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.