|
What are the major pitfalls of creating a game from scratch? I have had this idea kicking around in my head for about 2 years now of a squad tactics strategy game that uses a cards for activation of special abilities, special effects on the board, and placement of new terrain on a grid map. I am 100% married to the idea of effect cards + miniatures. I am just unsure what I should do to bring it about other than make, playtest, repeat. My plan is to buy some blank playing cards to write on, and get a laminated map printed for a grid map, and go from there trying to get my friends to play and help develop it. I know it'll take a long time of course, but it seems like a fun thing to do. I just don't want to get started on the wrong foot out of the gate.
signalnoise fucked around with this message at 15:17 on Nov 24, 2012 |
#
¿
Nov 24, 2012 14:47
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 28, 2024 16:11 |
|
|
Before I get started would this be the best place to just spitball an idea? I have an idea but it's not even fully fleshed out to a point where I could play a game of it. Still in the forming stages.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 1, 2012 19:50
|
|
|
OK so here's my idea in parts 1- Minis on a grid. Squad based minis game. I want it to be grid based because I want clear rules for things like cover and movement, no guessing. I want no room for error. Each mini has a stat card with whatever special abilities it has, but by themselves the game is very very simple. Your dude can move a certain amount, make very basic attacks, that's pretty much it. However, there are special characteristics for each dude like knowledge of explosives, or special non-attack abilities the character can do instead of attack. The rest of the game's actions are served up by 2- Cards. Cards allow your character to perform special actions (suppressing fire for example), interrupt enemy actions, lay down new terrain, etc.. These cards are drawn from a communal deck. I want to marry these two ideas to make it so even though you're picking unique dudes, you and your opponent still both draw from the same deck and the strategy here is always having options. When you kill an enemy's guy, I want it to be not because you rolled the right number the right number of times- I want it to be because you laid down a card and they had no answer. I also like the idea with this plan that since you're dealing with one hand for each set of guys, every time one of your guys dies, the rest become potentially more dangerous because you have fewer mouths to feed, so to speak. The last guy will always be slippery because he is one guy with an entire hand to use. So that's the idea in a nutshell. A squad tactics game with a hand of cards to deal with. Problems I already have- 1- Nailing down exactly what cards I want available. I know that I want the main idea to be the active player laying down attacks and the other guy using what's left in his and at the end of his turn to evade those attacks. But what cards will those be? 2- Hit points. I don't think I want hit points, because I want the end result of you running out of options to be that a guy is dead. I want it to mean something for you to have no way out, and I want the attacker to have the satisfaction of knowing he did that. Should I have hit points? 3- Actions and theme. I would like to think that whatever cards I think up, those cards should be purely about the system, but at the same time I feel that the theme of the game, whatever it is (right now I'm thinking old west) should feel like it is integral to the game. 4- How the gently caress do I organize decks of cards? I could do it Dominion style where I have banks of cards and the player tailors their deck to their force over the course of the game, but that feels like I would be cheating in terms of game design. Right now the best idea I have though is to rip off Dominion pretty much wholesale in the deck building area, where players choose multiple types of cards to be available, and then pick units based on what actions they know will be available.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 2, 2012 05:46
|
|
|
What if I made it so when you would have taken damage, discard a card (or cards, depending). When you run out of cards, that's when you take real damage. That way you're encouraged to make the enemy discard as many cards as possible during your turn while minimizing the amount of cards you have to use to do so, unless you think that using all your cards will result in more gains this turn than losses next turn. I think that might bring about a lot of running from cover to cover, making sure you're in cover at the end of the turn after killing a dude. You think this could work? I could also see having each card in your hand have a wounds value inversely proportional to the utility of the card during your turn.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 2, 2012 17:04
|
|
|
As far as balancing stats are concerned, I am trying as much as possible to eliminate stats in favor of options. I don't want hit points because I don't want one guy to be able to take twice as many bullets as another. Instead, give characters special abilities that increase the number of your possibilities.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 2, 2012 20:13
|
|
|
That is really good advice, I'll be using that in my own game
signalnoise fucked around with this message at 13:15 on Dec 3, 2012 |
|
#
¿
Dec 3, 2012 13:12
|
|
|
So I have been thinking about the whole bottom-up design philosophy as it applies to my game, and I have been thinking ok, this is a minis game. Why is it a minis game? What does that actually accomplish as far as what the player has to do? Positioning is my answer to that, and I think I could work positioning in as the primary quirk in what is fundamentally a card game. Rather than use any hit point system at all, simply have everything revolve around positioning, like chess. This will make the most important attributes on a miniature be attack range and movement speed. A unit only dies when they have nowhere to run. One unit covering puts that character in check, forcing it to take cover. If there is no way to take cover, the unit is taken out of the game. This makes it so I don't even have to worry about attack or defend actions, which is something I wanted to eliminate anyway. This makes it all a logic puzzle. Suppression of an area would have to be a deliberate action that takes a card and only lasts one round, or something like that. Places that you have not covered can be freely traversed for the duration of their turn but units cannot end their turn in an enemy's attack zone or they will die. Melee-capable units automatically kill if they can end their movement in base to base contact with an enemy. I think this type of game should allow me a lot more liberty with cards and have things like terrain cards mean much more. It also would take what had been fundamentally a card game and brings minis back to the forefront. Thoughts on this system as opposed to using cards as hit points?
|
|
#
¿
Dec 3, 2012 23:22
|
|
|
Time to get to work making cards. Thanks for the help!
|
|
#
¿
Dec 4, 2012 00:21
|
|
|
I feel like the theme could be drawn from the mechanic though.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 13, 2012 22:59
|
|
|
I have a rough idea for a card game. It's a superhero game. I'm unfamiliar with the multitude of superhero card games, please let me know if this idea has been done. Basic idea is for two or more teams of superheroes to have a brawl in the city streets that rapidly escalates. You lose if all of your heroes/villains are incapacitated at the same time. Otherwise, incapacitated dudes can get back in the fight. You win by being the last person not to lose. The game is played with multiple locations, with the first one being the street. Every game starts in the street. As the game goes on, effects cause new locations to come into play, separating heroes from their group as they're plowed through buildings. Whenever this happens, draw a location from the location deck, and it has special rules you follow. You can crash through as many walls as your table can hold cards. That said, the heroes themselves aren't really the focus. The situation is the focus. You don't make your guys take action directly. Instead, they have instructions on the cards that say what to do at the end of each turn based on the situation. For example if you have a Juggernaut kind of guy, if there is an enemy in the same location, he will always charge them, and he'll always move towards the closest enemy if there's no enemy on his location. Thus he's always doing damage but has a possible drawback. Ultimately the players are watching the fight and subtly altering it in their team's favor like some Olympian god rather than taking the role of the heroes/villains themselves. The only time the player really does something with their team is when there are mutually exclusive instructions to follow. Then they get to choose what their guy does. Players influence the game by playing cards that set up their team to do actions based on instructions on the card that interact with the type of hero they are. Say there's a card that's a Civilian In Distress. This card is played on a location and Self-Sacrificing or Virtuous heroes must attempt to resolve that card by landing on it, or suffer a penalty for the distraction. Players draw cards from various randomized decks, but the decks are all themed such that you have a pretty good idea of whether a deck will be good or bad for your team based on the types of cards that are there and the characteristics of your dudes. Decks are based on common stuff like Police activity, Civilian activity, or Escalation, which is stuff like a building falling down or the national guard showing up. I still need to think of more deck types. Not every character is incapacitated in the same way, but they are generally going to be incapacitated by a particular interaction between two or more characters, or by something like getting caught by the police. Someone could easily be incapacitated on the first turn since all characters on both teams will be in the same spot. Been done? This is by far an example of theme first mechanics second of course, taking a note on that running topic.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 16, 2013 19:47
|
|
|
I think I just figured out the way to solve the problem I've been having with this game I've been designing in my head. To reiterate the game briefly: The game is played on a grid, and the object is to eliminate the enemy team. You have a band of characters that you select to make your team. Each character has a card that displays its movement, reaction movement, and threat area. The threat area is shows as highlighted grid squares relative to the forward facing of the character, i.e. if it's a straight line up, that character threatens a straight line heading out from its front facing. To eliminate an enemy character, you must threaten it such that it cannot escape the threat with its reaction. In other words the enemy can react to your movement, but at the end of each turn (this is for both players), every character that is in another character's threat range is eliminated. It's basically like checkmating that character. I've been grappling with how to manage a hand of cards that allow things that alter the playing field to eliminate stalemates while not adding randomness to the game. I want the whole game to be strategy. I think I found a way to do this. Each player draws up to X number of cards (I want to call it 7 for now but I'll have to see how it goes in playtesting). These cards do not represent actions in themselves, but rather types of actions. The actual effect of using a given card depends on the character that uses the effect of the card. Each character will have an action listed for each type of card. You use your actions during your turn, and at the end of your turn you draw the cards you want to have for your next turn. That way your opponent doesn't know what you are GOING to do, but they do know what you have available to do. You are also committed at the end of your turn to what you're going to have available the next turn. You must be thinking ahead in order to be effective. It also means that as your characters get eliminated, you have more cards available per character, so ultimately having fewer guys limits your options but it also makes each character necessarily more dangerous. I feel that this solution should eliminate the randomness while maintaining the unpredictable opponent aspect while also making setup fast. The next step is to figure out a mechanic that forces aggression and something that resolves stalemates in the event you only have 1 character left.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 21, 2013 04:31
|
|
|
Is there a good site for making 1" circles or hexes that are the same physical qualities as poker chips? Basically what I'm looking for here is something I could stack easily underneath a model that could be identified from the side based on color or something like that.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 14, 2013 23:28
|
|
|
Awesome, this is pretty much exactly what I was looking for
|
|
#
¿
Oct 15, 2013 02:04
|
|
|
I had this idea last night to make a game based on video game RTS stuff. Basically the idea is this- 1- Macro economy management. The core of the game is worker placement, but with a catch. The chits you amass are used to create buildings that allow you to build units. Each player has a game board that they use to place workers at different locations, which gives them chits of different types per turn. This is your currency which you use to buy buildings, represented by "complete" tokens on the board. 2- Army building Using your remaining chits, there is a buy phase where you can buy as many units of whatever kind as you have access to. There's no limit, but players can watch you purchase. To keep it fair, alternate first buy every turn. Players alternate buying until both players pass. 3- Fighting Place your unit cards face down at strategic locations. Each unit has a bonus to fighting other units of different types, so it's in your best interest to place cards in a way that you have an advantage in the fight. Both players place cards face down and turn them over once committed. Take turns placing cards until both players pass. Call it anteing. Combat resolves as is indicated on the cards, and if you win a fight, you take the strategic location, which gives you an extra worker placement location and also victory points. 4- Winning the game Here's where I got stuck
|
|
#
¿
Feb 18, 2015 19:03
|
|
|
jmzero posted:I'm always nervous about doubling up on victory. Like, if you win this round and that means you have more production options, how does that work for loser-guy? I'd be tempted to just make the fights for victory points, and then have good ways for trailing players to "up the ante"/"go high risk" in order to potentially get back in (or quickly end the game by losing their desperate plan). What if you add in a way to take points back? If you win a location, you turn the location card 90 degrees to face yourself, rather than taking the card entirely. You leave your units at the location and there's some kind of cost for doing so, either by paying upkeep or having a limit to the number of units you can have, but now the other guy knows what you have at that location and can plan to take it from you more easily. Meanwhile if you want to keep it, you have to commit reinforcements to the location, which is an opportunity cost.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 18, 2015 19:30
|
|
|
Oh hell yeah, I'm definitely using something like that when I sink my teeth into this.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 19, 2015 19:23
|
|
|
I watched a Kickstarter video recently and it gave me the idea that it'd be really cool if there was a game sort of modeled after Legend of Mana. In LoM you create the world out of blocks, and the element alignments of each block depends on its location relative to other blocks. You could play the same game over and over and experience different quests based on how you created the world. I'd like to see a game that uses a big board and lots of province blocks that get played each turn, sort of like creating a world out of dominoes. From there you can have some kind of quest mechanic that allows you to play cards or something like that based on the world available so far. Anyone want to give me a push with this into some kind of narrative game? Or does anyone know a game that already works this way?
|
|
#
¿
Jun 2, 2015 17:59
|
|
|
Anniversary posted:What exactly do you see each location/block doing. Do they provide resources? Do they provide combat bonuses? Well, in Legend of Mana they unlocked quests based on the element values in the block. For example there might be a quest unlocked with 3 shadow that wouldn't be there otherwise. So what I'm thinking is that you play these tiles and the different ways they combine allow you to place something on the tiles, so you have to think "what's in my hand, what are my placement options, and what plays do those placements let me make?"
|
|
#
¿
Jun 2, 2015 18:32
|
|
|
Seems like it'd be weird keeping up with who has the most cultists if you're sharing a board. I'm thinking something more along the lines of sending a questing knight off for glory who takes the path of least resistance. Your job as the player is to play cards that alter the knight's circumstances such that they're forced to do things they otherwise wouldn't, and the board is built collaboratively. The board expands outward from the capital, radially, and you have to have an applicable quest in your hand for each additional tile they move. You pick up points, somehow, for your knights going forth and slaying dragons and poo poo in your name. I dunno
|
|
#
¿
Jun 2, 2015 19:00
|
|
|
Tell me if this game exists already or if I have an idea on my hands The game is based around barons vying for control of their fief, or garnering favor with the lord. There is one central castle indicated by a hexagonal tile that does nothing. Every turn, a player places a tile and takes an action. These actions are generally spending resources to create towns or develop tiles that their towns control. Each tile has properties such as income, food, or other poo poo I dunno. Each side of a tile can have properties that affect the tile it touches, so if you place a lake, it increases the food value of neighboring tiles. The idea is to make a game where you are creating the board as you play, and each board should be different. You are trying to control as much of the board as you can while denying valuable resources to other players, by strategically placing tiles such that they benefit you but do not benefit your opponents. This is the basic mechanical idea and I want to do this while adding stuff to the game like hidden agendas and ridiculous demands from the overlord. I think what the game idea needs at this point is a way to directly interact with other players.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 5, 2015 01:57
|
|
|
 Each hex has values along the edges, and the corners have 1/3 circles of color. Each hex's value as a tile is the sum of its edge bonuses and native value. You can add value to each tile through development. If you manage to create a complete circle of a single color, that confers bonuses/opportunities to all three tiles that makes up that circle. An example of a tile that would have different values along different edges would be a mine, where the entrance to the mine is on one side, and is nothing but mountain on the other sides. The object here is to be the favored heir of the fief lord when he passes (when the game ends). This is done by currying the lord's favor and by controlling more of the countryside. There are three possible values on the edge of each tile: money, food, and magic. City tiles confer no edge bonuses, but you must control a city to get the bonuses from the tiles that surround it. Money allows you to buy upgrades to tiles, which are noted by blocks set between the city and its surrounding tiles along the edge, like a road in Catan. Food allows you to curry favor with the locals, which will spread your influence. Magic is needed to play cards, which have effects that shake up the game. Food is important because you generate militia every turn in each city you own equal to the food value of the surrounding tiles, and you can use them to establish your dominance in a tile. Militia are all equally skilled so you win a fight if you bring more dudes than the garrison. For example, if the enemy has 3 militia on a tile and you bring 5, you clear away the garrison and place your 2 remaining militia on the tile, establishing it as yours. How's this sounding so far?
|
|
#
¿
Jun 6, 2015 01:29
|
|
|
How would you go about a win condition design in a 2-player head to head card game with no location-based positioning that does not revolve around numeric damage accumulation? I'm trying to think of a way to make a game that only requires cards and nothing else, and the only thing I can think of is milling the enemy's deck or having specific win condition cards. I think with win condition cards the problem would be what if you never get the cards you need? I wouldn't want to base the whole game around luck.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 6, 2016 19:52
|
|
|
I have an Argent variation I would like notes on MUTINY! Mutiny! is a game played by 2+ players where you try to gain control of a pirate ship. Each player is a defector plotting against each other and the captain. The game proceeds basically like Argent, with hidden supporter cards. Each card has a condition for support, like "most gold" or "most food" or whatever. Each card also has a minimum amount required to support you. The game has no turn limit. Score is tallied when one player yells "MUTINY!" at the beginning of their turn. Once Mutiny! is called, you tally supporters, dealing the card to whoever wins their condition, and a winner is determined who very well might not be the person who called the end of the game. Ties for support are not dealt to players, and support the captain instead. Any supporter whose condition is not met supports the captain. This prevents people from calling Mutiny! too early, because EVERYONE might lose. The captain is not a player, just a lose condition. Each turn, a player can view one supporter's card, without showing it to the rest of the players, then put it back. It's up to the player to remember which supporters support based on which conditions. I have not determined what systems I'd use to generate score and what resources I'd have, just "build score, hidden from the rest of the game, and call the game when you THINK you've won it." I'd like to add some stuff to interact with other players.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 16, 2016 15:33
|
|
|
Misandu posted:Would this be with the normal Argent rules and a modified board or are you just evoking Argent as the inspiration? Inspiration. I like the hidden supporters, but I would do something entirely different from the worker placement, making it more of a party game.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 16, 2016 18:24
|
|
|
signalnoise posted:Inspiration. I like the hidden supporters, but I would do something entirely different from the worker placement, making it more of a party game. OK. I have thought about this. You have a group of hidden supporters like Argent, but instead of having a set of static locations, each turn you flip over a location card and that's where your ship has docked. Each location (all real locations in the Caribbean) will have various poo poo to do that you act on and get rewarded for. Each turn, you flip a location card, look at one supporter, and do whatever you're going to do at that location. These things can range from buying and selling goods to carousing and stirring up poo poo for other players (actual mechanics of this to be determined but largely the functions of the locations will be reflections of the crew cards). At any time, a player may call mutiny. If that player does not win, he is out of the game, the crew deck is reshuffled, and new crew are placed. At a meta level what you are trying to do is be the best at more things than anyone else, without being so good at one thing that your efforts are wasted.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 15, 2016 05:32
|
|
|
Misandu posted:That gives me a cool idea for a game! Play as Pirate Captains trying to impress Nations with randomly determined rulers Argent style. Workers get replaced by ships in your fleet. Don't have a lot thought up yet but it seems like it could be cool. That might actually be a better theme than mine because buying and selling goods sounds perfectly fine for individual ships but not so for different officers in the crew
|
|
#
¿
Apr 16, 2016 00:19
|
|
|
I would like to see a game based on Romance of the Three Kingdoms where you construct a deck that contains armies and commands, but no officers. You choose a leader that you keep, and you choose a selection of officers that go into a draft pile. Shuffle and distribute, all players choose an officer and put it face down and flip at the same time, so you can see who is choosing which officers, and try to counter their selections. Then you play it like any LCG once you have your officer list. Officers are face up until eliminated from the game, and when they are eliminated, you lose whatever options they gave you for the game. You are out of the game when you must lose an officer but all your officers are dead. The winner is whoever is alive at the end of the game. Anything like this exist already?
|
|
#
¿
Dec 16, 2016 23:06
|
|
|
Anniversary posted:My worry with that kind of system would be that if your options disappear as your officers die it could get death spirally? Possibly. I am trying to think of ways to deal with that. One option would be just to make it a bigger game, like have a board or something with armies on it, or have a draft every turn. I dunno. I just want this theme and I want to deal with officers in such a way that you are picking up abilities and stripping abilities from others based on future leverage. Might be better to have a way to kill the leader without killing his officers first?
|
|
#
¿
Dec 19, 2016 23:35
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 28, 2024 16:11 |
|
|
How about You draft X officers at the beginning of the game, where X is the number of players. The rest go into a deck that becomes market row. For absolutely free, during your turn, you may replace one officer in your charge with one from the market row, and the officer you displace goes into the market row discard pile. That's how you plan. Officers can be exhausted, dispatched to a location, or killed. In any of these 3 cases, they cannot be used to defend your leader. Your leader can however defend himself, making your total HP of sorts for the game =X+1. Officers are killed when they find themselves under attack but unable to defend themselves. This would probably happen in the case that like, they go to take a location and are defeated by overwhelming forces, where you run out of army but the enemy still has army at that location. In the case of a draw at a battle, both officers would be dispatched, then exhausted upon return for 1 turn of recovery, but if they are dispatched and lose, then the winning opponent gets to choose what to do to that officer, which I don't know what it would be yet, but one option could be to kill them outright. I would also want ownership of a location to DO something. This is starting to sound like a game that will require chits.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 20, 2016 01:13
|
|