Week 43 Reflection

This was another tough week for us. Many of us (me included) we’re sick and away during the start of the week. When we all finally got together at Wednesday we had some major issues facing us. Both from the testing session last week and from the meeting we had with Marcus Monday we learned that the game we had simply did not work. The biggest issue we had was perhaps with sabotage; it was set up so that it was costly in resources for the one who performed the sabotaged and drained much resources for the target of the sabotage. If all four players of the game got into sabotaging the game would basically come to a standstill and all resource flows would stop. If three players got into sabotaging and the fourth player stayed in her/his own corner, avoiding all player interaction, that player would win by a landslide. This system felt unfair to players and was really not fun as it made the most tactical players interact less with each other instead of more.

Another problem we had was with the resource system. The victor of the game was determined by the first to reach 20 resources. But these were the same resources you used to build mines and saboteurs and new workers. This made it hard to know what the best strategy of the game was. If you never bought anything, but simply used your first worker to explore and gather resources you might win. This is really counter-intuitive and definitely not how we intended the game to be played.

All in all, it’s safe to say we all felt quite uneasy when our meeting Wednesday started and we knew we needed to somehow fix these issues. For some time we just threw out ideas; these ideas where usually cut down immediately by the group on the grounds of not solving any of the problems we were facing and sometimes on the grounds of creating a whole new range of problems. Needless to say, our spirits were quite low. Some of us wanted to change something drastic, while others wanted to take smaller steps to be able to test what worked with each iteration. It didn’t really matter though as we had no strong ideas for what we wanted to change, and how that change should look.

Eventually it all collapsed when we started screaming at each other. I think I was the one who managed to save the situation by suggesting we cut down features to the very basics of our game and then take another look at our aesthetic goal and work from there. We scraped the entire sabotage system and resource system. We went back to the aesthetic goal of being an explorer in a struggle for resources, and our first order of business was to create a new resource system. We settled for a system where the resources you got would not be able to buy you more income or additional characters, but would only work to get you closer to the victory condition.

What we eventually got was a game where each player controls two characters. There were four types of resources; A, B, C and D. The different resources where located in the four corners of the map, and two different types were needed to build a victory structure. The first player to build three victory structures of different types would win. Sabotage was a lot more subtle now as players could block each other from building structures, but not directly steal or destroy what others had build. To fill the void we introduced trading into the game. 

Players can trade any resources with each other if their characters are in the same room. To further encourage trading we also introduced a trading resource which the players could get from their structures. A trading resource could not be used to build structures, but if it is traded the player who receives it would be able to swap it for any other resource. (Inspired by Pokemons evolving only when traded).

With these changes the game felt much more tactical; players would have a clear goal to work towards and clear available paths to reach that goal. Player interaction also became much more meaningful as trading is heavily encouraged by the game and because sabotaging isn’t so present and is much more tactical when it occurs. For the first time we actually enjoyed the game when we tested it during this iteration!

Finally we have used the rest of the week for testing and iterating and adding some flavor to the game. Our setting is in a cave and we changed the resources to gems of emerald, ruby, sapphire and topaz. The trading resource became magic gems. The players are controlling the king and queen of their respective dwarf-clans and they are racing to become the first to build three gemstone monuments!