Theodor

Week 1
To start of this assignment, we were tasked with creating a game system which would be the center piece of our board game. Right off the bat we had two ideas. One was heavily inspired by Drakborgen which we played a few weeks earlier, where players had to explore dungeons while the other was inspired by tower defense games and Last Night on Earth which we played recently as well. We chose the latter since it had more depth and seemed more interesting.

This game had two different spaces on the game board; the castle which the "defenders" needed to defend and consisted of a 3x3 grid the other was the surrounding area (fields, forest, etc) where the "attackers! roamed and tried to infiltrate the castle. Spread across the surrounding area were resource nodes which generated materials which the teams needed to collect to be able to build weapons and defenses against the other team.

After just a few minutes of our first playtesting we realized that the movement was way to slow and the players quickly became bored. We needed to look over this aspect of the game. Should we tinker with some numbers or do a complete overhaul of the game regarding the movement?

Week 2
The first playtesting session with our classmates was coming up this week which meant that we needed to fix the movement system ASAP to be able to do our own testing before we let it loose on the others.

We manage to move away from the movement and resource gathering system to a more focused card system (event cards), a heavier focus on the castles, disregarding the "surrounding areas" completely and merging the "attackers" and "defenders" to just each player against each other by the same rules.

Each opening to the castle now has a three spaced lane attached to it. A player who is attacking someone else's castle can now place attacking units by these lanes, creating a queue which moves automatically towards the castle each round. Once/if they reach the center of the castle, the defending player loses 1 health. The player defending her castle can also use these spaces on the lane to build traps and barricades to hinder or stop the attackers. Each castle also has two towers (with the ability to upgrade and add two more towers) which can try to shoot down the attackers. To upgrade towers, add traps, attacking units, etc. the players need to use the implemented card-system.

The card system consists of two categories; Attack-cards and Defend-cards. Two cards (players choose which to draw) are drawn at the start of each round and will give the players abilities to upgrade towers, give them more units, hinder others' progress and so on. The two categories offers different abilities which gives the players a chance to dictate if they should play more defensively or offensively.

These cards can only be used if the players have a amount of gold on there hands, which is now our only resource. Each upgrade, soldier and trap cost a set of amount of gold which forces the players to be strategical with their cards.

Next week we will try to balance the game as much as possible since our game became really long when we added another player into the mix. We previously tested the game with two people which was fine, but with three it became too long.

Week 3
Week 3 started off with a meeting on Monday where we scheduled the coming week. Balancing several assignments at once made this meeting and schedule important since it gave everybody a chance to work on the other assignments. We also had a short discussion regarding the feedback we gathered from last week's playtesting session, but we decided to continue the discussion the next day when we had a bit more time to also address the feedback while discussing.

The next day was dedicated to what we decided upon the previous day. All the feedback was processed and we addressed everything that we saw was necessary and made changes accordingly. A lot of the feedback we received was regarding aspects of the game that we needed to test further before we knew how to change them, or if they even needed to be changed at all.

We also decided to modify the system from a balance between the Offense and Defense to a bigger focus on the Offensive side. Before this, each player had three designated piles of cards where two were "shared" with the other players; the offense and defense piles. The third and "private" pile was the HP pile where unknown offense and defense cards were placed, which the player could utilize once they lost one health. All these piles have been modified to a certain extent, where the biggest change is to the HP pile. This is now the pile where all the tower upgrades and other bonuses lay, instead of in the defense pile. This will remove the dynamic of player hoarding the defense cards to build up a too strong defense against the other players and forces them to experiment and take risks to win the game.

Another small but significant change is that the base towers can now take damage from different ranged units.

The rest of the week consisted of fine tuning the aesthetics of the physical game space to improve the experience for the players and make it easier to understand for newcomers!

Week 4
Last week's playtesting showed us similar results to the one before and we received similar feedback. Players seemed to prefer to stock up on heavy defenses rather than attacking which created stalemates at certain points.

To continue to shift focus on offense instead of defense we decided to increase the cost of most defender cards, to encourage attacking. We also changed how cards were drawn at the start of each round as the players now have to take 1 defender and 1 attacker card instead of choosing 2 cards freely. This will stop players from hoarding the defender cards and build unbeatable castles.

To encourage attacking even more, we have changed the system so that once an attack is successful, the attacking player will receive a card from the damaged players HP pile. So instead of aiding players who get damaged, we now reward players for playing offensively. Previously, every player could place their attacking units on any lane of the opposing players but this, combined with the new reward system, would make it hard for players to keep track of who actually damaged the other one. To combat this confusion, players will now "occupy" lanes by placing units down. This means that other players cannot utilize this lane during that same time, which will make it easier to keep track of your attackers.

With these changes, attacking occurred a lot more often in the playtesting as people also started to create alliances to work together to defeat other opponents.