Assignment 1 - Designer Diary (Part 1)For this assignment, my group came up with many ideas for the board game, but most of them ended up not succeeding.
For the first version of the board game, we were planning to implement a "moving around the map" mechanic with RPG elements. Some of the main mechanics include Area Movement, Action Point Selection, Player Elimination and Area Control. This version of the game had a few win conditions:
The first element of the game we had to come up with was how players move around the board and how combat worked. We decided that players will spend action points to move using the Action Point Selection mechanic. As we wanted an Area Control mechanic, we implemented a system where players can use an action point to place a marker at their current location to mark that tile. At this point, the game seemed too simple as there was no variation between players (like RPG games), so to add in some variety, I partially came up with the idea of using different classes to represent each of the players. We eventually chose to use some common classes in RPG games: warrior, archer, assassin, and paladin. While thinking of ideas of the size of the board, we were considering this game to be played by up to 4 players. By calculating the lowest common multiple (of 2,3,4), we felt that a 12x12 board is suitable for our game. Now that we got the basic idea of our game, we felt that it was necessary to add/improve elements of the game to make it able to stand out. Firstly, to make the classes feel more different, each class have unique passives that make them stronger. We decided to stick with the 'stereotype' of these classes (from typical RPG games). So, warriors have extra attack damage, Archers have extra range, Assassins have an extra action point, and Paladins have extra health. Players can choose to attack other players if they are in range of their attacks. While developing this idea, we encountered some balancing issues. The game can feel unbalanced as merchants can provide damage upgrades and there are treasure cards that increase the damage dealt (mentioned later). In this situation, one player could defeat another player very quickly, making the game not very fun for the victim. To solve this, we increased the base health of players while maintaining the amount of damage dealt so that players could survive for a longer period of time. After implementing classes, however, some of these problems returned. For example, when we compared the amount of damage a legendary weapon did with the amount of health players had, we found out that players died too quickly. Secondly, we added in Merchants so players can upgrade their stats. Players would take one each and scatter them across the board at the start of the game, and they could spend action points to purchase an upgrade of their choice. This also brought about balancing issues. Firstly, it was difficult to decide how the Merchants were to be placed on the map. If players could choose the position of the Merchants, they would intentionally place them around their 'spawn', giving them an advantage. If the positions of the Merchants were fixed, players would obviously want to rush to the Merchants to get their upgrades first to get an advantage, so there would not be much choice other than to get the upgrades first. Lastly, we had some difficulty in deciding what upgrades the Merchants could provide as we wanted the upgrades to feel worth but not too overpowered. For example, a warrior can get more damage from the Merchant, but him getting too much damage will not be fun for other players as they will die too quickly. Thirdly, treasure cards were added so weaker players could hopefully get an edge over the others. Players would take some of the cards and randomly scatter them across the board for players to pick up during the game. However, this also brought about balancing issues. Firstly, for example, one of the treasure cards grants the player extra damage, and it will be discarded after that turn. I felt that discarding the card after one turn made it not worth getting, but not discarding it meant that other players would get defeated more quickly. Secondly, similar to the merchants, players could purposely scatter them near their 'spawn', giving them an advantage. Before we could playtest this prototype, we decided to drop this idea of the prototype. This is because even before playtesting, we had already encountered many balancing issues (where fixing one problem would bring up more problems), and we knew that it would be extremely difficult to continue to balance the cards. Since we did not want to continue to work on a game that was too difficult for us to balance, we decided to change the mechanics and theme of the game, and chose to make a new prototype revolving around the same board.
0 Comments
Assignment 1 - Video PitchHere is the link to my team's video pitch: www.youtube.com/watch?v=DqJkABxZFyE
|
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |