Today we took the whole day to work on the game. The overall plan was to have a playable core system by the time we went home.
Before everyone had a chance to get on site we discussed a little about the alignment concept.
The first iteration: Test the movement system.
Ever player gets one action per turn.
Movement is an action. If the player moves into an empty space, place a new tile. Otherwise just move into an existing tile. A tile must be placed so that the player can move into the tile. Every round (when all players have taken a turn)
Daniel mentions it would be an interesting idea if the player received an alignment when the game is over, based on how the player has played the game.
Simon thinks it's a weird idea and rather think and that you should get an alignment from the beginning, adding more dynamic.
Andreas says he can see the potential if you get a alignment based on how they played but also think it might be confusing.
It's discussed how the alignments is to be used in the game. Andreas mentions that it would feel strange if you had to be role-playing. He thinks the mechanics should be affected by what alignment you have, clear choices.
Andreas makes a connection between weakness and alignment.
You are playing against the game (pandemic, forbidden island).
We sort the cards to make a pool that we can use and expand the game as we go from iteration to iteration.
We discuss the choices in the game.
Andreas think that choices should be clear. E.g. a card, "chose A, B, or C". Not " role-playing choices", like "I have climbed up the cliff and now chooses to abandon and not help the other up".
Daniel agrees.
Andreas has thought of a coordinate system for the placement and movement of other tokens.
Iteration #0
The idea was to start and try playing the game at 1/4 the current board-size and expand as we go. But it was obvious it was too small to begin with and we used the full size instead.
At the start of the players round you decide where to go. If there is no tile already placed at the destination the player draws a tile and put in a legitimate way. The player decides the orientation of the tile, but the player has to be able to step onto the tile.
We start by having all the cards in a pile and take one from the top.
Cards thrown away are put in a discard pile .
Iteration #1
What happens if you get to a passage leading into a wall against another room? Will it be a dead-end or does it lead under the room to the other side?
For now, it's a dead end.
We interpret "event room" as regular rooms.
When the discards are mixed into the draw pile, it is MIXED into it, not just added to the bottom. The discards are mixed in after each round.
Andreas suggests that the discard pile is to be mixed in only when the draw pile is out of cars ( like any other game). Well be tested.
6 players must have 66 tiles.
num_players * 9 squares + starting_tile (1) + tangent_tiles (surrounding the starting tile) (10)
f (x) = y = 9x + 11
Iteration #2
1 exit less than the number of players. A maximum of 3 exits.
Iteration #3
Should you have a "vision" and be able to see the adjacent rooms, in a cross shape, if all tiles allows it (visuals through corridors) or should you have a "local knowledge" about the 8 surrounding tiles.
We went with the "cross vision", until further.
Iteration #4
All exits are in the discard pile from start so you don't stumble upon it the first thing you do.
Iteration #5
We mark a set of "basic" cards with the number 2 to indicate that they are for at least 2 players.
For each player (3 and up) a set of 9 tiles are added to the deck (marked 3, 4, etc..)
Iteration #6
The implementation of food.
Daniel says that it gives a sense of time, so that you must do something.
There will be a finite amount of resource.
Food can be shared with other characters.
Victor thinks that your food/energy level should be secret and that challenges costs food.
Daniel thinks that eating prevent you to become weaker. If you do not eat, you have to roll a dice that will lower your stats.
Daniel says that all Challenges will be easier if the characters collaborate. Encourage to help each other and sharing food.
Andreas mentions meeting #2 where there was talk about food.
"Food cards, eat mushrooms, roots, animal etc. Flip the cards to see if the food was toxic or not."
Andreas adds that you could wait a few rounds to reveal side effects.
Daniel think you should be able to cook the food to avoid poisoning. This kind of thing can give depth to the game.
Iteration #7
Daniel thinks we can implement some sort of meter, for each character, that will drop for each round if you do not eat anything.
We create a "character card" with a meter (1-10). The meter has been directly linked to the food. However, we haven't decided what it does so far.
Should we use dice or a card system?
When you resolve challenges should you roll you as many dice as you have energy/food?
Andreas think a character could prefer a special type of food , like mushrooms , roots , meat, veg , GI, etc. Daniel says "carnivore", "herbivore" and "omnivore".
Different characters benefit more from different types of food.
Daniel says, that if one gets ill and vomit, maybe you lose two levels of food or so.
We discuss an item system.
Find the stick, that is useless, but can combine with a poisonous spider.
Discussing Terror
Overkill penalty? Speaking of terror and overreact to something that was harmless.
Simon has an idea that when a player dies, you turn the character card. That player now control the terror.
Iteration #8
We are trying to expand the power meter to from 1-10 to 1-20 so the players don't starve so fast.
Tiles surrounding the starting tile will be removed when out of visual range.
Do we need the start-tile once the game is on?
- 1 action per round.
- 1 round = all players made X actions.
Move one square. Left , right , up, down .
Put out a tile if there is no where you are going.
You have to put the tile so that you can move onto it (if possible)
- Lost of vision!
Remove tiles that are longer than 1 square away. ( Right , left, up , down)
- Food
You start with 20 energy/food.
For each round, you loose 1 energy/food.
If you eat a food ration, you get two energy/food.
When the energy/food marker reaches 0, you die.
You get to eat X number of food per round.
If there's an black tile, you can not go into it. It's just a solid wall, no movement occurs.
Ever player gets one action per turn.
Movement is an action. If the player moves into an empty space, place a new tile. Otherwise just move into an existing tile. A tile must be placed so that the player can move into the tile. Every round (when all players have taken a turn)
Notes during the day:
We're talking about weather or not a character should have alignment in the game.Daniel mentions it would be an interesting idea if the player received an alignment when the game is over, based on how the player has played the game.
Simon thinks it's a weird idea and rather think and that you should get an alignment from the beginning, adding more dynamic.
Andreas says he can see the potential if you get a alignment based on how they played but also think it might be confusing.
It's discussed how the alignments is to be used in the game. Andreas mentions that it would feel strange if you had to be role-playing. He thinks the mechanics should be affected by what alignment you have, clear choices.
Andreas makes a connection between weakness and alignment.
You are playing against the game (pandemic, forbidden island).
We sort the cards to make a pool that we can use and expand the game as we go from iteration to iteration.
We discuss the choices in the game.
Andreas think that choices should be clear. E.g. a card, "chose A, B, or C". Not " role-playing choices", like "I have climbed up the cliff and now chooses to abandon and not help the other up".
Daniel agrees.
Andreas has thought of a coordinate system for the placement and movement of other tokens.
Iteration #0
The idea was to start and try playing the game at 1/4 the current board-size and expand as we go. But it was obvious it was too small to begin with and we used the full size instead.
At the start of the players round you decide where to go. If there is no tile already placed at the destination the player draws a tile and put in a legitimate way. The player decides the orientation of the tile, but the player has to be able to step onto the tile.
We start by having all the cards in a pile and take one from the top.
Cards thrown away are put in a discard pile .
Iteration #1
What happens if you get to a passage leading into a wall against another room? Will it be a dead-end or does it lead under the room to the other side?
For now, it's a dead end.
We interpret "event room" as regular rooms.
When the discards are mixed into the draw pile, it is MIXED into it, not just added to the bottom. The discards are mixed in after each round.
Andreas suggests that the discard pile is to be mixed in only when the draw pile is out of cars ( like any other game). Well be tested.
6 players must have 66 tiles.
num_players * 9 squares + starting_tile (1) + tangent_tiles (surrounding the starting tile) (10)
f (x) = y = 9x + 11
Iteration #2
1 exit less than the number of players. A maximum of 3 exits.
Iteration #3
Should you have a "vision" and be able to see the adjacent rooms, in a cross shape, if all tiles allows it (visuals through corridors) or should you have a "local knowledge" about the 8 surrounding tiles.
We went with the "cross vision", until further.
Iteration #4
All exits are in the discard pile from start so you don't stumble upon it the first thing you do.
Iteration #5
We mark a set of "basic" cards with the number 2 to indicate that they are for at least 2 players.
For each player (3 and up) a set of 9 tiles are added to the deck (marked 3, 4, etc..)
Iteration #6
The implementation of food.
Daniel says that it gives a sense of time, so that you must do something.
There will be a finite amount of resource.
Food can be shared with other characters.
Victor thinks that your food/energy level should be secret and that challenges costs food.
Daniel thinks that eating prevent you to become weaker. If you do not eat, you have to roll a dice that will lower your stats.
Daniel says that all Challenges will be easier if the characters collaborate. Encourage to help each other and sharing food.
Andreas mentions meeting #2 where there was talk about food.
"Food cards, eat mushrooms, roots, animal etc. Flip the cards to see if the food was toxic or not."
Andreas adds that you could wait a few rounds to reveal side effects.
Daniel think you should be able to cook the food to avoid poisoning. This kind of thing can give depth to the game.
Iteration #7
Daniel thinks we can implement some sort of meter, for each character, that will drop for each round if you do not eat anything.
We create a "character card" with a meter (1-10). The meter has been directly linked to the food. However, we haven't decided what it does so far.
Should we use dice or a card system?
When you resolve challenges should you roll you as many dice as you have energy/food?
Andreas think a character could prefer a special type of food , like mushrooms , roots , meat, veg , GI, etc. Daniel says "carnivore", "herbivore" and "omnivore".
Different characters benefit more from different types of food.
Daniel says, that if one gets ill and vomit, maybe you lose two levels of food or so.
We discuss an item system.
Find the stick, that is useless, but can combine with a poisonous spider.
Discussing Terror
Overkill penalty? Speaking of terror and overreact to something that was harmless.
Simon has an idea that when a player dies, you turn the character card. That player now control the terror.
Iteration #8
We are trying to expand the power meter to from 1-10 to 1-20 so the players don't starve so fast.
Tiles surrounding the starting tile will be removed when out of visual range.
Do we need the start-tile once the game is on?
Rules so far:
- You can pass.- 1 action per round.
- 1 round = all players made X actions.
Actions:
- MovementMove one square. Left , right , up, down .
Put out a tile if there is no where you are going.
You have to put the tile so that you can move onto it (if possible)
- Lost of vision!
Remove tiles that are longer than 1 square away. ( Right , left, up , down)
- Food
You start with 20 energy/food.
For each round, you loose 1 energy/food.
If you eat a food ration, you get two energy/food.
When the energy/food marker reaches 0, you die.
You get to eat X number of food per round.
If there's an black tile, you can not go into it. It's just a solid wall, no movement occurs.
Hey, we playtested your game during the play-testing session before and we have some notes :)
SvaraRaderaIt's very unclear where you could go on certain tiles. It's just a matter of graphical design but some parts of the tiles made it seem that you could go there (e.g. up) while a developer then explicitely told us we couldn't.
There are also (during our playtest) to many dead-ends, especially for a certain duration where a player was 'stuck', juggling back and forth between dead-ends, which take a very long time to get out off.
We would like to see more encounters. As it was when we played there were very few encounter, and we got the idea that there might be suprise encounters that appear when you reveal a tile.
There was a certain card that depicted a fire that got us thinking that there should be some sort of meaning behind what is on each tile. For example there was one card that we were told was an hermit and nothing else. Maybe the hermit could give food or something alike.
The 'mentality' resource felt unnecessary. The only time anything had to do with it was when one player got paranoia, and even then it was useless as the game was over quite quickly after that. Either give mentality a bigger scope or scrap it.
We got a sense that the game implied co-op, but no design made for it. There was no real reason to help each other with food or paranoia if only a single player was victorious once the exit was found. That player then had no obligation to ensure the safety of the other team members. One cause for this may be that the exit is random, and once a player finds it he/she wins. Perhaps if there was more team-oriented events and that the exit required the combined effort of the whole party.
Also the idea of characterizing each player by giving them names and titles is nifty, but it needs more. Perhaps give each character specific perks, such as that the chef heal for 2x, or that the adventurer can see for longer distances.
We really enjoyed the dynamic world and how it unfolded as we player through. The way you could re-discover new tiles on a previously explored coordinate by shrouding it in darkness and then returning to it was very interesting and added a certain feel to being lost and seeking new challenges. There was also a great variation of tiles available that prolonged the excitment, which was neat.
Here's some more feedback!
SvaraRaderaWhen we tried your game we thought that the basic concept of a group of players being stuck in a dungeon and being forced to cooperate was interesting. Once we played the game we thought that you haven’t really captured the feeling of cooperation. As we played we never felt that we needed each other. The players didn’t have any specific goal either, so every player just started to move in different directions to collect event cards. Players didn’t want to follow anyone else, since the player in the lead would take all the event cards before they could reach them.
All players also had a profession like chef, thief or archeologist. When we played the game these professions had no meaning. We think it would be more interesting if you added different bonuses depending on profession. Maybe the chefs food will heal more and the thief could steal food from other players. You could also add some weaknesses that would increase the cooperation, since the players would need each other’s bonuses to survive.
The players had both a health meter and a mental meter. Since the health meter started at 20 it took a long time before you had to worry. The health decreased with one point each turn, but we think that it would be better if the health was lower to begin with. Maybe you could try ten points and see what happens. We didn’t have any use of the mental meter. If you feel that you want to keep it, make it important.
Also, if the game is about exploring, the dungeon should not change after the players have already discovered it. If you want the explored part of the dungeon to change, give us a reason to why that happens. Otherwise, just turn the path cards up-side-down when the player is too far away. This way the players have to use their memory to remember which way a specific path goes. This will increase the cooperation even more, since players might help each other to remember different paths.
It’s an interesting concept and it would be fun to play it again once you have a final version.
/ Group 5