With the Kickstarter only a month away – and the latest Tabletop Simulator version of Distilled being published – I felt it was the perfect time to share some behind-the-scenes process about our solo version in the game, designed by David Digby. David has a number of great solo designs under his belt already, including some Alley Cat Games products, like Chocolate Factory, the upcoming Tinner’s Trail reboot and Dice Theme Park. I’ve asked David to take it from here, with a guest post. So, take it away, David!
“I first came across Distilled and Dave at an online playtesting session. Like all good playtests I enjoyed the game and then proceeded to outline a raft of changes I’d make to improve it! Must’ve made an impression, as a little while later Dave got in touch and asked me if I’d like to design the solo mode for the game when he got to that stage. I said yes in a flash as I could see real potential in the game and solo play for it.
A few months passed before Dave got in touch again to say he was ready to start looking at solo play. As is often my method, I asked my regular collaborator David Ellis (got enough David’s involved yet?) to play a game with me so we could scope out how to do the solo. We enjoyed the game a lot and only earmarked a couple of areas that needed work overall, which isn’t much for us! Having read a short passage in the rulebook I also had concerns over the solo play brief.
Dave and I chatted and I opened in my usual no-nonsense style “So there’s good news and bad news. I think the game will be great and I’m happy to design a solo for it but if you want and automa style solo game I’m out, it’ll be s#!t”. With that as an icebreaker I imagine Dave knew what he was letting himself in for over the coming months. We discussed at length the potential and I explained that I felt the multiplayer solitaire aspects of gameplay meant a bot player would just be rubbish player experience and there is scope for other types of solo game. What I proposed was an improved version of the sort of system I designed for Chocolate Factory by Alley Cat Games. Dave was happy with the plan so I set about building something.
My overall plan was a variable puzzle system which challenges the player to complete large, game long goals, and little ones along the way. This is very similar to Chocolate Factory, but with Distilled I wanted to give the player more options (or paths) and a bit less randomness. Integrating different difficulties was also high on my list as that’s something I didn’t have time to do on Chocolate Factory.
The result was 3 tiers of goals, A Goals would be like a whole game strategy for the player and would set the score target. B Goals would be tough goals, hard to complete without a bit of skill or planning, C Goals would be pretty easy but require the player to be able to adapt and roll with the punches. Taking inspiration from a few spatial open draft systems I’d seen (think 7 Wonders Duel) I worked out that I wanted 5 rows of goals, with rows 1, 3 and 5 face up and rows 2 and 4 face down, only revealed when the below them are completed. The concept of paths was still with me so I decided to restrict the player by saying they needed to complete a path from bottom to top. I like visual patterns like this. Whilst sketching patterns and working out how many cards I wanted (component count is often a big part of a solo design brief) I came up with the idea of a barrel shaped pattern to fit with the theme. Eureka! Draft 1 was born.
I presented this to Dave and gave him some rough rules notes. Into the frame comes Richard (let’s pretend he’s called Davey just for consistency) Richard (sorry Davey) had already been working as a developer with Dave and played the game a lot as a single player but without a solo mode. The 3 of us played the game and started batting ideas around. I think the next version added goals to the B cards too so there was more variability and with it an easy way to make difficulty levels. By replacing a row of C cards with Bs the goals got harder and increased the VP target for the player. The problem was Richard was too good at the game so hard mode was quickly followed by expert mode with 3 rows of Bs and he was still winning! Lots of versions later had managed to tweak all the scoring to give the right target scores in normal, hard, and ‘Richard’ modes.
At some point we also added first VP, then money to the C cards so players got a boost for completing them. Alongside this I needed to tighten the process of when you can and can’t complete goals. I had a plan but had to ask Dave for an extra component, a barrel marker to show the players progress, luckily they were already in the game so that was approved straight away and we had another layer of decisions in the timing of when to progress.
Solo Game, setup and ready! 
Solo Game, mid-game
As you should be aware Distilled contains lots of asymmetrical characters to play (for some reason these aren’t all called David?). Luckily I had had this in mind from the outset so integrating this was pretty easy. Initially we planned to have a random setup and then fixed setups for each character. I was keen to have as much replayability as possible so we added region specific goals and some scope in the rules. This gives us variable asymmetrical setup that works for whatever character you chose to play with. As a developer I was always taught to find simple elegant solutions and this worked a treat.
Richard and the other testers (let’s call them all Dave) continued to put in the hard yards playing the game over and over again to get me tons of data to make balancing changes. Amazing work from the team saw us doing fine balances months ahead of schedule. I hope it really says something about the design we came up with that people were more than happy to play it over and over again! No way I could’ve worked this quickly on my own as playtesting takes a huge amount of time.”
Thank you David! So, as you can see, it was a wonderful collaboration amongst numerous folks. I want to thank Hunter Rising and Houston Taylor, both of which helped a great deal in the playtesting of Distilled’s solo mode during its infancy. For those solo players out there, this is available right now on Tabletop Simulator, and will be part of the base pledge for Kickstarter, launching July 6th. I hope you’ll get to experience this great solo game yourself someday!