The After Math

So today is Dday, and we've put our game up for the lower years to play; not as smooth as I had imagined. The main cause of the problem was lack of play testing after major changes had been made. This resulted in a pretty bumpy experience for both our team, and the players. We weren't able to project our game easy enough for people to simply just 'Pick up and Play' so to speak. The game is based on teamplay and tactics, meaning a lot of people new to the game, and new to the rules wouldn't have been able to create strategy whilst still taking in the rules for the first time. The first problem of the play test was appeal. Our game was situated towards the back of the room, and our game has always revolved more around the concept and strategy of the game as an oppose to the look of our board. We we're relatively happy with the board for it's purpose, with more time we would have produced a more visually striking board, but with the smallest group in the class and such a small project, time kinda crept up on us. As people flooded in to play the games, people naturally started to crowed around the games situated at the front, heading mainly towards the boards with a more 3D plain. I've never considered the other teams board design to be better than our own until today, purely because it worked. They had all the attention without having to move; people just turned up to play without knowing about their battle system, without knowing of their move systems. I kinda got so lost in the idea of a balanced game, with interesting mechanics, I forgot that we live in a world where cosmetics are key. Regardless of who's game was better thought about, or more finely tuned in terms of skill, and gameplay. Whether they intended for it to happen or not, they won on marketing.

The second factor that put people off was the level of information each person had to consume before they even thought about playing the game. This had never crossed my mind before because I've been working around this game for the past 3 weeks, and the rules are second nature to me, after all I made them. The problem was that people had to pick up 3 weeks worth of idea generation for a game we unknowingly tailored for a specific audience, and then remember it all throughout the game to play the best they could. In a nutshell, the wasn't remotely noob friendly. On a brighter note, we were fortunate to get a group of players that were patient enough to sit through the rules of the game, and eventually got the game going the way we intented. From a spectators perspective, the players seemed to be enjoying their game, but on top of that, it was enjoyable for me to watch people play. They laughed, joked and generally had a good time, giving us brilliant feedback, not only positive, but contructive too. They noted that the rules had taken too long to read before starting, and that there were a few skills that needed tweaking, all things I had made a note of whilst the game was in progress. I'm still confident that the rules and game play is amongst the stronger half of the class, however the game has a pretty double edged learning curve. What I mean by this is; players found the learning curve too high, but once you got into it, the skill level of the game was appropriate, where people can play their own specs, the way they want, in a tactical team based board game. If the project were to continue, I would take the game forward, and remove some of the initial complication and confusion caused by the rules, whilst still trying to keep the complexity of the game



The main cure to games weakness is time, but then the question becomes "Did we not have enough time? Or did we simply not work fast enough?".

Switch Up

We took our game rules and mechanics to Drew and asked for his opinion on a few of our concepts. We began to explain the idea of our game, and I told him how, for me at least, the play test was a flop. We looked over our mechanics and discussed how they did or didn't work through feedback of the play test. The main thing that stood out to me was that each player chose the Double Damage comp of our optional teams, this kind of made the effort we put into thinking of utility specs pointless. Despite the utility builds having awesome skill sets for the game, the option to play the damage class for each player is too appealing. The way we've tried to prevent this from happening is to remove the option to choose a spec at the beginning of the game, and replace it with the option to build your own through tier skills, similar to how a talent tree would work. This gives the player a lot of choice to think about strategy before the game even begins. They can pick skills to counter their foes, they can stick to the full damage spec if they choose, or they can mix it up and bring map control as well as a source of damage. This is yet to be play tested but I believe this will change the way the game was played, and hopefully remove the mirrored game play that happened in our first play test.

Are You Not Entertained?!

So we gave our game a play test and in response to the title, the answer is no, I wasn't. For me the game was very boring, there was no dynamic game play, no real entertainment. It was kind of like playing monopoly when you're so far behind that rolling the die feels more like a chore. However we did find out that our game was at least balanced, in fact it was too balanced. To the point where which ever person went first usually won. It wasn't until after I realised we never involved our randomiser to the game, and without that random element there was no surprise to the game.

The way I believe this will be fixed will be to try the game again with damage multipliers determined by the randomiser, and maybe spice up the skills a little, by adding more map control abilities to see if it gives the players more of a strategic outlook on the game.

Let The Games Begin.

We spent a few hours thinking of skills based on out character cosmetics and characteristics whilst also thawing into consideration the balance of each team. We did this by giving characters of each team similar moves without being completely identical.

We came up with an interesting idea fr a skill related to a quick assassin type character where the player must first nominate a number from the die before rolling, and if the player was successful they would then assassinate the other hero reducing hit points to 0. The idea behind this was the low probability of a person rolling their nominated number in exchange for a very high chance of losing a turn for nothing. When we asked Dean for his opinion he pointed out a few flaws in the skill. First of all that there would be no chance for the other player to defend themselves from the attack, resulting in what would appear to be an unfair death. The second and most important thing pointed out was the risk/ reward ratio was off (like I mentioned before, "for every action the must be an equal and opposite reaction"). One thing that Dean suggested was to increase the penalty for missing, and the way he suggested this was to have the player lose all their own hit points if the miss. Though I liked the mechanic, I now thought that the risk far out weighed the reward at at 1/6 or even a 1/10 (without taking in to consideration the player must first nominate their own number adding a level of uncertainty to probability), in comparison to a 5/6 or a 9/10 chance of suicide. We spoke for a while about how the player would feel being on either end of the attack, and if the death would make the player feel cheated or not, then we began to discuss more mechanics to make the ability a bit more interesting and a bit more balanced. An idea that came up was making the ability inactive through the game until that specific character reached a critical level of hit points. Other members of the group didn't seem too enthusiastic about the idea, however I found this to be the perfect solution to the problem. This would remove the appeal to get in and try and insta-kill your opponent in the first few moves of the game, it lowers the risk and keeps the reward the same to the person rolling by basically saying, "there's a high chance I will die if I don't do anything, this is my last chance". This gives the player an all or nothing move that can't be used to disrupt the earlier stages of the game.

Tightrope Is Hard For A Reason.

We started thinking about our game and what we wanted it to be like. We already decided that it was going be a board game set on a grid of some sort, in which a player moves based on a number relevant to the class they're playing, however the combat system was something we had to get our heads round. After much discussion, we started talking about the way games are balanced in the MOBA genre. Now some of you may be wondering what MOBA is? Well it stands for "Multiplayer Online Battle Arena", something I consider relatively new in the gaming world, with only 3 major named games out there (DotA- Defence of the Ancients, LoL- League of Legends, and HoN- Heroes of Newerth). I only discovered the MOBA genre early this year, and soon became addicted to the competitive, versatile, and balanced game play. 

I only play LoL out of the 3 listed earlier, so it's the only one I can give real insight into, however the idea of the game is to battle it out over a period of time and eventually destroy the other teams base. The game consists of 2 teams of 5, each player has control over a single champion, that is then used to generate money though enemy minion and champion kills (champions controlled by other players). The gold is then spent to buy items to increase the stats of your character and grow stronger to specific situations. The idea is to take objectives to gain the upper hand, and eventually destroy the enemy Nexus for victory.

So let's get into the champions.

Each champion is equipped with 5 major skills that define them as a character. First of all they have something referred to as a 'Passive'. This is a unique trait that your champion has from the get go, that will provide you with a perk relevant to your characters skill set. Aside from this they also come with 4 different skills suited to your character, 3 of which can be unlocked as you start the game, and a 4th that can only be unlocked every 6 levels, this is referred to as your "Ultimate Ability", this is like your bread and butter ability that completely defines your champion.

You're now probably wondering what this has to do with anything? Well the main thing we want to give our player is choice. Choice provides more variation in how a player can play a game, as well as a player to think about what is best used in a situation. The way we wanted to do this was to take the skill set aspects of the MOBA games we play, and try and incorporate them into our own game.

"Lol so OP, That better get nerfed."

Fridays lesson we began to discuss archetypes in games, and how to establish balance within a PVP (Player Vs. Player) environment. We spoke about the balance of Rock, Paper, Scissors, and how that may also apply to games with what I call "The holy trinity" of classes- Warrior, Ranger, Mage. However in modern games there aren't only 3 classes any more, making the unbreakable game of R,P,S, ineffective. We were then shown the internet made game of Rock, Paper, Scissors, Lizard, Spock. (commonly referred to on The Big Bang Theory).

This is a closer representation of something you would find within a game. A single class may be effective against multiple other classes, but in return should be weak to an equal amount of different classes. As a fairly experienced PvP gamer, I know that the victor isn't always the person that picks the class that's statistically fit to win before the game starts, but this is all down to the balancing of the things in discussion, to ensure there isn't something that is impossible to lose with, in class referred to as the "I Win Button", most commonly referred to as "OP" or "Over Powered", in the gaming community.

The way to counter this as a member of the balance team (apart from a ridiculously large number of hours crunching numbers and making formulas), is to consider "For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction". This applies in PvP games, it's then up to the player to minimize the drawbacks of the reaction. For example, if a player has a move that he can use to do a serious amount of damage to another enemy, at the risk of being in a bad position to then be killed himself, the player must determine when the best possible time would be to use the ability, without then being caught out.

All of the things discussed I'm very familiar with within the games that I play, yet I never really realised how hard it is to create balance, whilst still keeping a game fun. I believe this will be the hardest task when creating our board game.

A Bit Of Nip & Tuck.

So we did a practise session with the green stuff to get used to sculpting on a tiny scale. Wasn't really that comfortable with it to begin with, I had a lot of issues with the green stuffs tendency to stick. I wasn't overly happy with the way my sleeping mat, and backpack came out, but I'm confident in pinning that to my unfamiliarity with the material we were modelling.

(Don't have the documents with me at home, so job for Monday> Insert picture here)

After doing that we were asked to create a face, which after the first 2 tasks I wasn't overly excited to do, however miraculously I managed to create something that resembles a face. I had a few issues with the shape of the face and the lack of cheekbones from the way I'd been holding it to sculpt features, but that turned around after a bit of minor reworking towards the end of the session.

(Insert other pictures here)