Our design team had another major play test between ourselves today. Unfortunately, many of the groups in our tutorial did not have a prototype ready to share with us, so they spent time working on theirs instead of coming to have a look at ours. We have done some extensive play testing on our game, so we used the workshop session to give feedback to another design team on their game. This latest play test happened later this afternoon, and we are very pleased with the results.

What I have noticed in earlier tests is that we are generally only willing to initiate battle where it is necessary to stop an opponent gaining an explicit advantage (or if the smack talk has caused players to harness a temporarily dislike for one another). Since an attacking player has no reassurance that he has a good chance of winning an active attack, there is really little motivation for battles to occur during the first few rounds.

As the game design stands, this is generally a good occurrence, in that it allows players to advance unchecked in collecting resources for the first (and lengthiest) tier. We wanted this situation to eventuate, in order to make sure individual players don’t fall behind from the start (as discussed in PvP design considerations in the Game Balancing lecture).

However, as players made their way to the middle tier, there was still not enough motivation to attack one another unless there was an urgent need to do so, and I wanted to give players a bit more certainty in their tactics. One suggestion I made was to let the challenging army roll a twenty-sided die in battle and only allow the defending army a twelve-sided die. My team-mates decided this was not the best idea, as it would encourage unnecessary battle initiation (which would also hinder our efforts to facilitate ally and betrayal dynamics), and possibly make the game play a bit too confusing (we already had two types of dice and a third may have been too much to deal with). I agreed with their reasoning.

My next suggestion was to introduce a power-up where a player could effectively double the strength of his army. Each player would be given a token that could be played only once during a game. This token would double the value of each of the player’s dice for that roll. David and Jeremy met the idea enthusiastically. What this would mean in terms of game play was that a player with a power-up token knew he had a much lower risk of losing a battle when playing the token against a player without the power-up. It also introduces another aspect to the decision making in that a defending player with a power-up played against him has to consider whether battling with the distinct disadvantage should play his own power-up to lower his risk of losing, or save the token for a more devastating effect later in the game. It would also be possible that one player wins the game before all players have used their tokens, so this places extra pressure on players to find the best time to use the one-off power-up.

New resource tokens

We also tested an additional power-up where a player could double the number of spaces he could move an army by doubling the face value of the six-sided die. The implications of including this power-up are fairly trivial compared to the first one discussed, so I will not go into its effects in detail.

In the second test game we played with these power-ups, their potential became very clear. Jeremy had one army at the summit and had an unchecked path for his remaining two armies to reach the summit and thus win the game. I used my movement power-up to catch up to his army furthest from the summit, and then my attacking power-up to assist in defeating that army. As a result, one of his remaining armies had to restart the ascent from the outer tier, while my armies all reached the summit before he could get his recently defeated army anywhere near the finish.

In another instance, Jeremy and David had formed a serious alliance, one that they did not seem to be willing to break until the final move. They performed an allied advance towards my three armies, all of which were on the same space. Their two armies attacked my three, with both my opponents playing their attacking power-ups. Their doubled attack value barely beat the value of my three-dice roll, but all three of my armies were forced back to the start as a result.

The attack power-up has integrated smoothly into our game and given a greater sense of power to the players who still hold the token during the game. As I have mentioned previously, we feel that our game has been designed well, effectively combining the aspects of design taught this semester. Resultantly, the power-up adds to the excitement of the game, without making it unbalanced and compliments any decent playing strategy without causing any single one to be dominant.

I’d like to add a third power-up into the mix, just to see if the power of three works well for our game. This could be in the form of a defensive power-up (causing the current attacking power-up to only be usable by a player who declares a battle) that doubles the defending armies’ strength. Another option would be to introduce an immunity token, whose effect would be to nullify an opponent’s declaration of battle. I think that both options would enhance the game experience, but I prefer the idea of the immunity token, in that it adds to the unpredictability of the game, and could be worked into out game narrative well (in that historically, primitive armies have been known to avoid battle through non-violent means such as trickery or bribery). Ultimately, our power-ups have added another enhancing element to the game experience and we are looking forward to using them in future tests.