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Week 1
This week, we had the assignment to come up with a game system to iterate on in the coming weeks. We had two ideas, one more thought-out than the other. The first was a game where the player had the role of a character and explored dungeons. This idea didn't get chosen by the majority of the group. Instead we continued with a concept where there are two groups of players, one who needed to defend their caste, and another which goal was to attack said castle.

The game-board consisted of a grid with a castle in the middle which occupied a 3x3 space. The surrounding area outside the castle had six resource nodes and a starting point in each corner for the attacking players. Both parties needed to collect wood, stone and food resources by having their units move between each resource node on the board. As soon as we began play-testing a quick draft, we noticed that the movement system was too cumbersome and it took too long for anything interesting to happen to both players. We knew that the current movement system needed to be revised.

Week 2
As stated in the previous week log, the movement system in its current form didn't work. This week we had to make changes for it to work, because group play-sessions were due this week's Friday. We solved it by changing the grid into four lanes consisting of three spaces. There was one lane on each side of the square castle. Now units were deployed at the end of one lane instead of the previous version, where players placed attacking units in one of the game-board's corners. This enabled faster play and the result of ones actions were noticed earlier.

Now when we had a simpler system, we changed the player's roles from attackers and defenders to both players having their own castle. As such they both had a defensive role through their towers and structures, and a offensive through the units they moved towards their enemy's castle. We also reduced the number of resources from: food, stone, iron and gold, to only having gold as the single resource. The new system was entirely card-based compared to the previous one which needed different pieces for units and resources. Now the only thing that wasn't cards were the gold resource.

The cards were divided into two categories, attack- and defend-cards. The attack-cards contained all the units and the defend-cards, tower modifications and structures. We tested this system with a preliminary set of units and structures and it worked well enough for us to considered it worthy of a play-session.

During the Friday play-session we noticed that the game quickly became a stalemate, with the defense being stronger than intended. This is something we will want to balance next week.

Week 3
As we discovered during the previous week's play-session, the defense was too powerful. Because of that there were games that lasted too long. Some over two hours. This we needed to fix. We aimed our efforts towards changing the decks contents.

In order to give players less of an defensive advantage, we moved all tower upgrades from the defense-deck, to the health-deck. In doing so, we gave the players only one way to get upgrades to their turrets; By getting attacked. Now, instead of having an offense and a defense-deck, we had an offense and a utility-deck. Where as the offense-deck now only contained attacking units. And the utility-deck, farms, barricades and traps.

We also changed the way towers get upgraded. Previously whenever they got an upgrade and later got destroyed, they got downgraded again. We changed this so that whenever an upgraded tower gets destroyed, it's removed entirely. This means that we had to introduce a way of getting the towers back. The solution became that all players would be able to purchase a new base-tower at a cost of four gold pieces.

When this version was play-tested this week, we noticed that even though the defense was no longer over-powered, the players still sometimes chose to mainly focus on their defense, rather than attacking the other player. This is something which we'll have a look at improving next week. Because currently, there isn't a large enough incentive to attack the other players.

Week 4
This week our focus was to give players a bigger incentive to attack the other players. This was due to the previous weeks play-session which showed that players would much rather build upon their defense, than sending attacking forces at the other players.

In order to increase the effectiveness of offensive strategies we changed who receives the cards during an attack of the castle. Previously the player who was attacked got the cards. Now we changed this so that the attacking player got rewarded the cards. But if we were going to give the attacker the cards, then we needed a way to keep track of who it was that sent the attacking unit. We solved this by introducing previously discussed tagging system, where the players only get to attack lanes that is free from enemy units.

We also balanced the costs of some of the defensive structures by increasing their price. Which further decreased the chances of having players that only played defensively.

The last thing we did was change what cards the player is allowed to draw on their turn. Before, the player could draw two cards in total and choose from what pile those cards were drawn. Now players were forced to draw one from each pile to ensure that players always were able to attack or did not choose to only build on their defense.