I now have a new-found respect for Game Designers. Balancing a game is no easy feat at all, fixing one problem can lead to MANY more problems. Changing my game concept about 5 times taught me this the hard way.
All I used to do was complain about how broken or how weak something is when an update came out. But after this, I think I'll try to complain more politely next time... This experience has taught me to look at balancing a game in a different way. Instead of just buffing or nerfing something to compensate for a bad point, look closer. Figure out WHY it doesn't work before dropping the nerf hammer on it. Does it not work thematically? Or is it bad because something else is TOO good? Theres a chance you can change a weakness into a strength! Play-testing also turned out to be SO MUCH MORE IMPORTANT than I made it out to be. If the idea sounds good on paper, TEST IT, it may not be as fun as you make it out to be once you finally start playing the game. Also, find out WHY you find games similar to your idea fun. Make sure your game fulfills those requirements and this should help ensure a game doesn't turn out boring during play-testing. I'm really glad my group managed to pull through. Hope we score well... *hint* *hint*
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The new idea started with the my group sitting down and discussing why we found other board games fun.
We pinpointed 3 Reasons:
After coming up with these reasons, we compared them with every iteration of or previous game and realised that none of them fulfilled any of the above 3 reasons. We went online to find a list of Board Game Mechanics we liked and narrowed it down to a few which we used to make the new game. The new game has these main mechanics
(Risk vs Reward) Students must risk placing certain cards down to create conditions and the riskier the condition is to set up, the more we rewarded the students. Similarly for the Teacher, he must risk opening a card that will not benefit him but will gain information and suspicion as a reward. (Meaningful Decision-Making) The Students must also work together to make the right call and play the right cards in order to give the teacher as little information as possible while also being able to complete their own goals. The Teacher must then decide with the information available, which cards to eliminate and which of his own cards he wants to play to foil the student's plans. (Always a way to win) We took turns as a team to play as the Teacher and Student. Each player had their own strategy when playing as either side. Even when each player played using their own strategy, there was a rather equal chance for either side to win. There were times when the Teacher was horribly behind in the first few rounds but still won and there were also rounds where the Teacher was lucky in the beginning but the Students still pulled through by a little to win. There was obviously some problems with this version as well but we managed to fix them. Examples would be:
This is our final iteration of the game before submission. As stated before, our board game concept turned into a Card game. This allowed us to remove the movement aspect of the game which solved the movement issue.
We kept our elemental dragon idea as we thought it could still work in this context. Now, it would be one Player facing of against another Player with cards. We gave each dragon 3 modes, Attack, Defense and Support. We started play testing this idea early to quickly discover as many problems as possible. The first problem we encountered was Health. With this new version, players would kill each other very fast, TOO fast for the pace we wanted our game to be. So we decided to give players more Health to compensate for this. The problem was that this change only improved the situation a little, the game's pace was still too fast for our liking. So I suggested that we have Mana and give cards cost to slow down the game. Initially we maintained the Action Points and players could play 3 cards during their turn. This turned out to be one of the factors affecting the pace of the game. Therefore, by adding cost and Mana, it would limit what players can do for each turn. Players need to use one card from their hand to place one Mana down. Each card placed down equates to the amount of Mana they have in a turn. We also gave Mana "Elemental Restriction" which meant if you wanted to play a Fire card, you need a Fire card placed down as Mana. Later on, we found that the "Elemental Restriction" now made the game WAY TOO SLOW. So we removed "Elemental Restriction" but we kept the placing down a card as Mana and the game was now at a relatively decent pace. We had our friends play test the game for us and they helped us point out several problems that we overlooked. The first problem they pointed out was that Defense seemed pointless to them because the defender uses a card from his hand, which would return to his hand after defending. This meant as the defender, you would just keep a strong card in your hand to defend with since it wouldn't die, defeating the purpose of playing card in Defense. Since defending with Defense Mode meant discarding the dragon after defending. Hence we made it such that playing a dragon from your hand to defend would cause it to be discarded after using it to defend with. The next problem would be that Support did not feel impactful enough. They did not see a need to play Support since attacking seemed the most optimal in the game. Finally, when a player uses up the cards in their hand, the game is essentially over because there is no way for the player to come back. Every time the player draws a card in the new round, the other player just plays a card and forces a fight which means he needs to discard the card he just drew to defend himself. This makes it impossible to stack up cards anymore because of the change we implemented to fix the Defense issue above. Therefore the other player now has the game under complete control. At this point, my group was extremely frustrated that we went through 4 different game ideas and all of them had so many problems. So we decided to scratch the whole idea and start one a completely new and fresh idea. We concluded that the previous game lacked proper decision-making elements as well as having very poor movement mechanics. Player Elimination was also ruled out to ensure every player gets to play and not feel left out.
To fix the first problem of decision-making, Tristan and I suggested that we go back to the Action Point Based system for movement as it gave players the option to move around and gather the dragons they desired rather than HOPE to land on a dragon. I also proposed to add in effects for each dragon to make players decide whether acquiring a specific dragon was worth it or not. The idea was to incorporate Simultaneous Action Selection into our game. Similar to Rock-Paper-Scissors, dragons now have elements such as Fire, Water, Earth and Lightning where some elements are stronger than others. I believed that since each dragon was unique, players would need to decide which is the best. However, I started to realise a few problems. For one, we were unintentionally bringing back Player Elimination which we initially decided we should stay away from because getting eliminated meant that a player would sit there and do nothing for the rest of the game. There was also no incentive for players to attack each other since both players would take damage anyway. So as the defender, there was no a clear drawback to playing a specific card because you wouldn't know how to counter it anyway. This could also lead to the problem that some players would hang back and wait for other players to burn their cards first and kill them off when they are vulnerable since playing a card meant discarding it. Another factor was that beating a player was almost entirely luck-based since it was a simultaneous action when challenging someone. So there was now a chance that a player gets completely crushed out of sheer luck. There was no way for a player to play well because of this. Which brought back the problem we were trying to fix in the first place, the lack of decision-making elements. All problems above were emphasized when we started play testing this version. A new problem also cropped up, the Action Point Based movement did not make the game feel any better. Sure players were no longer confined to their own corners of the map, but when a player has to spend their Action points travelling ACROSS the map just to challenge somebody and only have a 1/4 Chance to deal significant damage and gain the upper hand, it felt awful. We felt stuck yet again, but fortunately we received some advice on how to continue this idea. We could turn this into a 1 vs 1 Card game. It would eliminate the movement problem and we could add effects to the dragons which could possibly promote decision-making from players. Hence we decided to move to this idea and drop the board game concept. The next idea started with GK, it was a modification to our first idea. We kept the 12 by 12 board but changed some of the mechanics of the game.
The new mechanics were Roll and Move and Dice Rolling. Area Control, Action Point Based and Player Elimination were no longer the main focus of the game. The goal of the game now was to collect as many points as possible by capturing dragons on the map. Movement and combat was decided with dice. I suggested that we adjusted the way the Player vs Player interaction was going to work. Rather than damaging a player, it should force them to restart back at a spawn location. This should give players opportunities to stop opponents from capturing dragons while also ensuring players cannot immediately retaliate on the next turn. The first issue that I pointed out with this game was the rate at which players gained could capture dragons. It was too slow in the beginning and ramped up way TOO fast. We tweaked this by adjusting the level of the player which decides how fast you capture a dragon. After capturing a dragon, we divided experience earned by 2 to slow down the speed at which players leveled up to slow down the game. The next issue I figured out was that it was EXTREMELY boring for a player to wait on a tile to finally capture a dragon. Since you have to wait and watch other players try to capture their own dragon as well, it becomes a game of looking at each other and passing turns constantly. So I recommended we add some power cards into the mix. These cards would give players the ability to mess with another player and delay that player. An example would be forcefully shifting a player one tile, which would interrupt the capturing of a dragon. I believe my suggestion should give players incentives to go for lower tier dragons first instead of jumping to an extremely high level at the beginning. It would take lesser turns to claim the dragon and players are less likely to try and capture a high level dragon for fear that they would be interrupted by other players. While we were on the topic of ability cards, I suggested perhaps we add in other ability cards as well, to change things up. So we added cards such as "Re-roll your dice" to give players more meaningful decisions during the game. We begun play testing this version of the game and ran into several problems. The first issue we ran into was that no matter which dragon a player lands on, no strategy was needed. It was a no-brainer since players needed points to win anyway and hence would go for ANY dragon they landed on as there was no drawback. This made the game feel like an activity since not much thought was needed to play the game as players were just going through the motion of rolling the die and HOPING that they landed on a dragon, no decision making was involved. The next point would be because of the dice, players would get stuck at the starting corners. We did not realise that having an equal dice roll would cause players to constantly be stuck near the starting area and not be able to roam out onto the board. This made the game very boring because yet again, players were just HOPING they had a good dice roll. Even with the added cards that allowed players to re-roll, it felt like a futile effort trying to reach dragons since there was a chance you would NEVER land on a dragon RIGHT NEXT TO YOU. On top of this, when you finally reached a dragon, if a player decides to move you, it makes your efforts feel even more in vain. With these two problems in mind, we went back to discuss on how we could possibly fix these problems. I thought up a game concept that involved Player vs Player and Exploration of a map. I shared my idea with the rest of my group and we built on the game from the rough description I gave.
The main mechanics in the game were Action Point Based, Area Control and Player Elimination. We settled on a 12x12 board which players could explore, fight other players, capture different points on the map or conquer the center of the map. Why I gave players Action Points to explore the map was because I feel it should be up to the player to decide where they want to explore first. After all this freedom of choice is what draws me as a gamer to exploration games in the first place. I proposed that as players explore the map, they can choose to go for different events such as fighting Monsters or finding treasure chests. These events would provide players with rewards to better combat the other players. However, these events could possibly cause players to lose something in exchange for the reward. This should make players decide whether the risk was worth the reward. To promote Player interaction, I suggested we implement chests scattered around the map containing "Legendary Weapons". They would give players a HUGE advantage over other players. I felt that this incentive should increase player interaction since players would be fighting over the "Legendary Weapons". Our next agenda is to balance the Damage, Heath and Range. We compared Damage with Health and realised players were dying too quickly and hence, buffed the player Health Pool to compensate for this. We then drew out how Range would look like on a diagram. The result was ridiculous as various Range upgrades led to players being able to cover the whole map. Hence, we toned down the range values to make Range more realistic. We proceeded to add Characters with perks afterwards. Unfortunately, while adding the Characters, we realised that the issues we had previously with Damage, Heath and Range came back. Not only that, there was a Merchant who we were planning on adding needed balancing as well. The upgrades the Merchant provided were over-tuned and placing him on the map was extremely difficult to make fair for all players. It was also around this time that we realised we had not given the different capture points around the map and conquering of the center much thought yet. This was were we drew the line for the first iteration as we realised we were running into an increasing amount of balancing issues. So before it got out of hand, we decided to switch game ideas. |
Ryan TanI'll list down my Game Projects here!. ArchivesCategories |