David

Week 1
Starting out after getting the Assignment there was not much being said straight away. I started with an idea I had thought about using systems for resources, units, movement and an objective to defend. This was then paper prototyped and we found out that some of the systems were just not adding anything to the experience but being a nuisance instead.

The problems with this system was mainly the movement, while going for a king of the hill system with movement for gathering resources. This idea would have worked much better in a digital environment where you wouldn't need to control your gatherers to such extent. Having this in a board game system we noticed rather quickly how this was never going to work.

During this week we also started the creation of this wiki.

Week 2
Having learned from Week 1 what went wrong and what worked from the first test of systems we then removed Movement, Some resources and what was left got revamped to fit in and make the game an enjoyable experience.

Instead we put the focus on the combat and a simplified resource system. While still keeping the same idea of the game being to hold a base. The way this was setup it took way to much time. With the objective to take over the other players base by spending resource to buy units that attacks was not strong enough when comparing to the defense capabilities. These numbers clearly needs to be worked on to shorten the game play down and make it more fast paced and action filled. This is something that we didn't notice until this weeks play testing as well as it being the first time the game was played on three players.

Week 3
As we not got to make changes from the previous week we tried to modify the balancing of the system in order to encourage players to go for a more offensive path rather than a defensive one. This was proven to have failed at the play-testing session, the games dragged out and the players still didn't want to attack each others even with the changes to the health system.

The changes to the health system now meant that the health pile only consisted of Tower-Upgrades and extra gold. While there still being two other card stacks for the player to choose from each turn, the offensive units deck and the utility deck. This is something that we will need to take another look at during next week. The system needs to be changed slightly so that the player actually gets a motivation for attacking, rather than trying to pile up defense on utility cards.

This week we have been focusing on making the paperprototype much more playable and easier to change, gluing paper on normal playing cards to fill with stats was how this was achieved.

During this weeks playtesting we got some good feedback that we will need to go through during the next week. In this feedback we found things that we had not noticed ourselves, and will need to be discussed in the group of if and in that case how to apply them on our systems.

Week 4
This week the focus has been placed on how to make sure that there are other viable tactics to win a game besides just bunkering up and hoping for the best. We balanced this out by making a card cap for how many cards each player is allowed to keep on his hand. We also modified how the cards are being drawn each turn. Rather than the old pick any two cards you are now forced to take one unit card and one utility card. This and also raising the cost of defensive and utility cards makes they players play more offensive, while being three players and playing offensive there is often teaming up going on which was something we wanted to achieve.

One of the other problems we had earlier was how the game dragged out due to defenses and just not simply enough room to advance made us think over the HP system. Or rather who draws the HP card once a unit has breached the castle. Now the one who sent the attacking unit receives this bonus. This even more encourages the Zerg rush tactic as the only way to get blueprints for tower upgrades is to siege the enemies castles.

During the playtesting we got to see results as the players actually were playing more aggressive and the games became shorter and less dragged out. Alliances forming and being broken, Exactly what we wanted to achieve and it was now shown in a playtesting.