Blog Post 5 - Playtest 1 Unit 3

  The iteration process of making Raid was somewhat straightforward, but we encountered many issues throughout development due to the scope of the game. When we were conceptualizing what kind of game we wanted to make, we wanted to take different elements from different kinds of games. 

One of those elements that we wanted to add to the game was the sense of progression through the use of getting items after defeating a wave of monsters. We originally came up with this idea from Risk of Rain 2, which is a roguelike game in which the player progresses through the level while defeating monsters and gaining gold to unlock chests, which leads to items that strengthen the player.

Early self-playtest

Though the game remains only partially complete, creating items was a large undertaking which continues to take up a lot of development time because it directly affects how the game is balanced, yet the game may seem too dry and uninteresting if not enough items are implemented. Our next step in terms of developing the items is skill progression. We plan on allowing the player to upgrade their skills instead of continually rerolling skills so that their power will scale into the late game when there are more monsters to deal with.

Another element that took up much of our development was the monsters. There are not that many monsters, but that is not because of a lack of effort–much of our thought process went into figuring out a way to make the monsters fun to fight against. In our first self-playtest, the game felt boring. There was not much player interaction, the monsters did not pose much of a threat, and there were no items to create a sense of reward or progression. One of the main mechanics which we wanted to dial in on was making fighting the monsters fun, and we worked on that issue by making items and putting more ideas into our monsters. Specifically, we tailored them more to their original archetype. For example, we made the “Glass Cannon” archetype a bee that dies once it attacks an opponent, but also deals a lot of damage. We gave all of the monsters passives, which significantly helped combat against them feeling more interactive, and we also named each of their basic attacks. 

Later playtest

As mentioned, the production of the monsters and items took up much of our time. This was partly due to the fact that it took time to think of ideas as to how we could make the game more fun for the player. But, another portion of that time was spent making simple mock-ups of the cards in Photoshop so that they could be printed out and played with. In my personal experience, for the past games that we have designed within the class, the playtests went smoother because our games only relied on a deck of playing cards and some handwritten player boards that took no more than 10 minutes to make. For Raid, the player cards took significantly longer, and there were multiple iterations of them from handwritten cards to basic printouts to our latest version of those edited printouts. In previous games, we could manage to rely on playing cards because the cards simply served the purpose of having some kind of single value or number attached to them, but in this game, there were multiple factors such as health, damage, and passives to care about. It was not as simple as assigning a passive to a face card from a playing card deck.

I believe that the playtest went fairly smoothly. As usual, the playtest revealed to us that there were some parts of the rule sheet that could’ve been explained better or more clearly. We also learned that we needed to introduce power scaling for the players so that they are able to keep up with the increasing number of monsters per wave.

Boss fight

Something I would change about our iteration process moving forward is that I would reduce the scope of the project sooner. We had many ideas about what we wanted included in the game, and now that we know what the game is lacking of, we are adding in more and more of those features, such as a progression system and a way to level up the characters, but if we had scaled down the other features to begin with and prioritized mainly combat, we likely would have had half the number of tribulations that we had now.