by Emily, Justice, Kay, Mars, Cassie
February 15, 2024
For our final project, we first had a rough idea of how we wanted our game to be violent and competitive. Through brainstorming, we first decided to settle on a basic genre, which would be to create a deck-building card battler game.
To think of ideas for our game, we decided to play Sushi Go Party! The game was not exactly what we were looking for, but it gave us some questions we could consider in the future while creating our game. For instance, we’re considering if we want our game to have simultaneous play or multiple turns, and if we should have different starting deck configurations.
So far, for our game, we have our tagline “Become the monster.” To match that, we are considering the theme “Monster Maker,” which could feature monsters such as beasts, serial killers, dragons, and cannibalists. We could use different cards so that players could assemble and create monsters as they go and fight each other. Given that we are going with the monster maker idea, right now, what we have are mostly questions about the world inside our game. What would be the origin story and the context? Why are the monsters fighting each other? What would the objective of the game and why would players want to win this game? What would be the point of life to the players?
Other than questions about context, we also have questions about mechanics as well. We’re thinking about how we could encourage player interaction. We could have players fight each other and have them eliminated, but we’re still thinking about how elimination would work and what eliminated characters should be doing. In addition, we’re considering many options about how the cards should be put together. Maybe we could discuss monster traits, appearances, talents, and abilities. Moreover, some of us played other games after playing Sushi Go Party!, and we talked about how we could have cards that could prompt interactions between players, such as bluffing.
February 22, 2024
The second week of prototyping forced us to resolve some tension between different concepts that we had in mind for our game and to make some hard decisions for which ideas we could fuse together to make a cohesive play experience. We had broad ideas for monster maker and creature collector elements, as well as our original concept of a deck building card battler game. For a minute our team kept getting stuck in communication issues–since our ideas were not as well defined, we found ourselves trying to have discussions and finding that different members had very different conceptions of what the game might look like even though we were all using the same language. We were in need of some serious thinning out and knew it was time to get specific.
We decided to divide our group into mini teams: Cassie and Justice took the lead on balance, mechanics, and rules; Emily, Mars, and Kay took the lead on theming, writing, and art design. This division of labor allowed us to accomplish much more during our meetings and to approach decisions from multiple perspectives at once.
Settling on theming and aesthetic helped us start envisioning the narrative of our game–this work started to help us get out of the dissonance we were experiencing with gameplay and mechanics. We wanted to pick a theme that would be fun and whimsical but also allow for the violent competition we had first envisioned. Mars thought that ghosts would allow for interesting creature building elements including fusions and unique ways of interacting with items. Justice was imagining a colosseum or arena setting to give a clear motivation for why players should want to get competitive and fight one another. Bringing these ideas together birthed our concept: a ghost arena in which spirits engaged in a “fight to the life,” that is, the winner would be awarded a second chance at life in exchange for providing entertainment for the Grim Reaper.
For the mechanics and ruleset, we decided on prototyping the game to be a 1v1 duel, even though we imagine the game to actually be playable for four players. We did this in order to nail down how mechanics work and to get an idea of the balancing of winning and losing rounds, as well as item specific balancing. We imagine the game as one where players are rewarded with either better item choice or more items based on round winning and currently decided on a draw-2-pick-1 for winners, while losers instead draw 1 with no selection, to try and implement this into the game. The balancing of this win-loss reward is currently one of the larger challenges we’re facing, as winning with selection is still significantly better than losing and it is complex to make winning feel appealing while making losing not insurmountable.
We focused on nailing down a very consistent and legible prototype for our silent playtest on Thursday, and stripped out a few features we’d like to add back in later. The Shadow Cloak spell, different kinds of spirit, and play for more than 2 players were all dropped for simplicity. We’d like to add these back in, plus make the game more strategic and have substantially more card variety, damage types, and unique mechanics. Ideally, interactions between limbs and spells/items/weapons will make the game a good deal more interesting. Post-playtest, we will bring both “teams” back together, mutually discuss theming and mechanics, and make future design decisions as a full group.
February 29, 2024
We came back from our first playtest with lots of notes! We knew it was a very barebones prototype and that we had far to go, but we got some very helpful direction in playtesting. Our players wondered where the strategy was, how they were supposed to build a hand, and what made some cards better than others. They also were enthusiastic about the theme/lore components we had so far but talked about how fleshing those out would make them feel more compelled. We were proud of our core concept and were excited to use this feedback to help us figure out our game’s identity.
The first thing we resolved to add was a market phase where players would be able to choose their cards rather than draw randomly. We needed a name for a currency – Mars suggested Ectoplasm, the icky supernatural substance (like in Ghostbusters). We considered several possibilities for the card market and the economy (the way players gain currency). How many cards would be in the market? When will the market be replenished? Do players gain currency as spoils of war, or through some sort of income stat? We resolved to keep it simple for our next playtest: the “winner” of each round (the one who dealt the most damage) would get 5 Ectoplasm, the loser would get 3, and then players would be able to choose from three Items and two Body parts. The loser buys first, and then all cards they bought are replenished for the winner’s buy round.
We also wanted cards to interact with each other. A common playtest complaint was that cards got useless and there was one “best build” in any given hand. We pulled from trading card games and tabletop RPGS by sorting our Spirit types into four categories (Beast, Humanoid, Fantastic, and Brute), and subsequently categorizing the limbs and weapons in that same framework. Justice designed most of the Spirits, giving them lots of different bonuses for different builds. The Spirit cards were finally added into the game for our next playtests, and actually ended up serving as a direction for playtesters. Combined with the market phase, the new class-based bonuses and limb interactions definitely make the game feel more interactive and strategic. Players now know what they want to buy from the market and what sort of monster they want to create.
Emily was able to come up with all the character designs and Kay began designing some of the items for the game. We are planning to add more art for the arms, so players could visualize the character building. In addition, we are thinking of unifying and resizing the cards so we can fit everything in the playmat we have for our game.
We are currently thinking of adding mechanics related to corruption. This would be a mechanic that would be introduced to introduce play styles that involve risk/reward in terms of taking on limbs not aligned with the player’s spirit type and class. This would be to encourage players to consider neutral items (that are class agnostic, and also slightly weaker) or instead take on some consequences to use the better class-specific items, with drawbacks if there is a mismatch in class. This also necessitates a larger class of neutral items to increase the amount of choice available to players.
