A week late but here it is, GameX took alot of time 😛
Last week we made some major changes to the game, we reworked the action system and we also further iterated on the game board.
In the start of the week we had a meeting with Marcus discussing what we could change and make better. He came up with some ideas that would give the monster player a more defined goal. He suggested that we should give the players lives, so when the player dies two times they are out of the game. He also suggested a modular board which would make a good addition to the game but with the time we have left, we felt that making a well-balanced board instead of trying to balance all the possibilities with the modular one would be a better choice for a good experience.
In the last game test the game did not performed as we hoped. The game sessions took way too long, lasting almost up to an hour; the reason for this was that we experimented with the round limit and the lives. We also tried different ways to reuse the wands in some way; we tried to reshuffle them as they depleted but since the talisman is also reshuffled in the deck when the monster kills the player that have it, the game resets and the monster have the upper hand because of the lives and the round limit.
So the goal for this week was to make the game faster but still has the same tension throughout the whole session. And we solved this by doing a few different things, first off we did a big change to the actions system that might not sound like much but makes the gameplay where different, in the original we had three different actions, Search, movement and wand use. Having these three actions you were only allowed one each turn, you where though allowed to use a wand if you moved so you could consider wand use a free action and the search as giving up your turn. Now you are allowed to use any two actions however you want and you are allowed to search immediately when you land on a search tile. However, you may not use two of the same actions.
Another thing we did was to further iterate the game board. We have now has about 230 tiles instead of the previous 130. By doing this we could use two dies for movement for each player to even out the randomness a bit but still have it so that you can get bad/good die rolls.
We also changed some of the cards so that they were more coherent in the way that almost everything can go through walls except disintegrate. We also increased the range of which these cards can be casted so they can more easily be used. And not just discarded all the time for their highly situational situations.
In the end the game plays much faster than the previous versions and we got a nice curve where it is slow in the beginning and ramps up towards the end.
Mikael Karlsson Gamedesign 