Following another check up with David King, Jacky and I went over the rules once again to make its presentation clearer. Key words are now in bold, colours are specifically made to refer to certain types of cards (red is for Challenges, blue is for Boons). Finally, images were pieced up and used to properly convey the game’s set up, movement, and clarifications.
In addition to this, Jacky went over the cards again to make them more printer-friendly, following what Luke Head said about player accessibility and his concerns thereof. As seen above, they were moved from coloured, parchment like cards, to something black and white, being more cost effective and easier to print for those without very performing machines.
It also grants the cards an old school aesthetic, found mostly in many CYOA (choose you own adventure) books, like the Lone Wolf series by Joe Denver, Ben Devere & Vincent Lazzari. (1984 – current). The most notorious artist/illustrator of the series being Gary Chalk.
Fire on the Water, “Lone Wolf” artwork, Gary Chalk, 1984
This will emphasise the theme we’re going for (fantasy dungeon/labyrinth), as well as give a certain charm to the cards that can be found in those old books or old fantasy editions.
The game itself is mostly complete, and is in a playable state now. All that remains is for the cards to be set up in a printable document, and the rules can be printed out properly as well.
Here is a final draft of the rules, accessible through this link: [Link].
Following some criticism and returns during our last presentation last week, Jacky decided to come up with a card back that communicated something instead of random lines. The original design was mistaken as communicating something when in fact it was simply just a few lines.
Playtesters believed that cards had to align (when faced down) connecting between both lines to create a path. This was unintentional, but we decided to roll with it and came up with a different card backing design that helped with the game’s layout, as well as understanding how players could move across the board.
So because Jacky is way better at graphic design than I, here are the card backings he drew up after deliberation!
Now each card as a symbol to dissociate between BOONS (in blue) and CHALLENGES (in red.) Boons also have a wind like symbol, whilst the challenges have a clashing symbol, which will allow players to apprehend and anticipate their trajectory through the maze/labyrinth.
Finally each card was styled to resemble a room, using stone walls as their borders, and they all have a path that shows how players might move around the board, that is to say towards any other adjacent card to the card currently stood upon. This design will avoid confusion when setting up and traversing the game board.
An example of how players might move through the board, see how the lines connect to show the potential trajectory a player might take.
We also began drafting more cohesive rules, and changed the set up to have something quicker. * 5 cards are drawn from the deck and placed between both character cards. * 3 cards are then drawn from the deck by both players again, and placed adjacent to this original lane. * 2 cards are then drawn and placed into the player’s hand, these cards can then be used on the player’s respective turns to switch out with one card on the board, or placed adjacent to another card.
The set up should look something akin to the image above, with no cards in the draw pile, on in the discard pile, and both players ought to have 2 cards in their hands at the beginning of the game.
Reflections on the Design Process so far:
I had previous made a card game during my Bachelor’s course, called Stranded Space, which was a single player card game with a randomised path, like this one. Though far more mechanical than the current game, the design process was mostly the same.
Conceptualise
Rough playtest
Asset Making
Clarify rules
Internal Playtesting (between both members of the group)
External Playtesting (between outsiders or with 1 member of the group)
Reiterate according to experience recorded
One major issue of playtesting this game is that due to travel restrictions we could only experience the parts of the game that require less physical interaction. Two solutions then come to mind, either we can focus the challenges onto something more accessible and less constraining, for example: the Wraiths card challenges both players to get on the ground (“play dead”). The quickest on the ground wins.
Or we can playtest with others during the holidays to get a proper grip at how the game might play when physicality is involved, which is the final plan. We’re approaching the final development blog, so I’ll have something larger at the ready seeing as this was merely a quick update on card backs and the explanation of their design.
Alrighty then. After the internal playtesting session we had on Monday, a few conclusions can be… well concluded. Also, Jacky came up with some sweet card designs.
They look amazing, and the card design is pretty clear. (They look sick!) The card is composed of an illustration, a movement number (top right corner), and a challenge description in the bottom half.
The movement rules and game rules lacked clarity. I ended up moving forwards more times than necessary and won too quickly. This action was a far better choice than drawing a card or switching things about.
Card placement needs clarification, the idea was to create one’s own path or force the opponent into a path, sadly this was never used except to lengthen the path of the enemy.
When we lost a challenge and were pushed back, we weren’t sure if the flipped card was to be tried again.
Well, that was stressful. After spending some time in vocal chat detailing the three concepts we had in for this brief. Through the use of quick slides describing the prototypes or ideas each student had in mind. The groups disscussed and deliberated amongst one another what would work, what is preferred, which proposal we think would work well; which leads us to Jack and I’s own project.
Taken from Jacky’s blog – this is the criticism and conclusions we drew before deliberating on which game we’d choose move on with:
“Railwaymaker: needed development, and more refining. I believe it lacks strucuture, there were no instructions to play a round. The rules regarding the card placement needed to be clarified too.
Matching war: A theme was absent, however it had clear rules. The mechanics were simple enough and quick to understand.
Labyrinth: Balance of gameplay is heavily skewed towards one player, other player could be left with nothing to do for a lot of the game.”
Labyrinth was chosen out of the three games we presented, which frankly came to me as a surprise. I expected the Matching Pairs to not make it, but the Railway card game seemed as fleshed out as Labyrinth was. In hindsight, I feel like the latter had a clearer destination, and a few qualities that (probably) steered the two of us to work on it.
I partnered up with Jacky for this one; the 18 card game brief is likely one I looked the most forwards to. Development started immediately after the lecture, where we began brainstorming a bunch of different ideas. Jacky offered to make a game first, with cards supporting the mechanics of it, rather than making something entirely card centric. Sounded good, so we both agreed and got to work.
We came up with the following to present for next week’s session:
And just to make sure we had everything well organised, we started a trello board, and then began prototyping and drawing some basic concepts for each game.
