Concept 4
Therefore, we decided to change the game into a 1v1 card game. How this game ran was that players would draw 4 cards at the start of the round and you could choose to attack, defend or support with your cards. Attacking still used the simultaneous selection and type effectiveness to deal damage. Having a card on defense allowed you to swap out with the attacking cards in case you did not like the match up. Support allowed you to use the card for more utility, such as drawing cards and damage mitigation. For this concept, I mainly tried to balance the various effects as well as give my input while play-testing and an issues that me and the rest of my team found was hand management. We soon found that to be a big problem as there was not much way to refill your hand unless you found one of the draw cards. Basically, the game was just a race to see who would lose first by exhausting their hand. We tried various measures to counteract this such as the defender of an attack would take their card back while the attacker would discard or variants of this such as the defender and attacker would discard their initial cards and draw a new card. However, these solutions also opened up new problems. In the case of the defender keeping their card after getting attacked, if the defense was an Elder Dragon, the strongest card in the game, the defender would just keep spamming that card in defense. Other options we explored included creating a tier system of dragons (lesser, normal, greater). The different tiers of dragons would also have stronger support effects while having stronger attacks. However, I feel that the problem with this option was that the lesser dragons felt really bad to draw which also brought about balancing problems and it also did not change the problem with the hand running out. We also tried an evolution system where elements could be combined to created stronger elements but we ran into problems with type effectiveness and it also did not really feel like it could be used in the game while play-testing. We also faced problems with the defense system. During play-testing, players would just keep their cards in their hand for the defense against an attack and not place it down for defense. When asked why, they said if the defense card was going to die, it was more worth it to play it from your hand and get it back after defense rather than use the place down defense and lose the card entirely. Eventually, we even had to scrap the defense feature all together. Similar to all of us our previous concepts, the game felt like it was extremely hard to make it feel fun and strategy as well as balance it so that nothing felt overpowered. To slow down the game, Ryan also suggested that we try to use a charge mana system where you can spend a card to charge a mana which allowed you to play a card so you had to balance between charging your mana and attacking/using utility. At first, we had element specific mana, so if you charged mana with a lightning card, you had one lightning mana to play a lightning card. Later on, we changed it to all-purpose mana as the elemental mana felt restricting. However, in the end, the mana system did not bring much strategic elements to the game as there was no reason not to charge at least one mana a turn. Overall, one big problem we also faced was that the game just did not feel fun. There was already not much strategy involved as it felt like just putting down cards to fill out the turn instead of thinking of cool ways to outsmart the opponent. The main reason we felt like this while play-testing was that the dragons did not really feel differentiated from each other so it just felt like you were doing the same thing over and over again which made the game not feel fun and instead made it feel like a boring game. At the end of it all, the game just felt like putting down cards till your hand was empty and then if your opponent somehow manages to draw a card draw, it gave a feeling of 'I guess I lose' and that you could not really do much to stop it.
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August 2018
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