Our playtesters really got into the idea of the hidden traitor, but it soon became evident that the cultist had a pretty passive role. If the countdown was going to advance per round, regardless of their actions, why would they risk revealing themselves? When I tried getting rid of the “per round” advancement, leaving it to the cultist to advance the timer using peppers, that didn’t work either since it was just too difficult for the cultist to sneak them into the garden (personally, I still love the idea of the hidden cultist. I’d love for an expansion to put it back into play. Stay tuned for any developments there).
Though there were still problems, it was a much better game having a player be the cultist, that much was clear. After the hidden traitor idea didn’t pan out, I decided to make the cultist an open role. That’s how we came around to the current version: “The Corrupting.” Everyone plays cooperatively, until one person is turned into the cultist! At that point, it’s good versus evil. The cultist won’t win without actively trying, and they don’t even need to be sneaky about it (unless they want to). It’s made for a fast, franticly paced game, a much more streamlined play experience, and one that still feels authentic to the theme we set out with.
Truth be told, when we presented Doomsday Peppers at Protospiel, we knew it wasn’t ready for other designers to playtest; we were prepared to fail (and don’t get me wrong, it was a great experience. I’ve written here before about Protospiel, and I still highly recommend it). We just didn’t expect to walk away needing to re-create the game entirely. This is our first game design experience, so we’ve had to become comfortable with it being one filled with dead ends, trial and error, and false starts. We love the theme of this game and are willing to keep hitting those dead ends. In the end, it just means we get to try something different in order to make Doomsday Peppers exciting, thematic, and above all, FUN.
Let us know wat you think of the decisions we’ve made. Good, bad, or indifferent, we love feedback!
