DreadBall: Behind the Scenes with the Design Team
Dreadball 2 is coming to Kickstarter soon – take a look at some of the new teams!
The folks at Mantic have been giving us sneak peeks of what they have planned. A little review:
DreadBall 2nd Edition will enable you to play exciting pick-up games, but also unlock epic leagues that will be talked about by your gaming group for years to come! Our plan is that it’ll let you enjoy the galaxy’s greatest sport whilst reinvigorating the DreadBall scene for the vets, and bring in a host of new players.
DreadBall 2nd Edition will be spearheaded by a new 2nd Edition core game, which will include the new rulebook, an up-sized pitch and two new teams. The tooling and production will be funded on a simple, short Kickstarter in July, which also builds awareness of its retail launch in 2017. You’ll get updated rules for every team and Dreadball Ultimate will also get the 2nd edition treatment.
The new edition update will address:
- Enhanced Game Play – Faster to play, simpler to learn and easier to collect, the new edition will streamline 6 seasons worth of rules, FAQ and errata without losing any of the soul of original DreadBall.
- A New League System – built from the ground up, offering unprecedented options for team building
- Improvements based on your feedback – Reworking Jacks, Giants and MVPs to become central to the game are high on our priority list!
- Balanced Teams – each team will have a unique play-style and will be fairly balanced for competitive gaming.
- And more!
In this installment Chris tells us about the design process behind the new edition…
This is the first game I’ve been able to develop going into a Kickstarter. Typically other groups in the studio create the product and I organise the Kickstarter and do the day-to-day running of it – this time I’m also creating the product whilst the studio groups focus on completing Warpath and The Walking Dead.
And that’s awesome because a) it’s hugely exciting to exercise some creativity and b) it means as I get assets I can share them immediately with you as I’m the one with all the access to our social media!
We’ve been showing off logo designs on our Facebook page. We’ll be dropping the ‘2’ from the end, but otherwise let us know what you think.
Teams in DreadBall
Having done DreadBall Xtreme and DreadBall Season 4-6, we’ve got a total of 25 DreadBall teams – there’s lots of aesthetically diverse teams and each will be reviewed thoroughly by the rules committee so that they each have their own distinctive play-styles and each are competitive in their own right. I’ll talk about that in a future blog on rules – for now, I’m going to look at the development of new teams.
AdvertisementThe core of 2nd edition revolves around a new 2-player boxed game. It’ll contain the rules, pitch, counters, dice and all the usual gubbinz you need to play but there was also opportunity to review the teams that most people are going to start playing the game with.
Composition Test Draft Artwork by Michele Giorgi
We’ve learnt a lot since we did original DreadBall – we’ve discovered new sculptors, new plastic manufacturers, and wanted to employ this learning by introducing two new starter teams, getting away from the Human vs Orc scenario.
It allows us to continue to develop our backstor, and has the added benefit that if you decide to pick up the new boxed game, there won’t be a single design of component you’ll already have, everything will be new – from the teams to the RefBot MKII right through to the pitch and card designs.
Subscribe to our newsletter!Get Tabletop, RPG & Pop Culture news delivered directly to your inbox.By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.The new teams will also come pre-assembled, making the game truly pick-up-and-play, which should help anyone familiar with board games, and will come in the same (awesome) plastic as The Walking Dead miniatures.
With the notion that we wanted at least 2 new teams adding to the range we went to concept artist Roberto Cirillo with some ideas about what we thought would be appropriate.
1st Draft Team Concept Art – Sports Robots
AdvertisementDreadBall is a futuristic sports game, so any team that went into the core game has to scream sci-fi. My first port of call was a new robot team – not one that transforms and not one from the junkyard that you can build yourself, but one with an American Football-style look. It says futuristic. It says sport. And the figures can be a little bigger than the human team making them more tangible, without introducing scale creep, making them consistent with the range and easier to paint if you so choose to paint them. All wins.
Here’s the first look:
My favourite is number 1 and I think the panels on the shoulders and chest, with the rivets removed, would make great advertising spots. You can imagine corporations branding their bots with logos and slogans and I hope that hobbyists follow through with that.
Maybe we should do a decal sheet to match?
1st Draft Team Concept Art – Yndij Team
To counter the slightly bulkier, heavier sports robot, we felt an agile team would make a good opponent. Rather than create a new race, we thought why not develop the Yndij into their own team? They’ve been on the periphery of DreadBall with the A’teo MVP in Azure Forest and the Yndij Reaver in the DreadBall Xtreme, and now Roberto has provided some concepts of what a team player might look like.
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These need developing further, but I think a mix of 2 and 3 with a different helmet design and different shoulder-pads will create a look that suggests agility and speed. The Yndij look like they should almost be wearing the bodywork of an F1 car, with all the little fins and grills that promote movement through the air.
There are other players and team captains in the works, including some Chris describes as “Sumo Alien Lizards and some Cyborg Living Dead” – this could be really interesting. I’m looking forward to seeing the rest of the new designs.
Are you ready for 2nd Edition?
