Christoffer

Week 1
For this assignment we are supposed to create well-functioning systems that are implemented into board games.

Our very first attempt was a concept for a game where there are two sides battling each other on a board, the “attacker” and the “defender”. This would function a bit like a tower defense game where the defender’s task was to hold a castle at the center of the board and the attacker would attempt to rush towards its center to cause damage.Each side would also have to gather resources that would be used to upgrade units or the castle’s defenses.

We also tried to implement this so that more than two players could play at the same time, dividing them between attackers and defenders.

Based on this we created a prototype to test the movement and resource gathering, but immediately saw flaws.The flow of the game was very slow, and taking future defenses and units into consideration it was quite obvious that the game as it was would create stalemates where both sides would only focus on gathering resources for large parts of the game.

So from this we saw that it needed a bit of reworking.

Week 2
Early this week we decided to revise the movement and resource systems a bit. They are still present, but not quite in the same manner, since the game was made to be pretty much entirely card-based. Also now each player has a castle of his/her own to defend, and is at the same time able to attack other players.

The movement system was simplified to become a lane system where each castle has four lanes connected to it. Each lane consists of three main slots and a spawn queue outside this for units waiting to enter. It simply functions so that each unit walks along this lane a set number of slots each turn, and in the meantime the castles defenses has a chance to defeat them.

Resources were also simplified to only having Gold instead of multiple different resources. Gold was given a standard income each round that can be altered by special cards. Because of this the focus of the game shifted more towards the attacking and defending of the castle instead of moving around competing for resources places on the board.

The game still requires a great deal of balancing of course, it is still a bit slow-paced and a bit tipped to the defenses favor.

Also the first play-testing session between groups was this week on Friday, so we will have to look at any feedback that was given during this.

Week 3
The main issue this week, and a recurring one at that, was that the defenses ultimately became far too strong if the players only focused on defending. What we did in an attempt to counter this was to alter the deck-structures.

Before we had two main types of cards, Defense-cards and Attack-cards, that were divided into separate decks. Further than using these cards in a normal manner, the players would at the start of the game form a Health-stack, consisting of a number of Attack and Defense cards. As the player took damage a number of these would be removed and added to the players hand instead, allowing him to remain competitive even as an underdog.

This week what we did was to remove alternate tower-types from the Defense-deck and altering the Health-stacks to consist of these tower-types and cards giving gold instead. This was so that it would be harder to build an ultimate defense, and the players would be more interested in attacking rather than bulking defense. But a player that took too great a beating would still have a fighting chance.

During the play-testing I played a match against one from another group and decided to rush him with units from the very start, to see if it was a viable strategy. It wasn’t. He bulked up on defenses that he got from his lost Health as I wasted my gold and countered when I didn’t have the resources to do the same.

As it is now, attacking must have greater rewards and be more appealing than it currently is, and the reversed for only defending. We probably have to look into the Health-stack again and revise the stats of the attacking units to start with.



Week 4
This week mostly relatively minor changes were made to the board game. As the game still favored a defensive strategy, we scheduled a meeting to attempt shifting this to a more balanced approach, where attacking becomes more viable, instead of creating the ultimate defense.

Various suggestions to fixing this was brought up, including mixing basic towers into the Health-cards, extending the lanes, claiming lanes when attacking to keep track on who owns units and altering the rules when a player is damaged so that the attacking player gains additional cards instead of the defending.

Ultimately this week we settled mainly on raising the cost of defense-cards, claiming lanes and that the attacker is the one to gain cards when damaging other players. This made attacking more appealing since defense cards can only be obtained from damaging other players and drawing cards from their Health-stacks. 

Additionally instead of drawing two cards divided between the Unit and Utility decks as the player decided, one would be drawn from each deck. This would ensure that the players always had the possibility to attack, and wouldn’t decide on only drawing utility cards.