CodfishCartographer posted:

Anyone have much experience designing worker placement games? I have an idea for one, where the “workers” are cards that have various effects. However, I’m having difficulty settling on what resources to have and how many places there should be to place workers.

Straight White Shark posted:

There's a dedicated thread for board game design.

My initial impression is that there doesn't seem to be a lot of game there, as described. There doesn't seem to be much room for strategy in the football resolution. There's a very minor edge to kicking if you're at or behind your 30, but the differences in EV are small enough that it's generally not going to make a huge difference unless you're doing something silly like punting when you're close to a TD. Ultimately it's just a dicefest, slanted heavily towards whoever got the better players. I'd suggest either making the football resolution even faster and simpler and making the game be 100% about team building and management, or else add some kind of real tactical payoff to justify spending the time to play out the football phase.

Darth Brooks posted:

Ya, I want to add more. I just wanted a test of the up and down movement on the field. I've a few football games where you just spin a dial and that seems just completely luck and didn't leave any room for team building.

One of the ideas was to have defensive cards. The defensive player would pull a card that was slanted against pass or run and then the offensive player would declare what his play was but it just didn't seem to play out right and made the game more complex. I want to have a short event and then move on to the other parts of the game. One idea I had was that for every TD a player scored they got a card that like a chance card, something good or bad.

There'd have to be something to make playing an individual event worth fun, but not something so time consuming that it was all that one event.

Darth Brooks posted:

Darth Brooks posted:

Frozen Peach posted:

oh god the person I'm interviewing with is AEG's CEO, John Zinser. I just assumed it'd be with someone in their acquisitions department or something. NOPE.

Skyl3lazer posted:

Is anyone a pro on kickstarting games? I know it's a complicated process, but how time intensive is it to deliver alone? Like, I have a full time job, is it even remotely possible to handle something like that on my own?

CodfishCartographer posted:

On the other hand, I could just drop the cooperative aspirations and just make it a pvp fighting game.

CodfishCartographer posted:

So, I’m working on a card game system that I think has potential, but need some advice on it.

The basic idea of the system is when you play a card, you more or less “equip” it into a “combo” of attacks. Your combo is around 3~5 cards long, and each card represents a different attack in the combo - so going from a sweeping kick into a straight punch into a fireball, etc. Cards are specifically be designed to synergize with each other and effect other cards in the combo. For example, your first card could move your position, then the second in the combo would deal critical damage if you’ve moved in the combo, then the third could heal you if you’ve dealt critical damage, etc. Your combo persists from round to round, and each round you add a card to it until you hit the limit, at which point it becomes more about refining the combo and improving its efficiency. There are also instant, single-use cards, that can provide more powerful temporary effects, or help you re-arrange cards in the combo if needed.

I think this is a solid enough system on its own, but I’d like the game to be cooperative rather than competitive, and I’m trying to think of ways to implement cooperative elements into the core gameplay. I could obviously just have some cards be something like “+2 health to another player” or something, but I’d prefer something more built-in to the core system. The most obvious way to me is to have enemies require players to specialize in mutually exclusive ways, such as one player needing to be tank, one needing to be DPS, another needing to be healer, etc. That’s a tad cliche however and I feel there’s something else I could do alongside that.

On the other hand, I could just drop the cooperative aspirations and just make it a pvp fighting game.

PMush Perfect posted:

If you wanted to make it co-op, my first thought is that you work "assists" and "tagging out" into the combos, just like a real fighting game.

Definitely seems like a fun game for PvP, though, so please make it work as both. 1v1, 1vE, 2v2, and 2vE would all fit in that, I think.

Edit: Example that comes up. Player A uses High Punch, High Punch, Low Kick, Assist, High Kick. Player B gets to throw a single attack into Assist. It's still player B's choice which card to use, but Player A gets to choose where in the combo it goes.
Then, during his turn, Player B plays Low Kick, Jump, Dive Kick, Change. After that point, player A can play any number of cards to branch off of that, but now has total control over the entire back half of the combo.

Edit 2: You can't have a real co-op fighting game without the opportunity to get absolutely bodied by Cell, Gohan, and Vegeta three random characters who I won't name all blasting you with their specials before you can react.

garthoneeye posted:

Another way to add cooperation could be on how the timing of your cards work. If you have a plan your combo phase and then a run your combo phase; during the run phase, everyone would operate the first card of their combo, then everyone would operate the second card, and so forth. You could have double attacks where both players have to each play the same card on the same beat of the fight. Or you can have cards that have different effects based on whether a teammate is nearby or not. What’s the theme of the game? Is it like a fighting video game where a combo means the opponent can’t escape, or is it like a choreographed fight scene in a movie or anime or whatever?

Darth Brooks posted:

The rule book https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jd6RaDiYiaHyLkr96BLwXOFIlihZSe7jPD6KQMvgCPk/edit?usp=sharing

I have 80 or so cards made up that look like old school ball cards. They are dealt out at random, eighteen per player. They form the starters and backup players.



They go onto these:



I also have a football field where you can keep track of progress and scoreboard sheets. The blind chance cards are cards that are randomly positive or negative for the player.

The TLDR version is this, it's like a football game, but to pass you say how far you're going to go for and if the die (times five) is smaller than the number you don't make it. You have a limited number of passes in a game 2-8 or so. To run, you subtract yardage from an set amount. There are twelve drives for each team total and the running yardage refreshes at halftime. Kicking is just the die times ten and you have to say that you're going for a field goal.

If more than just two people are playing then there are rules for a playoff or league play. I am still working out stadium rental, salaries, etc for league play.

I have been debating what the defense would do and I haven't come up with anything that's satisfactory. In Monopoly when someone is rolling the dice you don't have another player rolling to block them. The other team gets the ball back pretty fast anyways and in that era of football the defense wasn't that big of a deal anyways.

BigRed0427 posted:

So I had an idea for a game I wanna try making. The inspiration hit me when my GF was DMing a 5th edition game we were playing a couple of weeks ago.

The quick elevator pitch is something like Decent or Imperial Assault (Players fighting through a space as unique characters in narrative driven adventures) but instead of a preset map, we use the exploration and tile system that Betrayal on House on the Hill uses. Each encounter and event, with some exceptions, are completely randomized.

For now, I'm just gonna use the D20 system for combat and rolls, but eventually I wanna learn how to make my own combat system.

Edit: For the first prototype, what I wanna do is use a set of Pre-generated 5th Edition Characters and then create maybe a small deck of encounters for them to draw from. Im thinking each encounter will have different levels in order to count for different player sizes?

golden bubble posted:

The most obvious issue with that is it limits your encounter design. The way you generate encounters means there is little to no foreshadowing for each encounter. So every encounter has to be theoretically beatable by every team composition. Otherwise you end up in a situation where the players can just lose when the draw the encounter, AKA bullshit.

food court bailiff posted:

That seems solvable by having some kind of rising tension gauge based on the number of encounters already drawn that influences some of the numbers on the cards or something - if you draw an orc as the first encounter it has 10 hp, if you draw it as the fourth encounter it has 20 HP and a special attack, that kind of thing.

golden bubble posted:

I was more worried about things like having a class that relies on melee attacks for everything and having the monster that counters melee attacks in the same game. Without some ability to choose your fights, you have to be careful when creating monsters that hard counter (or even soft counter) specific tactics.

Nephzinho posted:

Much improved over your last iteration. Couple of quick notes:
You have a lot of positions and players. Do you really have that many interesting things for them to do? Might want to simplify while you test to QB/RB/DL/OL. Would make individual cards matter more and give you a better sense of what works without offering too many decisions - especially if those decisions don't matter seeing as you just pick throw/run.
If you're going to add interaction, which you should, isolate it to OL and DL cards. Maybe they just give you a timer of sorts -- OL tries for 3, DL tries for 4, the DL will break through on 4 and sack if the QB hasn't thrown - how far you attempt for is how long you hold while the WR gets there. Likewise the OL tries for 3, DL tries for 1, OL holds and the QB is free to throw whenever. They could have set stamina and essentially turn into a mini game of "win with the least spent resources" x5 and x10 on dice rolls is going to get real annoying real fast, just make the numbers what they are. If you need bigger numbers, roll 2d6 instead of 1d6. Scale accordingly.

Darth Brooks posted:

I'm not sure about making the game more complex. There's a whole bit with different stadiums that will probably be standardized.

As far as the dice, I may look to see if I can find some with the numbers already on them. "Roll the blue die to pass, roll the red die to kick." Or such.

Darth Brooks posted:

I'm not sure about making the game more complex. There's a whole bit with different stadiums that will probably be standardized.

As far as the dice, I may look to see if I can find some with the numbers already on them. "Roll the blue die to pass, roll the red die to kick." Or such.

CodfishCartographer posted:

Have you considered getting rid of dice all together? Depending on what you have in mind for the game, you could replace them with cards that players play against each other, then defense has something to do instead of sitting there watching offense roll dice. Cards could just have the number of yards on them, and defense needs to play a card of lesser value in order to block the pass or kick. So going for a long pass would be risky, unless you know that the other player has already spent all their low cards. Or you could tease out all of the opponent's low cards with short passes and then nail them with a huge kick now that you've set them up to be unable to stop it. It's not a perfect 1-to-1 rendition of football, but does get the same experience of using plays to manipulate your opponents into a worse position.