17/2/2020
I had 4 sessions of play testing with both my peers and some family members and found that their experience was enjoyable. Most people were treating it like a role playing game which I was really happy about as there isn’t much narrative behind the game.
Each session I was able to observe how the 3 different events played out and they did work very well and were balanced alongside the gameplay and movement. I did receive a bit of feedback which I will elaborate on later in this post. I found that the roulette wheel worked really well, it caused tension and excitement between players within the battle phase and none of it was what they expected it would be from a first glance.
I found that people enjoyed the items that I had in place but hoped that there would be more health potions along the way, due to this being a prototype there is only 1 of each item which would not be the same in the final product. I do feel like more items would make the game more interesting and strategic in where or when you use them.
Another thing people wanted to be more balanced is when you go into a battle alone or without all team members. Having to battle alone against a strong enemy can be hard, especially with a low damaging character so I have tweaked the battle phase with the continuation of the movement phase for other characters not in battle, however your movement is turned to 1 rather than 3. This adds less fear of going into battle alone and allows players to join in on a fight if close by.
I tested this out on my next play test and it worked remarkably well, my peers enjoyed the movement allot more with the movement while a team mate was in combat, it made players feel like they were more immersed in the world. Others thought the movement however was tedious at times due to having to back track occasionally to uncover all tiles. I would like to try tackle this by trying a playthrough where if you run out of tiles and reach the edge of the world, uncovered tiles furthest away will be put nearer to the player to make a more explored world.
I tried to tweak with the movement by having it where you lay out tiles as you walk on them. This allowed for no tiles to be left uncovered so players didn’t feel like they had to go back around the world again to find a certain tile to progress. Implementing this might cause some issues with exploration as you can just travel in one direction, Possibly have cave ins or locked doors can cut off pathways and allow players to expand the map rather than having it very linear.
The roulette wheel turned out to be very successful when it came to gameplay, people enjoyed the tension the spinner caused and the joy when it landed on a double hit or even a singular hit to defeat the enemy. Having the defend mechanic also work this way allowed for consistency and allowed players to have the option to attack or defend alternately to take the brunt of the damage or be the heavy damage dealer.
As the characters were, my peers enjoyed the way they played and the passives that they had. One passive I would tweak is the mages, if the map does change to allow for player exploration ahead rather than having to circle back I would change it so that you can lay down 3 tiles anywhere you would like on the world, this would encourage players to try and split off in different directions which is something I would like to make more possible with this change.
While play testing, I didn’t get to try out the capacity mechanic which only allows players to only hold up to a certain amount of items. I feel like in professional play this would be a very strategic mechanic and would allow players to devise who gets what item or who has to consume an item to collect a better one.
An event my peers hand trouble with what “a trip to the afterlife” this event requires you to find a ghost and have them help you defeat an enemy. This, although a fun event, had some issues I would like to address. The ghost card is an enemy card, the problem I encountered was due to the ghost card being the last enemy found and therefore you couldn’t complete the event as there were no more enemies available to fight. To combat this I could just add more enemy tiles so you cycle through the enemies once the deck has been completed. I also could change the ghost into a item card that acts like a pet rather than an enemy in other scenarios.
This could solve this problem or make it more easy to complete the event, possibly having it as a tile would be better and you have to do something for the ghost before it becomes your ally, so somewhat like a quest. This could be helpful as my peers played my game like an RPG so adding more quest like narrative might drive the game forward in terms of gameplay.
Another issue I had was with the sorceress of the undead’s trigger. Coming out of a boss battle is hard enough on players to then possibly draw another one and have to fight that. To combat this I want to implement a rule that says you must shuffle the enemy deck if you draw another boss however this could just be a pain for the players. So I might just have it so next turn when you go into combat draw 2 enemies instead of 1, if a boss appears with this shuffle back into deck, or just draw an enemy card with the sorceress making sure its there previous enemy you fought as she revived it.
Besides this, my product has been deemed good by my peers and I want to work on the feedback given if my group goes with my idea as our final product. Once we have decided we will begin making art and a rule book based on the finalised game idea.
20/02/20 – Discussion of theme and action plan –
Theme – Fantasy
Due to the feedback we received throughout each of our 3 iterations, we decided to go with the most popular theme which was fantasy.
We are taking my iteration forward and going to split up roles, I’m going to make iterations of enemies and characters to play around the fantasy theme whereas Patrick and Phillip are going to work on creating tile and card layouts/designs
Nerice's Semester 2 portfolio 