|
dhamster posted:I wanted to talk a bit about a game I mentioned I was working on a few pages ago. Sounds really neat! Have you done any solo playtesting to make sure that some of the basic mechanics work how you want? The footsies and mindgames are my favorite part of fighting games, but gently caress if i’m too unskilled to ever be able to get to that point. Do you have various (dis)advantages built into the skills / attacks, aside from their range?
|
#
?
Oct 4, 2016 21:33
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 17, 2024 01:14 |
|
|
CodfishCartographer posted:Sounds really neat! Have you done any solo playtesting to make sure that some of the basic mechanics work how you want? The footsies and mindgames are my favorite part of fighting games, but gently caress if i’m too unskilled to ever be able to get to that point. Do you have various (dis)advantages built into the skills / attacks, aside from their range? In a word, yes. Right now the stubbier attacks do less damage individually, but are faster and lead to bigger combos on a clean hit. The slowest, longest-range attack knocks down if it hits as your combat card, but it can't hit jumping opponents and gives the opponent momentum if it's blocked. The faster attacks have ways to give you the momentum if they're blocked, but are easier to evade. There are some other interactions in there too, and characters tend to build on that baseline. There's a shoto with a dragon punch and fireball, a slow grappler with super armor and a scary grab, and a noodly guy with a long reach, to name a few. Solo playtesting is a great idea. I should try playing against a dummy opponent using random combat cards, for instance.
|
|
#
?
Oct 5, 2016 02:58
|
|
|
Playing against random cards is a good idea, as is (sub)optimally playing both sides. Always solitaire your games before having anyone else try them out!
|
|
#
?
Oct 5, 2016 03:21
|
|
|
dhamster posted:fightmans  And to follow my own advice... One of my backburnered projects started as an attempt to capture the je ne sais quoi of SoulsBorne combat. I have no clue why, but for me that meant a Mage Knight-esque (but not really) card resolution system stapled to a time tracking system somewhat similar to CodfishCartographer's Behemoth with enemies being purely reactionary (to me this reflects their tells), and it was a solo game. How that worked out for enemies was that you would take an action taking, say, 5 time, they would then look at their action list and take the action closest to but under 5 time, and any unused time would carry over to their next turn. Say they had a 3 time and a 7 time action. On your first turn you take a 5 time action, and they respond with the three time action. You take another 5 time action and, now with the two carried over from the last turn, they take a 7 time action. So it played like a hand/resource management math problem. Which I was actually pretty happy with. But the randomness introduced by the card resolution system was frustrating me. Primarily because I kept losing to my own game due to unlucky shuffles. So I shelved it. I recently gave it a couple plays and found it still had the issues I remembered, namely a bad shuffle would mean you got all your defensive cards clogging your hand at once and would lose off luck alone. (As while there were basic actions you could use, they are so much less efficient than the cards that they aren't something you want to have to take.) So I went back to the drawing board for the card resolution system and cut down the cards from 15 to 10, made there be only 3 defensive cards (that merged the best aspects of the 6 old defensive cards) so you could no longer have a hand of only defensive options. I also redesigned the system so it can support multiple players. But I have yet to test it.
|
|
#
?
Oct 5, 2016 06:47
|
|
|
Nice! You should test it out some and post here about it. I love soulsborne so I'd be super stoked to see it done justice in tabletop form, since I'm not super confident in the official dark souls board game. Is it even out yet? Anyways, I'm not super clear on how your time delay system works. So on my turn I play a 4 time card, which immediately deals damage (or whatever). Then the enemy does a 2 time card which does its thing, then I can play a 6 time card? Could I not have played the 6 time card until I earned that difference? I'm not super sure how the time difference effects what I can (or can't) play.
|
|
#
?
Oct 5, 2016 15:07
|
|
|
CodfishCartographer posted:Anyways, I'm not super clear on how your time delay system works. So on my turn I play a 4 time card, which immediately deals damage (or whatever). Then the enemy does a 2 time card which does its thing, then I can play a 6 time card? Could I not have played the 6 time card until I earned that difference? I'm not super sure how the time difference effects what I can (or can't) play. I think he means that you can play any card you goddamn like, but each card gives the opponent an amount of "time" resource, which the AI immediately spends on the most expensive thing it can and banks the rest.
|
|
#
?
Oct 5, 2016 15:21
|
|
|
Playing against a random opponent was surprisingly difficult! I used random.org to select their card choices and tried to make the optimal move on my end, but the "AI" found ways to surprise me. Already found some things I want to tweak but it is looking alright so far. I'll report back when I'm ready to look for human playtesters. e: Specifically, the balance between different attacks seemed to work decently well, but blocks and throws aren't quite where I want them yet. Right now throws can beat everything else point blank on the ground, but don't let you move. That turned out to be a big drawback with double blind movement, so I'm going to try giving them a defined speed: really high when you stand still, fairly slow when you move. Attacks already operate similarly: they're a bit faster when you stay still, and slower when you jump. Anyway, I think this would be an improvement: throws will still punish up close attacks on a hard read, and you can walk up throw to punish blockers.. but you can be hit out of the latter if they disrespect it. Blocks aren't that useful yet, unless you are trying to buy time because you were knocked down or the opponent has momentum. That might actually be a good thing, but I might increase the number of situations that give momentum on block, or even allow a free counterattack when really unsafe moves are blocked. dhamster fucked around with this message at 17:06 on Oct 5, 2016 |
|
#
?
Oct 5, 2016 16:11
|
|
|
Yup, Gutter Owl has how it works out exactly right! I've slowly tinkered with how exactly the time resource manifests, so rules wise its a little different than that. Right now I'm using a turn tracker: Hunt Track posted:Each Agent has a place on the Hunt Track. Some, usually defensive, actions are Exhausting. Because they take place on the enemy's turn they both move you forward on the Hunt Track and make you lose your own turn (which just means that the enemy might have another chance to act after you took your turn, but depending on how much time your defense took it might not actually get to act) because of how enemies work: Enemy AI posted:When it is the Enemy’s turn they take the most expensive Action that will keep them behind all Players on the Hunt Track. (This means that the Enemy will always be last, or tied for last, on the Hunt Track.) Enemy AI posted:Pass I'm going to do a little testing now while thinking on how to incorporate multi-enemy combats (anyone have thoughts on this?) Then I'll post more about other systems.
|
|
#
?
Oct 5, 2016 16:53
|
|
|
Instead of breaking the representation of the hunt track, you should move the exhausted token ahead of the next token in line and give the enemy/player some "time tokens" to be spent later. Then it will always be clear whose turn it is, and no possibility of infinite loops, but the enemy can still bank their excess time.
|
|
#
?
Oct 5, 2016 20:16
|
|
|
That would work, I think, but I'm a bit wary of introducing more pieces than absolutely necessary as I want to make the enemies have as little bookkeeping as possible. (And there's already a bit behind tracking their health.) I think I can solve it by giving it a different trigger condition. Stalk Cost: 0 When calculating which Agent is last on the Hunt Track ignore this until after a Player acts. Which I think achieves what I want with the least amount of extra work. (And I think I actually had the problem backwards, as is multiple units vs player worked, but 1 v 1 it would allow players to get chain actions in an unintended way.) Another mechanic breakdown: Armor. As a Hunter, you wear Armor. Armor is great in that it not only weakens, or stops, enemy attacks but in that it also limits the total amount of damage that an enemy can inflict with a single attack. How this works is when you are subject to an attack you compare the attacks Power to your Armor Track, which might look like so: code:But aren't there some attacks that are so great that they overwhelm even the greatest of armors? Yes, sadly, there are such perils in the Hunt. For attacks that are inhumanely powerful you look to your armors Critical value. If an attack equals or exceeds this value you put the wounds it deals into your hand instead of your discard. That's right, Wounds are tracked as part of your deck, draw too many into your hand and you die. But hopefully with your armor on and wits about you that wont happen.
|
|
#
?
Oct 5, 2016 21:39
|
|
|
I really like that armor and wound system! The armor system is neat and reminds me a bit of how FATE accelerated deals with damage, and I love having junk cards being wounds. The critical number seems like it might be unnecessary though - why not just have it so of all three of an armor's tiers are broken, then it crits? Or maybe have specific weapons / attacks that deal damage directly to an opponent's hand or something? Idk throwing around ideas.
|
|
#
?
Oct 5, 2016 23:34
|
|
|
Thanks! It's an idea I've been mucking around with for quite a while, but every other place I tried to fit it into it just didn't work out properly, but here it seems to. The wounds clogging up hands I have to give the nod to Mage Knight for, as I'm pretty sure that's where the idea came from. But having Wounds in hand 'feels' very different here, as instead of it weakening your power, it more explicitly limits your possibilities, as you only play a max of one card per turn, and then draw up to your maximum hand size at the end of your turn, but if you ever have Wounds in hand equal to your characters Body attribute you die/lose. (Hand size is determined by your characters Mind attribute, for most, body can never be higher than mind... because otherwise you could only possibly die to a critical attack.) The critical number is actually something I'm using to mess around with the character identity (I have one character brainstormed that has a 1+ Critical threshold, so whenever they take wounds, they take them into hand, unless they use some tricks.) But it is somewhat ... clunky? I've also played around with the idea that some attack are Critical attacks and inflict critical wounds regardless of whether or not they exceed the critical threshold (as long as they would inflict wounds.) The action system is relatively straightforward. You pick one of the cards in your hand and choose to either play it for its Action or discard it to take a Basic Action. Basic Actions are weaker than actions, but you always have access to them, which can be critical. They are Rest, which discards your hand and sheds any negative conditions you might have accumulated, Sprint, which lets you avoid an enemy attack *if* they are on the same space on the Hunt track as you, and Punch, which lets you deal a little damage. I'm currently planning for these to be consistent across characters. The actual Action cards are character based. Currently each character has a ten card deck which has three copies of one card, two copies of three cards, and one copy of one card. The class I'm most focused on is the Knight, a heavily armored warrior who can shrug off lesser blows and, with careful use of the hunt track, block their opponents devastating attacks while steadily inflicting damage. To this end, they have three copies of Block, which costs a little time and guarantees they avoid an enemy attack, but unless they are on the same space on the Hunt Track as their foe they become Exhausted and lose their next turn. They have two copies each of Stab, Slash, and Swipe, which deal increasing damage for increasing time. Their one-of is Knight's Resolve, which lets them Recover like a rest while picking which cards, if any, they discard. Its usually not that good until after having taken a few wounds or when dealing with a boss fight, but Bosses are something I'll get to later.
|
|
#
?
Oct 6, 2016 01:02
|
|
|
I've been working more on my shooter miniature game. I'm walking a little bit away from the x-com inspiration, because I feel it doesn't fit in with the rest of the design. I did a test play against myself. I wrote about it more in-deph in my blog post (with some pictures) My main thoughts as take-away: The custom dice are pretty fun and have a pretty good variance to them. Not sure if it's too swingy, I might need to reduce the number of dice. I don't need the will stat. Trying to be more realistic with "breaking" rules just doesn't fit. Less complexity is better. Likewise, I don't think Accuracy does much. I forgot to use it the whole game. Also, there's enough dice being thrown, maybe too many (See #1) I'm not sure about action economy. This game I used a rule where you get 6 actions, and a maximum of 3 actions per unit. Two of those actions may be use for attacking. Most games seem to limit the number of attacks to 1, maybe 2 per unit, and maybe there's a good reason for this. I'm not sure about just allowing any action to be used for attacking. I'm not a huge fan of heroclix which penalizes moving units more than once on the same or consecutive turns. Maybe I'll "borrow" a mechanic I saw in another game someone is developing elsewhere where you can only attack 1/turn, but you can use additional actions to boost the accuracy with extra dice. I need to make overwatch more useful. Roll an additional die? I don't need multiple class levels (Rookie, Veteran, etc.). I think I want to go the more overwatch collection of badass heros in their own way thing, and just make it one level. E: Also, I keep going back and forth on building climbing. I was going to allow for any unit to climb at a slow rate, but this strikes me as a bad idea. I guess any unit can shoot at a unit on a building since if they are in LOS, the shooter will have LOS too, but it seems like it could be abused. This is another thing I've noticed is limited in most games, and I can see why it would be for a good reason. Foolster41 fucked around with this message at 03:30 on Oct 7, 2016 |
|
#
?
Oct 7, 2016 02:33
|
|
|
Foolster41 posted:I've been working more on my shooter miniature game. I'm walking a little bit away from the x-com inspiration, because I feel it doesn't fit in with the rest of the design. I did a test play against myself. I wrote about it more in-deph in my blog post (with some pictures) I think you are on the right track on simplifying! Just spitballing here, but I think it would make a lot of sense to define the squads/characters more and play with what they can do/what abilities they have. Looking at a big list of upgrades for squads/characters right off the bat doesn't seem like a very good introduction to the game when I'm not really sure whats going to be useful. As an aside, I always thought it would be cool if a wargame really limited the number of dice you roll. So if you had a squad of six guys you would get six dice that the player would have to commit on actions. It would cost a die to move the squad x inches, cost x dice (min. 1) to attack, and cost x dice (min. 1) to put the squad on overwatch. You can move/attack/overwatch with as many or as few dice as you like, but you only have those six dice to work with for that squad and they have to be locked in as groups so you couldn't chain them (ex: move-shoot-move-overwatch-shoot). Held another playtest of Porteur over the weekend and I got some wonderful feedback! I think I have too many swap ability cards, so now it's just narrowing the decks down a little and trimming the fat. If any of you guys are going to the Game Makers Guild playtest next week in Boston I'm going to be playtesting Porteur v.3 there. I'm also going to make a print and play version sometime this week so people can actually try it out without me having to cart the prototype around. Chip McFuck fucked around with this message at 18:46 on Oct 10, 2016 |
|
#
?
Oct 10, 2016 18:26
|
|
|
Chip McFuck posted:I think you are on the right track on simplifying! Just spitballing here, but I think it would make a lot of sense to define the squads/characters more and play with what they can do/what abilities they have. Looking at a big list of upgrades for squads/characters right off the bat doesn't seem like a very good introduction to the game when I'm not really sure whats going to be useful. So make prepackaged characters rather than super customizable characters? Yeah, maybe I should at least put together "quick-start" packages, and have the "build a hero" as an advanced rule. That makes sense. I've seen dice distribution as actions like that in another x-com inspired game that I've been test playing (where you roll for movement!). it's a neat mechanic. It might be tricky because of the math with my dice (Rolling 1 die for attack is just not practical), so it wouldn't be 1:1, but something to consider.
|
|
#
?
Oct 10, 2016 20:54
|
|
|
rchandra posted:Don't think you got a reply to this? This is incredible.
|
|
#
?
Oct 11, 2016 17:05
|
|
|
I hope nobody minds that I kind of use this thread as a design journal for Behemoth. sorry for posting huge dumps of  about it, hopefully someone finds this poo poo interesting! If people find it annoying I can cut it out / tone them down.Anyways, I’ve been getting Behemoth playtested more and more, and a strange thing has been happening as I’ve been improving the game - huge problems have cropped up. As I’ve gotten better at design, I’ve been able to tighten things up and trim away the fat, and as I’ve been doing so I’ve been noticing some cracks in the underlying structure of the game. Some of which are actually really drat substantial the more I’ve thought about them. So substantial that I’m feeling I might wind up rebuilding the game almost entirely. I know this is a pretty big step considering how highly I’ve talked about the game, but I think it’s needed in the long run - so may as well deal with it now. So, what are the problems? The Timer Track is really unnecessary. I was super thrilled when the thread helped me come up with the Timer Track mechanic - basically, using a Galaxy Trucker-esque track to determine turn order, with cards having differing “delay” values that would push you shorter or farther along the track, which would determine turn order. It’s definitely an interesting mechanic, but I don’t think it’s ultimately right for Behemoth. I thought about it, and I want the core gameplay of Behemoth to be about playing cool combos of cards. The core gameplay doesn’t really need the timer track to function - and if something isn’t needed in a game’s design, a strong argument stands for cutting it out. In theory, the timer track adds some neat decisions in how much time you want to commit to your attacks, but in practice it winds up being counter-intuitive: players want to use their best attacks and load up on as many attacks as they can! But that means they get delayed a huge amount and then need to wait 15-20 minutes for their next turn, which feels lovely. With a traditional resource to manage, players are limited by the amount of that resource they have - they don’t go into negative, loving themselves over. The timer track system essentially allows players to go into negative. The timer track also has the issue of being a little confusing. Since turn order shifts around, players find it hard to plan out and feel like they can never be sure when their next turn will actually come up. Now, it’s possible for a player to predict turn order and plan around that with time and practice, but most players feel a bit lost with it at first and never even try to predict ahead so it kind of doesn’t matter if they can eventually if they never get to that point. Another thing that puts a dampener on planning is that players only really get 2-4 turns over the course of the game, which is related to the next problem: The damage system is kind of hosed The way damage is handled I actually think is fairly neat and has some merit as a mechanic, but just like with the Timer Track I don’t think it’s right for Behemoth. How it works is that when you deal damage, you take that many cards off the top of the Behemoth’s attack card deck - when the Behemoth deck is out of cards, the Behemoth is dead and the Hunters win! This is fine, but some various design decisions have kind of compounded together to make it not work for me anymore. To start with, there are 60 cards in the Behemoth deck. However, 12 of those are “enraged” cards which become readied immediately and thus can’t be discarded as damage - which means that while there are 60 cards in the deck, there’s actually only 48 cards that the players need to burn through in order to win. If there are 4 players, this means each player only really gets to deal 12 damage. For earlier versions of the game that didn’t have very much card synergy, players were only dealing 2-3 damage a turn, so they’d get 4-6 turns. This isn’t a ton of turns, especially with a 60 minute playtime it means that players will get to play only roughly every 10-15 minutes, which isn’t great. Now that I’ve designed cards to be much more synergistic and based around powering other cards up, players can easily deal 4-6+ damage on a turn, which means even fewer turns for the players. To try to mitigate this, I had to design cards to have a weaker base (to give more room for powering up). That means that most cards have only 1-2 base damage, and THAT means most cards start feeling samey very quickly. It wasn’t super uncommon for players to have a full hand of cards with the exact same damage, and almost all of the exact same delay cost (because any delay cost over 3ish would mean the player would be waiting for too long before their next turn - see the previous problem). Since all a player’s damage and delay values are more or less the same, the cards kind of blend together in the player’s head. The distinguishing factor to the cards, then, is purely their ability text. This isn’t a terrible thing on its own, but has a problem where players have difficulty remembering everything they have in hand and what they can do with it all. The game is a bit wishy-washy between coop and competitive This is a bit of a simpler problem - the game doesn’t really push players enough either way. It’s intended as semi-coop, but wound up being a boring middleground. This is partially due to the game’s theming - players see they’re all fighting one big dragon, and assume that it’s coop. They think of the victory point system (each point of damage you deal is worth 1VP, whoever has the most VP at the end of the game wins) as just kind of an afterthought. Something like “Oh boy, we won! Oh and someone got the most points I guess, whatever” This ties into Mark Rosewater’s lesson of “don’t go against human nature.” I wanted the game to be more competitive, but players wanted it to be cooperative. The fact that I didn’t want it to be directly competitive was a problem as well - if players aren’t actively punching each other in the face, it can be hard to get them to act aggressively. Especially hard when there’s a big dragon for them to focus on punching. So what to do about it all? Well, solutions are complicated. I’m heavily considering replacing the Timer Track board with some kind of energy / resource management system, and then just having a traditional turn structure. As for what that would exactly entail, I’m still brainstorming ideas to try and find something I’m happy with. As for the damage system, I’m thinking of different ways to completely overhaul it. I could just keep it as-is, then use some d10’s or damage counters to track the Behemoth’s health, but that’s a little sloppy and I’m not super sure how well I’d like that - it feels like just putting more components in as a band-aid for design. Besides, just increasing the behemoth’s health is ignoring other problems - it takes 10-15 minutes to get to your turn. Players having to constantly read their cards and try to remember what they all do and how they all relate to each other slows the game down a lot. Redesigning cards to be simpler overall would be a good idea, and I’ll probably wind up doing that. The problem then comes with making sure that the cards are still unique and interesting. Maybe switching to more iconography is a way to keep mechanical complexity while making the cards easier to read? I’m not sure. I’m also considering alternatives than just “deal X damage total to win”. Maybe players have to play cards in a special combo in order to build up to breaking a Behemoth body part, then when enough body parts are broken the players win? Not sure how the specifics would work, but maybe it’s a route to go down. I’m also leaning towards just going full-on cooperative with the game. Players assume it’s cooperative from the start, and trying to go against that current is kind of a losing battle. Obviously this comes with its own share of problems - quarterbacking, one player being the star and doing all the work, keeping players interested in other players’ turns when the game is primarily about coming up with cool card combos, etc. Possible rework While brainstorming ideas for how to rework the game in these fairly major ways, I came up with a possible system - players’ cards primarily help other players out, not themselves. While thinking of how to thematically explain this away, I considered going with a super sentai / giant robot theme, with all the players helping to control a giant robot together. Maybe one player in a round plays an action card, and all the other players help buff it up with their cards. Then the next round it would be the next player’s turn to play an action card and everyone else buffs it, etc. Hopefully it’s not too similar to Final Attack, haha. Anyways, this is just a random idea for where I could possibly take the game. Obviously piloting a giant robot is quite a ways away from Monster Hunter, but what’s important at the end of the day is what makes for the best game, so who knows!
|
|
#
?
Oct 13, 2016 17:56
|
|
|
It seems like a really important step might be deciding on what you think is crucial to your vision of Behemoth (it sounds like the combos is one big part) and figure out from there how to emphasize those aspects. If you like the idea of buffing each others actions I could see a sentai type setup as well.
|
|
#
?
Oct 14, 2016 17:19
|
|
|
CodfishCartographer posted:This is a bit of a simpler problem - the game doesn’t really push players enough either way. It’s intended as semi-coop, but wound up being a boring middleground. This is partially due to the game’s theming - players see they’re all fighting one big dragon, and assume that it’s coop. They think of the victory point system (each point of damage you deal is worth 1VP, whoever has the most VP at the end of the game wins) as just kind of an afterthought. Something like “Oh boy, we won! Oh and someone got the most points I guess, whatever” I think co-op is the right place for this game. I don't think anyone has made true semi-coop work right (without a traitor); I think it'll take a "big" idea that clarifies player motivation for it to really work.
|
|
#
?
Oct 15, 2016 21:21
|
|
|
Yeah, I'm definitely thinking coop. I feel like Archipelago did good semi-coop without (always) having a traitor, but that's literally the only one I can think of. I feel like for semi-coop to really work it needs personal goals, so each person has to make the decision between progressing their own personal goal or helping the team. Ideally these two things probably shouldn't be able to easily be accomplished all at once. It's tricky and I can definitely see why more games don't try for it. Creating combos of cards is definitely something I want to be the focus, but being pure coop I'll have to be careful with it. After all, if everyone had their heads buried in their hands the whole game it doesn't make for a particularly interactive experience. A designer friend suggested I go for more loose, indirect combos: stuff like one person taunts the dragon so it turn around so another player can deal back stab damage, or one person blocking dragon attacks so the other can charge a strong attack. I like that a bit but I'd be worried about shoehorning players into roles that are a bit too specific. I'd like players to focus on creating their combos, not just following along the same premade obvious combos over and over. I personally love in a game where I get to think about the available options and feel super clever for playing cards / actions / whatever in a creative unique way, and that's the feeling I want to capture for players.
|
|
#
?
Oct 15, 2016 22:39
|
|
|
I'm finally beta-testing tomorrow! Part of that was going through and doing a full write-up of my rules, which was really helpful in terms of helping me to conceptualize the whole game at once. I'm not going to do this as a blind test, though, but will try saving that for a "break my game" type event with strangers.
|
|
#
?
Oct 17, 2016 23:44
|
|
|
CodfishCartographer posted:
Maybe you could play with the idea of drawing aggro? One player is the primary focus of the beast, and is therefore attacking it, while other players take on a co-op role?
|
|
#
?
Oct 17, 2016 23:45
|
|
|
I've had this idea I've been kicking around in my head for the past few days, I'd love to get some comments on it: Uproar (working title) Uproar is a semi-cooperative game for 3-6 players with a hidden traitor mechanic. Each player assumes the role of a mad scientist who made a pact to take over the world together once their experiments are completed. Unfortunately, one of the scientists has decided that they don't want to share and released their unstoppable monster into the world to wreak havoc. It's up to the players to figure out who has betrayed them and destroy their secret laboratories before the monster destroys theirs. In the beginning of the game, each player is given a character card which has their allegiance on it and two city cards. The allegiance card will tell the player if they are the Traitor, the Rival, or Working with the Rival and the city cards correspond to certain cities on the game board. These cards should be kept face down and shouldn't be revealed to other players. The cities on the cards represents each mad scientist's secret labs and if the cities containing those labs are destroyed, that player is eliminated from the game. Once each player knows their role, the Rival reveals his or herself but does not reveal their city cards. The goal of the game is relatively straightforward: The Traitor wants to destroy the Rival's labs and/or destroy all other cities, and the Rival and the people working with him/her want to destroy the Traitor's labs (thereby stopping the monster). During the game, the players take turns moving the monster around the board. Movement for the monster is simple: The monster can only move one adjacent space from it's current city. When the monster reaches a city, the player who is currently controlling the monster removes one building token from the city and places it in front of themselves. If a city loses all three of it's building tokens, that city is destroyed and the player with the matching city card reveals it. The players can do two things with the tokens they will accumulate: On their turn they may spend three tokens to move the monster two spaces instead of one (only removing a building from the destination city) or spend five tokens to fly the monster to any un-destroyed city on the board. The monster moves through destroyed cities for free.
|
|
#
?
Oct 18, 2016 16:25
|
|
|
Chip McFuck posted:I've had this idea I've been kicking around in my head for the past few days, I'd love to get some comments on it: So are there particular rules on communication? Otherwise, it seems like the, uh, strategy is something like 1. All the non-rival players announce their cities. It will take very good luck to lie effectively here (assuming cities can only belong to one person) 2. The rival announces their cities. 3. If anyone stomps a "rival" city without everyone agreeing that's the right move (ie. it's the only way to get somewhere) then they're the traitor and we stomp their cities 4. If stomping their cities didn't work (ie. they lied somehow, I'm not sure whether there's extra cities) we continue to stomp cities that nobody claimed until they're dead. If the non-traitors can't win in this scenario, then the game is kind of hopeless for them in general Perhaps I'm misunderstanding rules here? Edit: The closest game I can think of to this sort of mechanic is the "Rumble in the House" series of games, where each player is trying to preserve their secret characters in a brawl on a grid. Players can move any character they choose on their turn, or eliminate any character that is in the same room as another. It has some degenerate "eternal chase" type problems depending on player count, but otherwise does function as a game. jmzero fucked around with this message at 17:07 on Oct 18, 2016 |
|
#
?
Oct 18, 2016 16:50
|
|
|
jmzero posted:So are there particular rules on communication? Otherwise, it seems like the, uh, strategy is something like This is the sense that I get too. The sheer number of moves that the Rival's team get seems to make it very difficult for the traitor to do anything once it becomes clear who the rival or traitor is. Two thoughts: 1) Three "hitpoints" per city is probably way too many. There's very little risk for the Rival letting their cities be found out since it takes the traitor a ridiculous number of turns to destroy them and they're never going to be given the chance. Realistically the traitor is going to have a hard time ever getting more than 2 passes against the Rival's cities, let alone 6. That's setting aside the sheer tedium of how slowly the game will progress. I think cities might need to be one-hit kills to keep the game moving and give the traitor any shot at all, using surplus cities on the board to add some breathing room back into the game. You could maybe try 2 and see how it goes but I think in that case you would definitely need something else, like... 2) The traitor really badly needs an ace up their sleeve. What if the traitor card also gave them a third, secret base separate from the normal city cards? You could accomplish this with e.g. a deck of traitor cards with different cities, which you draw one card from to add to the other role cards. This gives the traitor insurance against massclaims. The only wrinkle this adds is that you'd need to come up with rules to handle the case where the traitor's secret base shares a city with the Rival. Just throwing some ideas out, I know they're not perfect but hopefully they may be useful as a starting point.
|
|
#
?
Oct 18, 2016 17:22
|
|
|
Those are some excellent points. I'm still learning in terms of game design, so it's good to hear these thoughts! To clarify some of my thoughts and answer some of your questions: There are no restrictions on what you can say or lie about during the game, you just can't reveal your card until the end of the game. Initially the Rival didn't reveal his or herself but I had thought that it might make things too unclear, so having the Rival's reveal at the beginning of the game would make a clearer goal for the players. Maybe the Rival reveal is unnecessary? There would also be Traitor Collaborators as the player count got higher. I was picturing for a 3 and 4 player game: 1 Traitor, a 5 player game: 1 Traitor and 1 Collaborator, and a 6 player game: 1 Traitor and 2 Collaborators (these numbers are fairly arbitrary as I don't know if those would make for a good balance). The Collaborators work with the Traitor but the game doesn't end if they are revealed. Maybe there could be some more variety in the roles? There aren't any neutral cities, so for a three player game there would be 6 cities on the board. I guess my thought for the hit points on the cities was that I wanted to give players a lot of time to discuss things but three does seem excessive. Thinking about it more just makes it seem like it would take way too long to actually accomplish anything. I like the idea of the traitor having a third base. If the board were larger and had a few neutral cities that the players didn't control I think that would be easy enough to add. Perhaps the roles and the city cards are placed into pouches that are then randomly distributed?
|
|
#
?
Oct 18, 2016 18:35
|
|
|
So I've been thinking for my shooter miniatures game of using the warmachine/Guildball action distribution system (E: Oh yeah, also Chip mentioned dice distribution, that might be where I got the idea from too. :P),since this would give a bit much-needed depth to the game. Then the idea occurred to me to tie the action tokens to the different types, and having to use the correct type of action. (Not claiming originality, I'm sure someone's done it before, but I think it would work well for this game). Here's the rules again. Feedback is welcome. I noticed someone was on as anon. reading while I'm editing. If you're a goon,  I'm not sure about if the math is right with hit/miss, if it's too low or too high. Or maybe too swingy/random. I'm concerned with the way I have things DF or Armor above 1 screws things up math-wise (basicly impossible to hit, or do more than 1 damage with 1-2 dice). Anyway, feedback is welcome. I'm working on character cards and perks to actually play the game. I've been usihng the Reaper figure finder to use for base characters for now. I'll post those for print and play if people want that. I could also do some online testing if people are interested. Foolster41 fucked around with this message at 00:25 on Oct 19, 2016 |
|
#
?
Oct 19, 2016 00:21
|
|
|
My first beta test of The Grand Coachman Hotel (nee` Betrayal Rework) went pretty well! I had three players. One of them is a teacher who gets up at 6:00 AM, and unfortunately she checked out early in the game, and wasn't really playing wholeheartedly before that. The other two players were trying to play optimally for their roles. One of them said that he really liked it, and would've kept playing if everyone hadn't had to leave. The other said that he wanted to keep playing, but the game wasn't really clicking for him yet, despite seeing the potential in the game. From a spectator's vantage point I could also see that the game is working at least in concept, which is a relief. There is at least a game there, it just needs to be shaped and molded a little bit. Briefly, here's the introductory section from my current rules document, quote:The Grand Coachman Hotel is a game of exploration, character building, and hidden roles. 3 to 5 players work together to explore a haunted hotel, uncovering its secrets while wrestling with their own inner demons. Characters are represented by a deck of ability cards, representing brains (blue), moxy (green), and brawn (yellow) as well as luck and good fortune (white). Players will move between the three floors of the hotel, encountering various rooms, which represent unique challenges, called “checks”. These checks task players with producing cards from their hand that total a certain number and color of ability cards. For example, a room that is asking a player to face down a shambling corpse might require a check of 6 or more yellow ability cards. Succeeding in meeting this check allows players to gain the favor of the hotel, find valuable objects and curios, or effect the state of the game in some way. Failure results in taking damage - mental damage (called delirium), physical damage (called fatigue), or adding to the pervading sense of unease that permeates the hotel (called dread). Players have specific amounts of delirium and fatigue that they may take before they are either driven insane, or die of physical exhaustion. Dread is a shared form of damage, and if there is 12 in the central pile, then the hotel swallows its occupants whole, and all players lose. Players are able to see a number of rooms for each floor at a time (3 for the upper and basement floors, 5 for the main floor). With a hand of 3 cards in front of them, they are able to see checks that they can make easily, or those that they have a good chance of meeting once they draw the remaining 2 cards for their hand. However, some rooms will draw “anomalies”, which are hauntings and events that take place throughout the hotel, often making checks more difficult for players or adding additional conditions. The main feedback from my testers seemed to be,
Another problem is sort of more general, which is that I need to clearly think about how the stack works for my game. There were a few times where someone had an order of operations question, and I realized that even I didn't rightly know. Coming up with a really clear stack, and putting this onto a player card would definitely help with clarity and ease of play.
|
|
#
?
Oct 20, 2016 16:22
|
|
|
For your concern about building the mansion, maybe have all of the rooms upside-down, and have them be revealed as you explore them? On the backs of the tiles you could probably even have some icons that show where doors are (so that they can connect logically), what types of checks the player can expect there, and maybe even how difficult those checks might be. Obscuring this information can simplify stuff down for players, since they don’t need to worry about all the different rooms or consider what they all do. All they really need to worry about is “where can i get to right now, and what is the risk in going there?” which is much easier to process. Then as tiles are revealed, players can comprehend all the information slowly over time. Obviously this would include some more randomness, which I know you’re trying to avoid generally, but I think maybe much of that could be mitigated with information provided on the backs of the tiles.
|
|
#
?
Oct 20, 2016 17:16
|
|
|
I've been toying around with an election boardgame--I know my timing is pretty godawful, but it strikes me as potentially being a fun design regardless. I've started writing some crude draft rules; anyone up to help critique? A lot of the meat of the game is going to be in the individual issue/event cards but I want to know if the basic gameflow is at all understandable and sensible here. My primary concerns: -The 2v2 format may raise some eyebrows. Eventually there will be rules for a straight 1v1 variant, of course. That may even evolve into the primary form of the game if 2v2 proves too unwieldy. But for the moment I like the idea. -Setup may be overly complicated. I want a good mix of being able to see what's coming and plan your strategy out in advance without getting perfect foreknowledge, but this may come at the expense of simplicity. -Third party rules are probably overly complex for a feature that only shows up on a relatively small number of cards. But third party campaigns tend to attract an outsized amount of attention and interest, so I feel compelled to include potential third party EVs.
|
|
#
?
Oct 20, 2016 18:47
|
|
|
CodfishCartographer posted:For your concern about building the mansion, maybe have all of the rooms upside-down, and have them be revealed as you explore them? On the backs of the tiles you could probably even have some icons that show where doors are (so that they can connect logically), what types of checks the player can expect there, and maybe even how difficult those checks might be. Obscuring this information can simplify stuff down for players, since they don’t need to worry about all the different rooms or consider what they all do. All they really need to worry about is “where can i get to right now, and what is the risk in going there?” which is much easier to process. Then as tiles are revealed, players can comprehend all the information slowly over time. That was actually pretty similar to the first version of the game, but it had a few problems that lead me to switch to a deck>market row solution. The main thing is that it's hard to fit any level of detail onto a tile, and the rooms themselves typically contain the meat of the gameplay. I'd gotten around this with a "check the room almanac" solution, until I realized I loving hated it. I also realized that randomness in rooms lead to "gently caress you" situations, where a player geared to meet intelligence checks could accidentally stumble on the end-game level strength check room. This is one of my big problems with Betrayal, and I realized that I'd just unintentionally replicated it.
|
|
#
?
Oct 20, 2016 18:54
|
|
|
Straight White Shark posted:I've been toying around with an election boardgame--I know my timing is pretty godawful, but it strikes me as potentially being a fun design regardless. I've started writing some crude draft rules; anyone up to help critique? A lot of the meat of the game is going to be in the individual issue/event cards but I want to know if the basic gameflow is at all understandable and sensible here. I really like the whole idea, though obviously it's hard to say too much without seeing some cards. I think 2v2 is underserved and will make for some great gameplay possibilities. I like the little wrinkles (eg. the types of issues, single-state regions, October Surprise - all of it) too; they're super thematic, and I think they'll give you the right amount of design space for your cards without making the game too muddy. This sounds very much like my kind of game.
|
|
#
?
Oct 20, 2016 19:17
|
|
|
I've been thinking about my mad scientist monster game "Uproar" a lot recently and I think I might just be trying to force mechanics onto a theme I really like. I mean, who doesn't love giant monsters stomping around and destroying cities? So I came up with some thoughts about how to change it: There isn't a map anymore. Instead, the monster is placed onto a timer track that represents how close it is to a major metropolitan area that the scientists are trying to protect. Because the attack is so unexpected, all of the projects your team were working on are in a half-finished state and need to be built before you can use them to stop the monster. However, one (or more) of the players is secretly the mad scientist who released the monster and will try and stop anything from being built. At the beginning of the game, the players will draw a card that will tell them the specific parts they will need to construct the device. The players will need to meet or exceed what the card says in order to win the game. If the players cannot get the specified number of parts before the monster reaches the end of the track, the traitor mad scientist wins. I'm imagining the track would be about seven rounds long, with the players losing on the eighth. Players start by drawing two cards from the draw deck (called the 'parts pile' in the game). These two cards will be their starting hand. At the beginning of their turn a player draws three cards from the parts pile. One card must be discarded face down and one card must be placed at the bottom of the parts pile, keeping the remainder in their hand. The player can then choose to pass a card to the player to their right or left. Once all players have had a turn, they may vote to have a player construct a part of the device. If they do, the player with the most votes places one of their cards facedown onto the device construction area, selects a card to keep in their hand, and then places the rest of their cards on the bottom of the draw deck and sits out the next round. If they don't, a random player keeps one of the cards in their hand and discards the rest. Discarded cards are not added back into the parts pile at any point in the game. At the end of any round the players may also call a vote if they believe the requirements to construct the device have been met. Should the vote pass, the players then flip the cards on the device construction area over and check the parts against the parts card. If they meet or exceed it, the scientists win. But, if they don't, the mad scientist wins. I was also thinking that maybe the players get to check on the progress of the device at certain points during the game. Like on round 3 and 5 they are able to see what the parts put into the device construction pile are, but I'm not sure if that is necessary. I'd love some comments or thoughts on this new direction. I hashed out the card idea with a friend and thought it might work beautifully for this game.
|
|
#
?
Oct 20, 2016 20:52
|
|
|
jmzero posted:I really like the whole idea, though obviously it's hard to say too much without seeing some cards. I think 2v2 is underserved and will make for some great gameplay possibilities. My thought is that there will need to be a certain amount of basic cards--e.g. "Gain 1 step on X issue", "Whoever controls X issue gains 1 step on Y and loses 1 step on Z", "Place X number of support tokens", etc. Maybe 25-35% of the deck, although it probably depends on what you define as basic cards. But there should be plenty of room for more interesting cards, and the theme allows for a certain amount of dark humor. Like a 9/11 remembrance card that just won't go away once played, or an overseas atrocity that gets forgotten from the media cycle at the drop of a hat. The other thing that interests me about the design is that there's nothing that says a card has to be help out the player pursuing its associated issue--so a fair number of cards may actually be double-edged swords, having some harmful effect when played but still letting you get your issues out and in the public spotlight.
|
|
#
?
Oct 21, 2016 03:16
|
|
|
Held a playtest of Porteur and Uproar the other night and got some really interesting feedback. Porteur is coming together nicely! It's changed a little since the last post about it and now it feels like it's finally shaping into something. The google doc has been updated with the most recent changes: Link. I'd appreciate any thoughts you guys might have. I'm not sure what to do with Uproar. While I really like the idea behind it, the card mechanic as it stands doesn't add much to the experience of the game. It also makes the game crazy hard to scale which kind of defeats the purpose of why I wanted to design this. Changing the deck so that it is only big enough to only give the players a specific hand size was something I was considering. Maybe I'm trying to hard to make it work, I need to think about this one a lot.
|
|
#
?
Oct 27, 2016 19:15
|
|
|
So I have been on a bit of a break from game design. Life being busy is the best excuse I can muster and losing motivation to stick to any one idea doesn't help. Also no longer having a printer makes prototyping a pain. Though that has given me time to go through my old ideas and get some inspiration to work on them. One I really like has the working title Aftermath and is my obligatory zombie game design (hiss boo). That said I really like some elements of the design. At the start of the game you pick a race (Human, Vampire, or Elf) and a class (Penitent, Berserker, or Arbalest). Players start the game in the center of a 3x3 grid of a city, with 1 zombie in all of the adjacent spaces. More zombies spawn in a Pandemic style and had a pretty basic, but robust, AI. You can't kill too many zombies at once or a Mass Grave spawns (which spawns zombies every turn for the rest of the game.) Zombies die pretty easily, so you've got to be careful about this. I had a pretty tight action economy and asymmetric play styles between race/class combos. However objectives were where I was having trouble. I think partially because I was initially trying to be really ambitious, when instead I should've been more grounded and just tried to get a proof of concept done. I playtested it once solo. It actually went relatively well, though the objective I triggered pretty much broke the game it was still pretty 'fun'. You know what, I'm gonna put up the race/class stuff, its what I'm most proud of from this design, but I'm sure it has some issues. quote:Races The action economy is really tight, and the Vampire's ability to break it really defines its gimmick, as theoretically a Vampire Penitent could clear the map of zombies in one turn with the right set up... only it would spawn mass graves all over the map which would be a long term problem. The Elf has the ability to do really silly things too, it can hop around without losing an action, or otherwise just be super action efficient. The Human's niche is that they are super hardy. As such they are the only race that can afford to start the turn on a space with zombies on it. I'm excited to hear that this is coming along nicely. When you had described it earlier I had thought it's resolution system was more deterministic (in a 'pay these many cards to complete this effect' type way, rather than the draw system.) Not sure why I got that notion. It sounds like a really interesting game, hope it continues to come along well. e: code is not quote Anniversary fucked around with this message at 18:13 on Nov 6, 2016 |
|
#
?
Nov 3, 2016 19:32
|
|
|
I actually think the race+class system you've got there is really neat, and can make for a really good zombie game! While the theme is definitely saturated, there's a distinct scarcity of good zombie games. The different combinations of races and classes could definitely lead to really cool interactions and customization! I definitely look forward to seeing what more you do with it.
|
|
#
?
Nov 4, 2016 18:53
|
|
|
dhamster posted:stuff I'm about to follow up on There was a local playtesting convention today and I was on the fence about going, but I sucked it up and printed out a prototype at the last minute, sleeved them up over some Space Hulk: Death Angel cards. I already had a playable template for tabletop simulator, so it only took an extra hour or two of loving around with photoshop, printing, cutting things.    It was a little nerve wracking sitting there with my game on display, but people seemed to like the game, of the three groups to come by my table. Saying "it's basically like street fighter" seemed to hook people into the theme pretty well. I was worried that people would have a hard time with it (my cards were packed with lots of descriptive text as a result) but people picked it up pretty quickly. One guy gave particularly good feedback: he recommended I rotate the board 90 degrees (into the configuration pictured) to make directions less confusing, and even suggested adding a "crouch" to make the game deeper (but more complicated), which I might think about. One guy thought the board was a little bland and recommended putting in interactables like Mortal Kombat. I might look into putting that in as a variant, or making a character that interacts with the board itself somehow. People were confused about the term "whiff," so I changed it to the more universal "miss." I think the biggest things I need to work on are: a) Characters, character balance: Still have only playtested the "baseline character" at this point, so I'm not sure how the actual cast plays so far. b) Cleaning up the cards: The layout is pretty messy, text-heavy and might be hard to parse without somewhere sitting there teaching it to you. Might be helped by some iconography and some additional keywords. c) Instructional materials: Right now there is a manual detailing the basic flow of the gameplay, but I am probably going to need to make some diagrams and stuff to summarize the different interactions going on in the game. Throws beat blocks beat attacks beat (walk-up) throws, but a good amount of stuff subverts that. d) Might need some sort of additional gimmick to spice things up for people like the interactables guy. Character abilities might fulfill this. e) The games went a little longer than expected. Could have been due in part to the teaching, but part of it could also be that I reduced the damage of attacks without shrinking character health as well. I'll probably tweak that as time goes on. f) I didn't really have anything to direct the playtesters to if they were interested in checking out the game as it develops. Eventually I collected a couple e-mails (one from someone who was clearly just humoring me), but it would have been better if I had some kind of website to point them to. Things the game seemed to do well: a) People were amused by the characters; hopefully the final art will have the same effect as the placeholder stuff I'm using right now. b) The core gameplay seems pretty solid. Nobody managed to break it yet. There were some tense moments both players hoped we made a good "read" on what the other player, and the titular Knockdown seems to be in a good place: the knocked-down player is in a bad spot, but has some options to work with... if they guess right. Overall it was a good experience. I am glad that I took the time to put my game out there and get feedback. Hopefully I'll be able to tune it up a bit as a result.
|
|
#
?
Nov 6, 2016 03:48
|
|
|
Sounds awesome! Congrats on getting out there and getting some playtesting/feedback. I'm still really curious to see more of your system. Thanks. The AI was relatively basic for non-Boss enemies: quote:At the start of turn, each Mass Grave spawns a Regular Zombie. quote:Regular zombies are represented by black cubes. The only boss I worked on was 'The Gravelord' was meant to be the first boss players encountered. It ran away from players, spawning Hollow Graves behind it (which functioned as Mass Graves, but could be placed in spaces with Mass Graves.) Basically it was meant to make the board miserable if they failed to contain it, as removing Graves is difficult / time consuming.
|
|
#
?
Nov 6, 2016 19:56
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 17, 2024 01:14 |
|
|
dhamster posted:e) The games went a little longer than expected. Could have been due in part to the teaching, but part of it could also be that I reduced the damage of attacks without shrinking character health as well. I'll probably tweak that as time goes on. I'm a big fan of two things in 1v1 video/board games, high damage (and the scary situations that come with it) and best-of-X sets. especially since you said playtesters weren't able to bust things open yet, I'm worried that it means your game may be too safe right now. players being able to do absurd, unfair poo poo is cool, especially during early playtesting, and I think you might want to try cranking up some of the damage again. not necessarily across the board - choose which moves it makes sense to do a shitload of damage for each character and give some characters more of those than others. obviously this leads to situations where someone is going to die quickly sometimes, but that's what sets are for. it's ok for a player to lose a game because they guessed wrong on knockdown twice, and sets give someone a chance to get back to a neutral start and try again. nothing feels worse in a game than doing something cool or bold and not getting a big payoff.
|
|
#
?
Nov 6, 2016 20:16
|
|
