❖ Version History ❖
30th of November, 2020:
While I was busy being distracted in the art and design sector of this project, very little got done when it came to further play testing and game balancing. In the paper phase of the project I had played the game probably 20-30 times before actually presenting anything to Matt, but now nearly half of the card designs have been touched up, some of the numbers have changed, and the actual flow of the experience has totally transformed. Additionally, there have been some concepts on the table for improving the quality of the player experience in the game, but there has been no means of testing what this experience would be like, or tracking how the results would work out when tested.
So, before explaining how I do all of my play testing data, let’s recap on where we are so far on the “Crisis Deck” and how it will impact the game:
1. Purpose: The Crisis is going to set up the challenge for the players in this game.
2. Method: A Crisis puts flight cards on the map to be solved & makes solving harder
3. Challenge: Each turn begins a crisis. If unsolved, the effects stack into next turn.
4. Game Goal: Lose control of solving flights/crises? you will lose. Defeat 10 to win.
5. Value: We want a diverse pool of possible crises, giving players a reason to replay.
In setting up the original prototype, I had successfully made about 12-15 fun and functioning crisis cards for play testing. When I sat down to do a play test at this point in time, I had been shuffling the total pile of crisis cards, pulling 10 random cards from the stack and facing the challenges in a random order. While this was mostly a functional approach, I came to find that there were a few unique problems, most notably: there were a few combinations of missions which, when played in a certain order, made the game extremely unlikely / challenging to survive. This simply would not do. So, I called up my close friend Ben and requested a day to nag him about improving the game mechanics. Our overall objectives for the day were as follows:
1. Create: We need to make at least 15 new mission cards… ideally more like 25 so that we can cull nonfunctional cards later on and leave ourselves some options.
2. Sort: We need to organize the 30 best crises into three batches of 10. The ideal here is that we will cut the randomization out of the order that the crisis cards appear. By sorting out three batches of ten, we might ideally create an: Easy, Medium, & hard mode.
3. Diversify: We hope to sort the crisis cards into different skill-types as we assemble the difficulty of the game. As an example, the easy mode would feature mostly the experience of solving crashes (what a crash investigation team does best). The harder modes would feature needing to do diplomatic missions & dealing with skirmish fights, as this is a more specialized skill for the different characters on the team.
4. Study: After concocting these batches of ideas into playable sets of 10, we need to play test the outcomes as much as possible. We also need to start tracking the interactions and how they function between the: Characters, Crisis Cards, & Flight Cards. (Are things too easy, too hard? Are certain characters too useful, or not useful enough? Are the challenge numbers for solving flights in a good medium range? so on & so forth).
5. Record: As we make changes from here, we need to take careful notes on what is kept, what is removed, and what is altered. By doing this, if we run into future problems, we won’t forget why Crisis Cards were functioning at a point where they worked better.
After a classically long day of staring at designs, scribbling down notes, eating junk food, and endless play testing, Ben and I accomplish a great deal. We successfully create the effects for the 30 total cards and give our best guess at how to organize them by difficulty. We create the initial chart for studying the data, and we get at least one good run on the play test before our brains are totally fried. Though we now have an infinitely larger pile of data to sort and test moving forward, we have set the standards for how we will progress our play testing from here forward, which is very important.
