Week 10

Over the past week the class began learning about dice games and how to implement similar mechanics into our own designs. Along with this we watched a few videos over a Harry Potter based deck building game that was quite complex.  One of these videos explained the concepts of the game while another offered some design ideas that could potentially be put to use in the design of our next project. Before I expand more on that project, I should first mention the bit of Battle Battle that we played and created. As you may know Battle Battle is a game that is used to help balance different characters and allows you to create new characters and balance them against the vanilla card. We started by just playing a few cards given to us against the vanilla card as it acts as a base. I had the zombie card and learned quite quickly that it is possibly one of the worst cards you could use as it only has two hit points. It seemed that no matter what the situation was the zombie was going to be taking the loss each round. After playing through this a few more times we were assigned to create our own cards, give them powers, and all that stuff. It was not necessarily difficult to create a character, but there was no way to know how your character would fare against another classmate's character. My favorite character I created out of the two was the Healer card. It had no tokens and two health points, but it has a few “powers” that, in theory, would help balance them out. Firstly, they can only take damage if the opponent rolls a three or higher. I decided this because I had pictured the healer to be similar to the flying healers in the old mobile game Clash of Clans. The power is supposed to imply that they have a bit of agility that makes it somewhat difficult to hit. Along with this the Healer gains back one health point if the dice land on a one or a six. This may seem a little overpowered, but during the initial gameplay against other classmates I got wiped across the floor. I ended up adding another hit point and this definitely helped, but further playtesting would be required to solidify that this was the right move. The second character I created was called “Berserker”, but he never saw the florescent lighting or swivel chairs of the classroom. I felt that the healer was a much more interesting character that had more potential to grow and help me learn the process so Berserker will seek an early retirement. Finally, we began discussions for our next game and the expectations of the project. My group and I tried coming up with a villain theme, but fell short of a solid idea on Thursday. We had plans to discuss it over the weekend, but I’m just now realizing that I do not have their contact info so we will see how these next few classes go.