Shadow Path and GameX

This is the last week of the course, Advanced Game Design and we had our final presentation of our board game.

Not many changes were made from the previous week to this one. While half of the group where at GameX the other half did as best they could to balance the game. They play tested it with people that had never played it before and they thought it was fun and exciting to play.

Short about GameX:

I and my group were requested by the school to show our game at GameX, the biggest game expo in Scandinavia. Not only that, we managed to have our game in two booths, we had one at the schools booth and also at the indie developer booth. It was an awesome experience and everyone was hyped throughout the whole expo. Our game got some great publicity through journalists, bloggers and youtubers. And we are very happy that we got the chance to do it and we would love to do it again.

Back to the game.

As I mentioned earlier there was not many changes to the game this week. We did however add feel that something had to be done to the monster. We had not balanced the monster while we saw over the heroes and their wands so something had to be done. We had earlier come to the conclusion that the giving the monster superior movement did not work at all, the monster became way to powerful ending a game in almost 12 rounds or less. So we had to come up with something ells.

We added pathways that only the monster could take at four locations on the map binding paths better for the monster. This way we did not alter the board for the players while still giving the monster a small advantage on catching up running players.

With this change we called the game finished and that it was finished for presentation.

The presentations went good and there was not a lot of feedback from the players, they seemed to have a good time playing it. Some people that had played the game before we redid the action system was surprised how well the game played and how exiting the game was to play.

One problem that we had before was that when the monster was about to choose its movement the other players could get a hint of where the monster where just by looking at his/hers eyes, so we printed out a small version of the board that the monster could use to make his/her movement more strategic without anyone knowing where he/she looked.

Marcus or Adam has yet to play our final version of the game. And we want to know what they think of it. Adam was skeptic about our concept in the beginning but after playing an older version he liked it a lot. We want to know what they think now when it’s done.

That concludes our five week project of making a board game. We had a lot of fun making it and learned a lot when it comes to systems and balancing. A postmortem will be written on this game and I will upload it here later.

And lastly, we finally gave the game a name. Shadow Path

Re-thinking

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.

The menacing ladybug

Todays session was about establishing a system till our play test on Thursday.

Our basic idea is that 4 players are to find treasure in a dungeon with a monster in it, the fifth player. The monster is only visable every fourth round and when he/she kills a player, rest of the time the players are unaware of it’s movement.

We feelt that the movement system in this sort of game would be the most important, thus starting with it. Also we knew the gameboard was going to be a big part of the game and how its balanced, so starting with the gameboard and movement was a quite obvious choice.

The gameboard is going to need alot more iteration aswell as the movement, but i think we got a good grasp on how this game is going to play.

Both the players and the monster moves equal amount of squares as a D6 die shows. The players does not have to move the full amount but have to move a minimum of 1 square.

Game 1 – First Iteration

This is our first iteration on the gameboard, The gray squares indicates tiles you move on. The white squares are rooms where you are to search for treasures. The white lines are shortcut pathways that players can take to quicker get to places.

To not make the movement of the monster to obvious we numbered the squares so that the monster player could write down his movement instead of having a avatar representing it at all times.

We decided that 20 turns would be enough to test one round of the game. It took about 30 minutes to play.

This board was way to small, the restriction in movement except for the outer ring it was way to limited and very predictable, for both the monster and the players. The monster had a huge advantage becuse of this and killed a player almost every turn. So we only needed one play to know that this board was not going to work.

 Game 2 – New board

We made a new board that was not symetrical. We also more than doubled the amount of tiles. We used the same rules as the first time we played.

 

We did not make any secret paths this time, we thought if they where needed we could add them later.

We was just trying the board with the most simplest mechanics which was movement.

This iteration was WAY better then the first one, the movements became much more unpredictable and random which was great. It happend alot that players ran into the monster thus killing them and it was great fun. When we died we respawned without penalties just to try the movement as much as possible.

The deaths was distributed between the round very even, round 2, 6, 12, and 19 so almost every sixth round there was a death.

Game 3 – you may not move through players.

So in the third game we added a little twist we thought could work very well in the system, and this was that players where not to move through eachother. Meaning that if a player blocks a pathway other players cant move past him and gets stuck.

we used the same board that we made for game 2 with no iteration. 

This added a whole new dynamic to the game, now you could block players to go paths that the monster could potential be on.

We tried to play as it would if they game had all its components, staying in rooms and search for treasure to simulate a more accurate representation of the game. 

We ecountered alot of cases where a player would block another to force him down another path and in some of the cases getting killed by the monster.

Deaths in this round: round 8, 10, 11, 20. Not so spread out this time but still counted up to four kills as the previous game.

Game 4 – More of the same

We tried to play the game again with the same set of rules as before, in this round we ended up with 7 kills on the players and much more concetrated, even there was two kills in the same round.

We dont know yet how the game exactly will play out when we add the treasure and searching system, we also think that some sort of action cards is going to be needed for the players to be more versitile. But this is stuff that we are going to test at a later stage, now we are focusing to get the movement just right.

 

Brainstorming about Understanding board games project

Today my group and i brainstormed about the upcoming group project where we are to create a boardgame from scratch.

First of we threw out random aesthetic words just to get started, we ended up with words like feeling accomplished, lonlyness, fear, despiration, paranioa.

After that we took some of the woords and try to give them some contex in the form of gameplay and how the game would play.

We thought of you being desserted on a island with other players and you where to survive on that island by yourself or with the help of others and there would be a winning condition that only one player could fullfill so backstabbing was eminent.

We also came up with the idea that you where stuck in a dungeon, in the dungeon there would be a monster that would apear only ever 4 rounds or so to create the tension and fear. The objective for the players would be to survive with the help of others or by yourself.

We really liked the idea of having alliances with eachother but there would only be one winner. So that in the start the players would cooperate and later in the game betray eachother to win. We think that this will create some fun gameplay.

We will talk more about this concept of having to eventually backstab your friends in other types of gameplay, but for now that concept feels good.