Board Game Progress Report (Advanced Game Design) - The End

Yesterday, we presented the final game that we came up with for the other groups and some staff at Campus Gotland. Below are some of the changes that was made to the final version of the game.

In addition to a slightly reworked board, there are also a few tiles on the board that only the monster can move on (marked green on the image below). The reason for adding those tiles is because we thought that the monster needed to get stronger in some way. We tried and solve this by having the monster rolling one or two D8 instead of D6 as the players. This made the monster to powerful however, so it was scrapped. What we instead came up with was a few shortcuts that only the monster could use, to improve it's movement somewhat. This also increases the risk for players searching the small rooms (marked 60 and 168 on the image below), as they can now "get attacked" from two sides. However, searching the small rooms gives the players two wand cards instead of one.







































Aside from the new board, the only thing that was added was the name of the game, which we decided to call ShadowPath. Now all that is left is to write a postmortem of the game and hand it in on Friday. Then this course is over and I start new courses in math and programming, my two favorite subjects!

Board Game Progress Report (Advanced Game Design) - 20131029

Today, we had our teacher for the course (Adam Mayes) play our game and give feedback on it in it's current state.

Initially, he was skeptical to as of how the monster's hidden movement was going to work in practice. However, after playing the game, he liked the game as it was. He got to play as the monster and the game was very tight overall to the very last. Although he thought that we could keep iterate on what we already had, if all of that failed, we could reverse to the game as it is now and hand that in.

One thing that we started testing before meeting Adam was a new, larger board and making it so that the players moves 2D6 rather than 1D6 each turn. The reason for testing this out is because we thought that the game would be easier to balance with 2 dice rather than 1, because now we can keep the average of 7 from 2D6 in mind when making the new board.

As before, Christian Roupé is the main person responsible for design the new board. Although we are going to make more changes to the new board, here is how the board looked earlier today.

As before, the monster starts in the middle and the other players starts in the corners. The red-marked rooms are search rooms, where the player has to search for the talisman and then escape the maze by getting to one of the corners.

Board Game Progress Report (Advanced Game Design) - 2013027

(I haven't made a blog post about some of these things earlier because there has been things that has been coming in the way for me)

This week, the work has been more divided among the different members in the group. One person was looking into a new version of the board for our game, others were looking into wands (what we call items in the game that could be found by searching) and others looked into writing on the game design document.

As a mentioned earlier, we now have a new board in our game, that is better balanced and more fair for all players. We also have new wands (full list is available here) that the players can use to their advantage and the design document is hopefully more readable.

We had a play-testing session earlier this week, were we let other groups test our game and give us feedback. Overall, people seemed to like our game but thought that we needed to polish some things more in the game. That is fair feedback if you ask me, the groups that tested our game brought up some good points that we can take into consideration when we keep working on our game.

In addition to new wands and a new board, we've made some other changes to the rules of the game as well. Now the players have two health  points, and they are out of the game when they have lost both of them. The players also have the option to steal the talisman from a player carrying it. This was added so the game would get more interesting, as we had noticed that the game could become stale as soon as someone got the talisman. Now the monster moves with a D8 rather than a D6 as the players, as we felt that the monster needed to become faster somehow.

The biggest challenge for us this week was to find a place and time where we all could together. Three persons in the group have the course Serious Games, and trying to synchronize those groups with this group has been a big challenge for us this week. And in my case, I had to skip over one meeting that the others were going to because of that it was the only time where we could work together because one person was going to leave the island later that day.

But with that said, I still think working as a group went well when we could work together. When we worked together, we were able to get stuff done and sort things out. We also know what we need to work on during the next week.

Board game progress report (Advanced Game Design) - 20131023

Today, some big progress was made to the development of our board game. Thanks to the work of our group mate Christian Roupé, we now now have a new board that is (hopefully) more balanced than our previous board.

One problem we had with out previous board was that the distance to the search areas were different for each player. But now, the distance should be the same for everyone, meaning that no player has an advantage over each other. Now we just have to play-test the board.

Board game progress report (Advanced Game Design) - 20131021

Today, we had a seminar this morning in Advanced Game Design. Marcus Ingvarsson, the teacher holding it, decided that each group talked to him in private where we demonstrated our game in it's current state.

Since our group had a late time with him, we decided to do some more polish to our game before showing it to Marcus. Today we tested the wands in the game (previously called items). The purpose of our game is to find a talisman and escape the maze with it. Initially the containing the talisman deck was separated from the rest of the cards, and it had some blank cards in it; but after some testing they where merged together as we found out that the game was going to work better that way.

Wands can be cast before or after the player has moved. When a wand is cast it is put to the discard pile. Below are some wands that are present in the game. Note that only one wand can be played each turn.

• Illuminate Allows the player that played the card to see where the monster currently is.
• +1D6 Allows the player playing the card to roll on an additional D6 when he would role for movement. The sum of both the dices is added together and the player may move up to that many squares across, the board
• Stun Stuns another nearby player, forcing her to skip her next turn.
• Teleport Short-range teleport for the hero
• Swap Swaps the player with another nearby player

Marcus though that we had a good base to build our game on. We needed some more polish to it, but overall he seemed to like our game. One suggestion he came up with was to try out different scenarios for the game.

Board game progress report (Serious Games) - 20131020

Today my group in Serious Games has a short session where we begin making a more concrete version of the ideas that we had for our game there.

After some brainstorming and discussion, we initially had a plan where we had a board that contained regions, and certain diseases cards and actions cards only had an effect on certain areas, other where omnipresent ones. This concept was scratched however, since we noticed while play-testing it that it would be to much to keep track of. So now the player is instead working entirely omnipresent.

The rules of the game was made more concrete. As before the player has a deck with diseases  that could hit the area and a deck with the tools that he has available to stop them. Now however, a player begins their round by looking at the top five cards of the disease decks, then shuffles those cards and put them back on the top of the disease deck. Then the player looks at the tools he has available and plays the card he thinks will stop most of the diseases.

We still have a point system present in our game, where the player starts with a certain amount of points. Each disease that strikes the town decreases that score. The tool cards may cost points to play as well, but they make it so that the points from diseases that "hurts" the player is reduced as well. For example, a certain disease cards may decrease 40 points from the player's score. But using a specific tool available, that amount is reduced by 15; meaning that the disease now only removes 25 points from the player's pool. Even though it may have cost the player 4 points to play the card, it still makes it worth it as the total points being reduced is being decreased compare to no tool at all.

At this point, we need to work so that all numbers in our games becomes more balanced, but we have
 a base to keep building our game from.

Board game progress report (Advanced Game Design) - 201301018

Today my group had a short meeting where we discussed what was done during the week, and talked about what we needed tog get done by the next week. The things that we came up with was that we needed a more polished board (as someone brought up some problems with it during playtesting), item cards implemented into the game, and a way to improve the monster's movement.

During this upcoming weekend, I'm going to test some ideas of how to improve the movement of the monster. Among the things we talked about included that the monster rolls a D8 instead of a D6 and that the monster can move a certain amount of squares in addition to the one that is rolled on the dice(For example 1D6+2). The reason for doing it on my own is because the other members of the group are busy with various things during the weekend.

Board game progress report (Advanced Game Design) - 20131017

Today was a play-testing day, where the different groups in the course was play-testing each others' games. We had a total of three groups playing our game in it's current state. Overall, people seemed to like our movement system and that the monster in the game was only revealed each fourth turn or whenever it lands on the same square as another player. People thought that we had a good base to keep building our game from.

During play-testing some interesting things was noticed that we haven't noticed for ourselves. The first one was that certain players on the board had a shorter distance to the search-rooms (where they can find various items, including the item that is required to win the game) than others. Our current board is not final so it's something we can improve. The second thing that we noticed was that it was possible for another player to re-spawn on top of another player (two players cannot be on the same square under our current rules, and players are currently re-spawning on their starting location when they are killed by the monster).

This showcases that it is important to play-test your game often, so you can get feedback on things that you don't noticed yourself. With all that said, I'm happy that we currently have a base for our game that people like.