The game we brought to our final in-class playtest was substantially more developed than the one we showed the previous week, but it turned out that a lot more had to be done. We actually went through the deck in the break between playtests, and snacking on Insomnia Cookies we frantically rebalanced the costs of many cards in the deck. Most of the live changes we made were to the Ectoplasm costs, which weren’t well-balanced and tended to be on the low side, but a few tweaks were also made to Attack values on cards.
Post-playtest, Mars organized the notes into four main categories: clarity, broken mechanics, theme/art, and new ideas. We quickly started a new document, writing out what tasks needed to be done IN ALL CAPS and color-coding them by who would do what. In retrospect, I wish we were this organized when first starting out! Delegating work in a game design project with five members is no joke, especially over finals week. Plenty of clarity changes were needed in the rules, adding a glossary for unique effects and elaborating some of the combat steps. A few details were accidentally left out of the rules, specifically how spirits were selected and changed out during the game, and relating to the new market phase. We received an inundation of new ideas from keen playtesters, many of which fell by the wayside, but we were grateful for the feedback and kept much of it in mind when putting together our final version.
Our group member Justice duels Ashlyn in our playtest
Neither Ashlyn nor the TAs played our game last Thursday, so we scheduled a playtest with the professor on Tuesday of finals week, which also served as a de-facto deadline for an updated version of our game. In addition to the above fixes, we added a new mechanic to our game, consistently styled in the rules as c o r r u p t i o n. We put all items in the game into the four classes of Spirit (Beastly, Brutish, Humanoid, and Fantastic), and introduced new penalties for equipping limbs or items that did not align with your spirit type. We flavored this mechanic with a new block of text in the rulebook:
It takes special effort to possess a limb that is not your own. Adding foreign limbs and items to your Creature increases its c o r r u p t i o n, risking the decay of limbs, items, and even your Spirit itself.
As threatened, the player with more corruption rolls a d20 and suffers a range of consequences, up to forcibly drawing a new Spirit. While adding a new mechanic after our playtest was daunting, it definitely added more strategy to what cards were bought during the Market phase and encouraged players to build toward their Spirit.
We got good feedback at Tuesday’s playtest from the professor, and have spent the last few days wrapping up small changes and producing the final physical prototype. Kay and Emily finished and uploaded the last of the art – our game looks great! We’re excited to release Ghost Arena into the wild after four long weeks of development, and walk away from the project with a vastly increased appreciation for how difficult it is to make what felt like a simple card-battler concept into a balanced and complete game.
