Herman

Week 1
Our goals for the first two weeks was to have the groundwork for a board game to test by Friday the 17th of October. We started by thinking of different ideas and decided on one where the players were divided into two teams, one which defended a castle and one which attacked the same castle. The defenders had four characters which they could move around the game grid and four towers on the castle which required a player to operate in order to fire. The attackers used no individual characters but rather purchased different units to move around the map. The players gathered different resources from points around the game's map grid, these resources was used to upgrade the castle's defenses and the defenders' abilities, and for the attackers to buy and upgrade units.

During our first week we fleshed out the core mechanics and made a paper prototype where we could test. In the beginning of week 2 we ran a few tests sessions and found out that moving around on the game field gathering resources wasn't any fun at all. Since this was our core mechanic we scrapped the idea.

Week 2
After the first idea for the game had failed we iterated the game, keeping the parts of the game we wanted to keep. Our game now consists only of a castle which the player defends while simultaneously attacks the enemy castle. Each castle has four entrances in a + formation with a lane in front of each where enemies can send attacking units through to attack the center of the castle. The castle began with four towers which could be upgraded, this was later changed to only having two towers and two slots where the player could later place additional towers.

During the week we created another paper prototype for the game and tested it in order to find any issues and determine different stats for individual cards. We started by creating a deck of game cards with the basic units and set up preliminary stats. While playing we took notes of how the game went and got some good statistics.

For the Friday's testing session we plan on making proper "boards" for the players, modify a few of the existing cards and add some new ones to see how they play, finally we also want to have the game played between more than two players at the same time to see how players interact when there is more than one potential target and threat.

Week 3
During the testing session we had one game running for over two hours before it ended and no player really took any damage until around the 20th round of the game but we still managed to get good test data from the session. We had a short meeting on this Monday where we planned out the week and discussed what changes we were going to have to make. The next day we had a longer meeting where we had time to go through the feedback from the testing session. We decided to try to make the game more focused on attacking rather than defending as well as clarify some of the rules; we also needed to adjust some values and how some cards worked.

Our goal for the week was to modify the game to be shorter and less about building as much defenses as possible. In order to do this we made changes to the towers such as making the base towers destroyable by ranged units. And also some changes to the attack units such as making some of the base units stronger and adding another ranged unit. One of the most important changes we made however is that we placed all the tower upgrades in the middle pile, meaning that a player could only upgrade a tower after taking damage, we also decided to have cards in the health pile which would give the player other bonuses, for now the only other bonus is cards which give the player additional gold.

On the Wednesday we got together and crafted the deck of cards for the game as well as making a proper list of how many of each card there should be in the deck. We also set the cost, health and damage done by every card.

On Thursday we didn't meet and worked on our level design project instead.

On Friday morning we finished off the descriptions of the cards and wrote down some additional instructions for the game.

Week 4
Our playtesting session still gave us the same results as previously, players would only draw cards from the defensive stack rather than from the unit stack. And all preferred to lock down their castles with excessive defenses rather than attack enemies. If a player did get attacked and it actually managed to get through their defenses, they got to take upgrade cards which meant they could increase their defenses and keep building ridiculous amounts of defenses.

During the week we had a bit fewer opportunities than usual to meet due to the level design assignment being supposed to be turned in on the Friday alongside a report. We met on the Tuesday to discuss new changes to the game. What we came up with was a modification in how the players drew cards as well as increasing the cost of several defensive cards. Previously, the players had been able to draw two cards per turn from either pile, two from one or one from each. Since the issue was that the player only wanted to take defensive cards and didn't want to play unit cards we gave the player a cap on how many cards they could have on their hand at once. Then we made it so the players were forced to take one card from each pile every turn, starting with the unit card, if the player had six cards on hand at the beginning of a turn they would only be allowed to take a unit card. This way players now needed to play unit cards in order to be able to continue drawing defensive cards.

The other changes we made was to have players place a token on the enemy lane they were attacking in order to keep track on who's units attacked each lane. With this in place we were able let the player who caused damage to another player's castle receive the health card rather than the owner of the castle. We also increased the cost of defensive cards except farms and traps in order to prevent players from simply locking down their castle with barricades and towers. On that note, we lowered the base towers' hit points to 2 instead of three which now means two archers or a single ballista is able to take down a base tower. Two other small changes we made was making the "Thievery" -card remain free of cost but only usable against a player with more gold than yourself, and making the "Relocate unit" -card cost 4 gold.

The playtesting session was shorter than usual but it showed good results of our changes. The players would attack other castles more than previous sessions and make quick alliances to aid each other in attacking the third player who still were able to send out units of their own. This way the alliances changed during the game as attack focused on different players. As one of the players built up enough defenses, the other two recognized that player as a threat and begun attacking them instead of each other, which in turn lead to themselves being able to improve their defense and become threats themselves. A few minor changes were suggested which we will look into before next session and the final hand in.