Hello again dear readers,
for this post, I will exclusively write about our second tournament, how it turned out, what helpful information we got out of it and how much fun the game is turning out to be.
What we added this time
So this was a while back, around three weeks ago we added two new features, toughness and assault bonus. Toughness added another dimension to collisions in the game by adding a specific stat value to each class, changing the dynamic of play when colliding with different classes. Before hand, we had a rule that everybody lose one HP and everybody that moved will move back to their original position. Now, we do the same when it came to movement but the stats on each class defines a class more distinct, a ranged class would think again about coming close to a tank like class, rethinking their actions and becoming a bit more predictable.
Assault bonus was different, we wanted a new way of play here, defining melee and ranged damage a bit more to hopefully balance them out and bridging the gap between predictable to the gut feeling you have.
Goodies
We also added a few new upgrades to our famous tournaments with a new rulebook, a character sheet, higher stats, whole new prototype, a new game mode (free-for-all) with its designated map, and of course, more snacks and nicer prizes to win!

Oh yea, the online controller worked as well which was a fantastic feature!
Players
So this time around, we had a bit less players but a more well rounded group of participants. Some had played more than five times, some three times, some twice and a bundle of first timers, creating interesting data which I will go into very soon.
Tutorial
Before we started the tournament I had a crack on how to learn our audience Omni quicker, making sure that ran a bit smoother than before. Omni in general is a pretty easy game to learn with a medium sized depth as we perceive it, you have a easy time understanding every aspect of the game after about tree to five sittings, making the tactical plays engaging you afterwards.
My research was based on both my knowledge of digital games but also board games this time around. One thing I found was that the explanation of how to play the game is different to how to setup the game when it came to board games, and I found that pretty interesting!
So after trying to convince Lui on how to design the rule book into -How to Play- I had to organize it differently. My solution was to create a video, explaining the games different systems quickly in a manner that was educational enough to have my audience concentrated.
On our first tournament, we had a hard time trying to teach our game to the participants in the time we posted, disengaging our potential audiences. This tournament felt like we improved significantly with not even five minutes of explanation of the basics then letting themselves look it up on the character sheet or rulebook. It was a burden that needed to be solved, without it, we now have the opportunity to actually generating a how-to video (next post!).
Character Sheet

This around, we added our brand new character sheet, explaining each class’s HP, toughness, damage, skill, range and how to calculate a collision. I of course, had nothing really to do with it other than some minor balancing issues. After two game tests, we’ve noticed something with it though, some people confuse the range with the first tile (starting left one) being where the avatar stands so we’ll fix that for our next update. Overall, I do enjoy a good cheat cart next to each player to understand the game, makes you feel like you press esc to look at some stats, an inventory, or just looking at a cheat card like you do in Settlers of Catan.
During the tournament, we saw almost everyone consulting the character sheet at least once which was a huge time saver not only for us but for the players themselves, helping the game to stand on its own without its parents. There is of course improvements to be made but we feel like we are on the right track.
Free-for-all
Coming from the twitch community (shout out), free for all is my death match; I’ve always felt like Omni needed diplomacy instead of co-operation because who doesn’t want backstabbing ?
One of the issues we encountered when building a FFA map was that we couldn’t create a totally balanced map because of hexagonal tiles. The six-directional movement destroyed our chances on creating something that would be fully balanced for four players.
The map now have players battling from the mid tile on each side, creating a pretty balanced map for the two people in the top and bottom but the people from left and right cannot reach each other before a few turns which is truly a shame but improve will come dear reader.

I figured this would be the most popular tournament with backstabbing, taunting, teaming up and crying but I was sorely mistaken!
Most people played like the would usually do with few people actually using that behavior I’ve come to love. Now we had a pretty close age group and these people were mostly not twitch gamers so I might be overreacting but from what our data shows, this was not a hugely popular map overall.
New Prototype
Our new prototype is up and running if anybody wants it, you can download it here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/9terlbgrt1lp5dm/OMNI.rar?dl=0
but if you wait a bit, the new version will come (I will talk more about this soon!)
So offer some art and some simplistic tournament components, we printed out solid maps with characters that was more educational for our participants to try out with and we introduced HP tokens. Now, we will of course offer our final product to be a lot better but for the time being, it was a good substitute from what we offered before.
One thing that was totally different was the opportunity to play with the phone online on our website at Omni. We noticed a totally different setting when people got a hold of their phones and started playing. People used the blitz mode a lot more with time being included in the online controller, HP were displayed as well making it easier to feel the damage when players would get hit and the controller overall felt easier to use. The data even showed our audience enjoyed it more, rendering the physical controller a bit obsolete for the time being (until its true form reveals itself, see analogue controller).
Tournament
7.5 hours did it take, needless to say everybody was tired and nobody truly wanted to finish.



As our second tournament we had learned a few tricks, people like snacks and people like food so, more snacks and food prizes. We had an interesting tournament with three couples entering and two on the Team-Versus-Team mode finale.

We of course had winners and most that stayed got their share of pizza and kebab rolls afterwards, rewarding the monumental task of answering our forms and staying sharp throughout the whole endeavor.
So the statistics
We hypothesized that people would find it more enjoyable, more predicting and less wanting of many more mechanics, providing us with stronger motivation to work on the art and lore. We weren’t wrong on many occasions but what we found interesting was that nobody really felt that they had it easy predicting and the overall aspects they were looking towards when predicting were rather simple. What we did find out was that nobody cared about the hardship they had when predicting and enjoyed the game overall, wanting more maps, more classes and more of the game in terms of art, actual figurines and the features we have been holding back!
Our conclusion is that our new systems are worth to keep and the closer we get to the game, the more finished they perceive it themselves. I write more about the conclusion after a few posts because it has been changed a few times because of our journey to Wiscon and overall development. Stay tuned for more very soon and for now, enjoy our statistics!
ps. I must mention my last statistics post, I promised raw data but as I learn about it, its not necessary so therefore, enjoy these bar charts.
Cheers and stay true,
Ladbon
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