Designing the Game

5 others and me put ourselves into a group and had to design a game with good balance and randomness, to learn how important these things are in games. The game had to have a Randomiser (in our case, a Die), and had to obviously have a set of rules that would mean someone won or lost. When the group came together to think up rules, we all sort of had the same idea from the way we talked, and started to put it down on paper, to see the ideas and alter them into a workable state.

*pictures taken by Azam Khan. (He's sorry about sideways pictures)

After that, we came up with a rough idea of how fights would play out and how different classes of character would differ in; Health, Damage, Speed and Range of Attack.

Because we didn’t have our Characters models yet, and passing a ruler around for every go would take way to long, we made model stand-ins and 6 rough rulers…

Just before we were about to test the game, we realised we didn’t have a map to play on, so we drew one in about 30 seconds…

Just before we started playing, we decided it would be a Team on Team game, instead of a free for all; and so we played 3 v 3.

After the first game, there were many problems with the game. The two biggest where: the maps layout and how long it took to kill people. So we started work on coming up with another rough map, and started to change the stats of each class, as well as adding an Armour system to the game. The two main things changed was upping the Damage output of each class, and well as upping their Health, so we had more freedom to make changes later.

We also redesigned the map slightly, to make the longer route safe, and the shorter route dangerous, by taking of 2hp for every turn taken within it.   

This is the Health results of the game, updated upon every hit and heal.

 The results of the game suggested to me that we seriously needed to improve on the Damage, Health and Movement Speed, as well as the Map layout, to make the games move quicker. The reason I think this: it took us almost an hour to finish our game, 40% of which was both teams trying to get close to each other, and the other 60% spent in the exact same place just attacking and healing, until eventually 1 person died, at which point we stopped playing because it was taking way too long.

The other members of the group at the time didnt think this was a problem, but I conviced some of them of my problem with it, and said that if I change the Stats around a bit, they will test play it and see if its better. I am, at the moment, stiff refining the new stats; they are still based around what we came up with together, but changes are being made to speed up the game.