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