Board Game Balancing

Short update this week, just about the board game prototype and the changes made to it. The biggest change is to the turn based structure: we are making it so that all the players take their turn at the same time. This will make it a closer imitation to the real time video game version, and allows some more strategies.

There is an obvious dominant strategy to our game as it stands now. That strategy is to race to the middle of the board, where there is a corner that enemies can only come at the players from 2 directions. One of the directions can be blocked up using the Engineer's special ability, and the other direction can be covered fairly effectively by the Assault, Sniper and Engineer shooting enemies. This also makes it so that the Medic spends their every turn healing the player who needs it most.

To help make playing the Medic more fun, we were also thinking of changing the Medic's special so that it heals a set number of hp, instead of full recovery, and allowing the Medic to shoot that turn as well.

And lastly, the blue enemies are useless. The way the game is made, is that Red's do 2 damage, Green's move 4 tiles and have 10 hp, and Blue's have 30 hp (where a hypothetical blank enemy would have 1 attack, 2 movement, 20 hp, and 2 range). This makes them have only one use, and that is as a shield for the Engineer to capture and block off that entrance. Maybe giving the Blue's longer range on their attacks would make them more dangerous. The proposed change to Blue's is to give them the base hp but 4 range on their attacks, this would force players to leave their corner to attack them, adding another element of risk and choice to the game.

a slightly toasted update

With everybody in the group busy pulling all nighters trying to finish the piles of assignments, the group has only made a little progress in the game over this past week. Here are some of the things our group has been working on:

Our programmer has worked on coding the enemy movement as well as finding target using A*. Other members are working on finishing up the board game prototype, making some game bits and typing up the rules before we meet up and play the game again. Other members are working as fast as they can to finish up the character models so that we can start the rigging process.

For game design, we are looking into things such as how can we create design patterns that will keep the players engaged in our game. We are discussing other things such as how we can design/implement the multiplayer system in order to keep everybody engaged so that nobody gets left behind whether they play a single or multiplayer game. We are also spending some time discussing the aesthetics of the game and how we can make it more visually appealing to players.

Since we have a networking assignment due, hopefully we will soon have basic chat functionality working in the game, which will be a good start for programming the networking portion of this game. Other than that, the group is hoping to have the board game prototype finished, the models finished and rigging process started, the chat function working, and the sounds recording started by the end of this month. Hopefully finishing all this by the end of February will help keep the group on track to finishing this game on time.

Board Game Night!

Our first version of the board game was completed this week so we took some time during our meeting to try out the board game version of 'Endless'. Here are some pictures:

The initial set up

This is what happens when you don't plan out your strategy early on

Basically the chess pieces are the players, and every turn they get 3 moves + the option to attack or use their special ability (assuming the cool down period is not active). The poker pieces are the robots. Each color represents a different type of enemy (some can move 3 spaces instead of 2, some have extra health, some deal extra damage).

As with all initial versions of games, there are problems, and these will eventually be worked out. Some of the stuff we are discussing for the board game include:
- Increasing HP for the 4 characters
- Should the medic be given the revive ability?
- Should the medic fully restore the HP of a team member or a set amount of HP when they use the heal ability?
- Should KO'd players really be allowed to play as part of the robots once they die?

In the one we played, all the characters had low HP and no revive ability. On top of that, once somebody died, they would play for the robot team (now, every turn, instead of 4 robots spawning, there are 8 because of the 2nd player, or 12 because of the 3rd player).

In other news, the team is making good progress in the GDW game. One important part of developing the game later on will be balancing. The recent homework assignment we got was a good boost as it helped us design a game mechanic and everybody in the group did something different.

Here you can see a screenshot from one of the prototypes. Here, the numbers were tweaked for the attack damage, speed, and enemy's health. This will come in handy later on for figuring out the cost / benefit for some of the weapons in order to make sure none of them are too over or under powered. We are storing these in a chart in a document so that we can easily access them later on.

Another mechanic that was designed was the spawning of the enemies. The prototype had simple objects spawning, but it was good for testing the spawn rate and making sure they don't spawn too fast or too slow.

As you can see, the benefit of that assignment was great and this will definitely help in allowing us to tweak the game while we are working to get something up and running. This way, when the game is finally up and running, we can just throw the numbers into the game and don't need to waste time balancing it.

For these next few weeks there will probably be a bigger shift to creating the assets and programming the game. This is not to say that we will drop designing the game but rather just work on that as time permits. We are hoping to have another version of the board game done by next week as well as have more balancing and cost/benefit figured out.