http://certainagegamer.com/2013/11/02/podcast-interview-with-jonathan-chey-of-blue-manchu/ It's really cool and I highly suggest you check it out!
This was a great interview. As someone who missed out on beta, hearing a lot of this helped a fill in a lot of blanks for me. It also generated a few more questions that I think would have been interesting to know, if Jon or anyone else could help me out. 1. When was it clear to you guys that the game map itself was going to be grid-based rather than hexes? There would have been historical precedent to use either, but most game enthusiasts that I've met will probably swear that hexes feel just a bit better, if slightly more complicated. Because of the way things like charge attacks and cone attacks are limited to how many facings a tile has, it seems like this may have been an opportunity for the game to be enhanced, but you clearly went with a square grid. Were hexes ever considered, or were they discarded due to being too complex? I can see how in a game where party size never increases above 3, protecting all your facings, or characters hidden in the back of your ranks becomes quite a bit more complicated. 2. When did you decide that a player's turn would be a single action from a single character, and not simultaneous in some way? This is easily one of the biggest differences I use to describe this game to people when comparing it to other turn-based tactics games, yet I rarely hear it get directly discussed. Was there ever a plan to have a turn involve moving all members of a team at once, or any other style of player turn? 3. When was it obvious to you that 3 was the magic number for party size? How large of a role did the fact that you can only move one character once per turn influence this decision? Is this what led to the creation of minion groups, or did these pieces just fall together? 4. When did you decide that gear would have a uniform amount of cards attached to it? Because people like to keep their deck size low, traits have a great deal of value even when they're bad. Did it ever cross your mind to also mess with this way of valuing an item by creating, say, a weapon that has 9 cards on it? Was that a line you just didn't want to ever cross, and if so, why?
