Game Iterations and Prototypes

Mik and I were extremely productive with our design time this week.

Not that we aren't normally, its just that we're reaching the point in design where all our previous investigative work has paid off and we're seeing much larger leaps in development. We found a fantastic mechanic to keep hero decks feeling unique, methods to playtest and create villain decks, and9 developed a new classification system to help us rapidly balance the decks that we create.

With all this and the story that our writer—Dave Armstrong—has been creating, we came up with a complete functioning prototype from nothing within about 4 hours. This is iteration number 4 on our tank-class deck, but we've learned a lot on the way, and we're getting better and faster at creating decks that will make it into the final game. Our efforts have definitely paid off.

The most important feature we added in this most recent design session was that each deck will play cards in a unique way. Since these characters all have story and compelling features about them, this will be much easier to develop from the top-down and still make it fun. The primary mechanic in a card game is the act of playing a card, and what better way to make two decks feel completely different than to change the conditions that they play cards?

This came with counter-arguments, and rightly so. Once people learn how one character operates, they're going to have a tougher time learning another character's play mechanics. The counter-counter argument is that if they're playing a second game, then mission accomplished—they like our game to play another session. Furthermore, learning different aspects of a game can be fun, especially if we keep the play-card mechanic simple enough for people to pick up relatively quickly.

Mik came up with a fantastic method to develop a villain deck—instead of trying to create a villain deck beforehand and playtest to find that its not quite right, we're going to spend some quality time developing some sound hero decks, and then one person plays all the heroes while the other person plays the DM. After a few sessions, we'll try to find patterns in the level of difficulty that made playing fun, and then try to recreate an automated version of that. We're about halfway through developing the three characters, and I'm totally excited for that stage of playtesting.

One thing is for sure—bringing a story-writer on to the team was an incredibly valuable way to increase the fun of the game we're making. Mechanics only go so far to bring people into the game, and having something to work from makes the game feel so much richer than it did before.

--Jake

First playthrough

Friday Mik came up to Salt Lake and we had our much-anticipated first playthrough of the game, even though it was decidedly un-finished. I'm thoroughly glad we decided to playtest earlier rather than later, however, because not 5 minutes into the game, we stopped to talk about some of the things we were noticing, and we continued talking for a good 2 hours.

Immediately, things became apparent about how fun or not fun they were, and I was disappointed with how many things just weren't fun. The most notable thing was the "speed" mechanic. Initially this was a resource that would allow you to either play a card or use a power. Every player started out with one speed, which was the core of the problem. While "do one thing on your turn" was supposed to be what made the game simple and streamlined, it was frustrating because it became "develop your character or do something to fight". Furthermore, while neither of us started our hands with the extra action cards in the deck, it was very clear that having that card in your starting hand would be tremendously advantageous--so much so that we could both picture players thumbing through their decks to "coincidentally" put the action-getter cards close to the top of their decks. Not good.

Furthermore, the original idea of speed was far away from making the game simpler. Since you could use this resource in any time during your turn and it was an inherently flexible resource (we'd talked about using a speed to draw a card, as well), it made things more complicated, not less. The original idea was inspired by Ticket to Ride, where each player only chose one thing to do during their turn and moved on. While this concept worked beautifully for Ticket to Ride, our game was going to scale by adding more of these actions during your turn down the road. In this case, having 2 speed was not twice as complicated as having 1 speed, it was several times as complicated. Specifically, it was however many things a player could do with a speed brought to the power of how many speed that player had. If the player could play a card, draw a card, or use a power with one speed, thats a choice of three things. Now if they have that choice twice, they have an initial choice of three, followed by an additional choice of one of three things for each option of their initial choice. Having 5 speed would result in 243 combinations, which is more daunting than we wanted, especially for the vanilla characters.

Speed was our primary problem, but there were others, too. Since we had begun by porting character decks from other games to give us a starting point, the characters were not designed to work with the mechanics we'd developed. Specifically, we both found ourselves without sufficient outlets for the steam cards we were attempting to acquire. Furthermore, we found our hand size rapidly dwindling to nothing as we faithfully discarded our worst card at the beginning of every turn to gain steam to potentially use later.

Discarding the worst card of your hand to get something is not necessarily a bad thing, but we found that this just wasn't as fun as we'd hoped. Nobody wants to look at a hand of great cards and decide which one they want to axe for an activity they can only do once per turn (so you'd better not miss it). Furthermore, if there's a card in there that you'd prefer to discard because its not as great, why not just make that card better?

When World of Warcraft was in beta, the game slowed down hardcore players with plenty of time to dedicate to the game by lowering their experience rate after a certain amount of time. They called this "unrested experience", with the idea that your character wouldn't level up or learn as fast without some time to rest. It was received poorly, but the mechanic was sound, so Blizzard changed the mechanic to "rested experience", which instead gave casual players a bonus to the experience they got until the bonus was gone. This was applauded by players alike as a great mechanic, but in reality, the only thing that changed was the wording. Now, people feel like they're being rewarded instead of punished, and subtle changes in mechanics like these are what separates mediocre games from games that truly shine. I frequently refer to the unrested experience story in terms of player perception, and it was appropriate in how our game gave players the steam resource.

Instead of discarding a card at the end of your turn to get a steam, we decided on changing it to a choice of gaining a steam or drawing a card. Now, the player feels like its the end of their turn and they get to choose a reward. Ironically, this mechanic is actually worse for the player, because they don't get a chance to search for a better card and discard their worst, but we both agreed that it felt much better and rewarding.

Still, speed was quite problematic, and steam felt like an all-or-nothing resource depending on what kinds of cards you drew. To make the early game fun and not punishing for not having sufficient speed, we changed speed to a resource that would do more limited things: play a card, and rarely be required for abilities. Most activated abilities would now cost steam, but speed would still be the kind of thing that would only be used on your turn. Abilities that required speed would carry the unspoken question: "is using this ability worth sacrificing a card drop?"

Steam mounted really quickly when dealt the right cards, which was a problem because you had 8-12 permanent steam cards that would untap at the beginning of every turn. There were a couple things we did to address this. First, we moved the untap stage to the end of your turn instead of the beginning. While neither of us had seen a game that does that, the location of the untap phase primarily affects when you want the players to save their resources. Players tend to use all their resources right before they're refreshed, would we want players to save steam on their turn so they can use it later, or save steam on other player's turns so that they can have an awesome turn? Additionally, having resources vulnerable from the end of your turn, through the beginning of other players turn, and toward the beginning of your turn gives each player vulnerabilities that the villains can target without saying things like "target resource does not untap normally during your untap step". Now we can just say "tap a resource" and you're not able to use it until the round after your next round.

Finally, we ended up changing what we called the resources. Steam was feeling more like something you got paid in, and we switched to calling that particular resource money instead. Everyone understands how some villains would target their money, but it was always hard to picture somebody targeting steam and making sense. We still wanted steam, however, so now the "play card" resource is steam instead of speed. Speed is gone, which is fine with me--I called it "actions" probably 80% of the time, anyway. Since we're calling it money now, we changed the way that it operates slightly: when you spend money, you don't get it back, and you now have cards that are "contracts"-- permanents that give you additional money per turn. Players can choose to draw a card or get a one-time pay at the end of their turn.

There were a few things that ended up working very well, like the doom-track method of attacks and villain draws. We were both stoked that that turned out just as well as we anticipated, and we're looking forward to really making some interesting things happen with it.

Physical Prototype

Changing gears from conceptual design to a physical prototype brings challenges that you might not initially think about. With a card game specifically, you're essentially creating the entire game before you can playtest anything. That means that you're going to have to spend a lot of time writing things out on cardstock, or spend time on a formatting program to work on printing out the cards.

Today, Mik and I spent more time than we anticipated just trying to get the physical prototype in order. Having done all the work and everything laid out in spreadsheets made this process easier, but didn't remove all the gruntwork that stood between us and our first playthrough.

Not surprisingly, we're both anxious to start. We're at the point in design where nearly every conversation ends with something along the lines of "well, we won't be able to tell which is better until we play test it", and being at that point is really exciting. So far, we have decks completed for vanilla ADC, Support, and Tank characters, even with roughly cohesive deck themes (Raymund the Electronaut, Temper the Boilerman, and the Gentleman, respectively). With the last few minutes of development today, we printed out a slightly unfinished version of the campaign one/game one villain deck, the Spiderlings.

Recently, we've also been surprised at how much effort creating a unified and cohesive villain has been. Making heroes was relatively easy because its everything that we've wanted in a co-operative deck building game. The villain, however, has proved particularly challenging because it's essentially the entire game. We can't make the villain too easy or the game won't be fun, but if we make it too hard the game won't be winnable, which is even less fun. On top of that balance, we have to give the players interesting choices to reward them for optimizing their hero's abilities, but not restrict them to such a narrow set of plays that they have no choice in what to play. It's quite the line we have to walk.

For now, we're just anxious to start playtesting. We both expect a large amount of rule-changes after playing, and we're hoping that those rule changes won't have to include axing some of our favorite aspects of the game.

-Jake