So for this post, i'll be talking about the creation of my short lived prototype board game and how it changed and evolved through each gameplay.
But first, a basic description of the game. What I essentially wanted to create was a game that was similar to Megaman Battle Network:
The gist of the my version of the game? A dedicated 1v1 fighting game that required special abilities and decisive movement in order to reduce the opponent's life points to zero. The playing field would be 4x10 spaced wide, with each space being a movable point. Players would draw from a deck of suit playing cards, and the suit and number of each card would determine the spell type and power, respectively. Like Meagan battle network, my game would dedicate special ability attacks determined by which cards you played, and I included the dice roll to add luck into the battle. The only original concept I created was my game would have "spell walls," which would block attacks and help create strategic interest and longevity to the game.
1st Gameplay session: In this session, I worked together with Shunt to create an interesting strategy game. This is how we collaborated on creating a game similar to Megaman Battle Network, as each of us had played and enjoyed the game much so. It wasn't so much as playing a game as we were mostly creating the game as we went along, so not much immersion was experienced. The core mechanic of the game played out in 2 parts, the design of life points and the design of special ability attacks.
2nd Gameplay session: In this session, I attempted to play a full game with my brother. My goal for this session was to get as much critique for my game, but alas the game was all together boring for my brother, as he didn't want to play anymore 5 minutes into the game. His critique was that games with suit deck cards and dice shouldn't be super complicated, and that I was essentially trying to create a specialized crd playing game (i.e. yugioh or pokemon) emulated in suit card deck form, which translates into unnecessary extra rules and conditions that made the game hard to keep track of. The worst part was that I completely understood what he meant, and that I needed to simplify my game.
3rd Gameplay Session: For this session, I played with a computer science student. It was pretty hard to explain all the rules to her, as it was honestly a lot to digest in a few minutes. Seeing the lack of interest in her, I decided to oversimplify the game rules by making it into simply a "move one space and attack" sort of game, which ended in a very boring game session. I have a lot of reworking to do, as at this point I understood that the approach of my game was wrong, as I was trying to mirror a highly specialized game onto a simple interface that ultimately did not translate well.
