Balancing Balancing and more Balancing.

Last day we had yet another balancing session, we were about half the group since the other half had other classes to attend. The goal of yesterdays sesion was to make the Wizard even stronger in the begining of the game and also try a new trap mechanic.

So inseed of doing an aditional 10+ saving throw for each trap and take two damage for each failed test, we tested and stuck with that you allways only take two damage no matter how many traps there are in a room.
The saving throw was lowered to 7+ and for each aditional trap in the room the you add 3 to the threshold, i.e. 1 trap 7+, 2 traps 10+, 3 traps 13+, and so on.
We decided to do this change since the traps were way to strong, especially during the endgame when the wizard could force the players to walk on the traps, so a 50/50 chance of taking 8 damage for about 6 mana was way to strong.

As for the wizard we tested to let him start at three mana and that helped alot more than we'd tought  But to reduce the heroes power at the start of the game, we removed alot of equipment and replaced them with consumable potions. This made the wizards spell "Demolish"(Destroy target equipment) alot more powerful since equipment was harder to come by.

Today we had a QA sesion with our primary teacher Adam, we only had half an hour with him and the game takes about 45 minutes to play. So needless to say he didn't get to finnish playing before the next group came along, but he did get sad when he had to stop playing which is a good sign. He liked the game and told us to just muck about with it this week, try and add classes, perhaps a town where you purches items and so on.

This is all for this week since I'm going to Gamex to show up a game I worked on last year called "Tribal Marathon"

That's all for today, goodnight and thanks for reading.

-David Forssell

Thursday QA

So the goal of this week was to balance the game as much as possible which i described in the previous post. This post will focus on the QA session we had this Thursday.

This thursday I pulled together the entire class and everyone tested at least one other game in the class. Since our game takes 45min - 1h 30min to play depending on the players experience only one group had time to test our game. It took the testers 1h 15min to play a round of our game. And their impresion of the game was that the traps were too powerfull, as it stands right now you roll a 10+ saving throw for each trap in a room you've entered, each roll you fail you take 2 damage for.
I also have found them to be a bit overpowered so what we plan to do is to change the trap system to, the more traps there are in a room the higher you have to roll, but you can only take two damage maximum.

A second thing they said was that the wizard was to weak at the start of the game, we've tried to fix this problem earlier by adding more lowcost cards in the game and increasing the mana the wizard gains but it seems that we still need to work on it a bit.

They also told us that there were to few potions in the game but I'm doubtful since this might just be an effect of the huge damage of the traps. So we will first try to fix the traps, and then if the problem remains we will add more potions.

All and all they loved our system and only feelt that we need to balance yet some more, so next week will be a balancing-week aswell.

That's all for today, goodnight and thanks for reading.

-David Forssell

Revamp!

Time for a lot of text!

So today I was in school working with my group from 10 a.m. - 8 p.m., we did QA(Quality Assurance) the entire day and improved the game. The main goal was to create ways for the wizard to split up players, since during the QA last friday we discovered that it was too easy for the heroes when they stick together.

So we decided to add these spells:

Switcheroo:

Choose a player and a token, switch their places.

Possess:

Choose a player, that player deals damage equal to the number of 

equipment he/she has to another player in the same room.

Whirlwind:

Choose a room, move each player in that room to a different adjecent room.
Place 2 level 5 tokens in the room they were previously stated in.

And my personal favorite

Evil Laugh:

Choose a room, each player in that room 

skips a turn for each player in that room

What this did was that the wizard could split the players up, or punish them when they are together and thereby making it more riskful to walk as a group. We also lowered the amount of swords a player could have (positive combat modifiers) from "one of each kind" to "two of any kind". Since there are three +3 swords, four +2 swords and five +1 swords. Before this change when you played three heroes all those heroes could have one +3,+2 and +1 card, giving them an +6 on their combat rolls. After this change, if you played three heroes only one person could have a total of +6 on their combat rolls, the other players could only have +5 and then +4 and so on.

We also wanted to try one new mechanic and add one new rule. The mechanic was "the rage of the wizard", when all three key's needed to get into the wizards tower is collected, the world starts to fall apart. The wizard must now, at the beginning of each turn, remove X number of tiles, where X is the number of people in the game. There are some constraints though, the wizard can't remove tiles so that a player can't get to the tower, of if a player dies and drops key's there must remain a path two that key. What this did was to create a narrower path to the wizards tower, forcing the heroes to walk through the wizards traps and monsters.

The rule we added was that when the wizard was enraged, he was allowed to place creatures inside of his tower aswell that the heroes had to fight before they win.

After some QA

The next thing we tried was that instead of the wizard gaining one "mana" each turn in addition to the modifiers from the tiles the players walk on, he only got the mana from the tiles. The reason we did this was because we felt that the wizard got to much "mana" too fast in the early game.

After trying this concept one time we realized that we had to re-balance the modifiers on the tiles in order for it to work. Since as they were now, the wizard was simply not getting enough "mana" because the negative "mana-modifiers"(the digit in the left icon) were too height and too many. So we made most of the -2 and -3 mana tiles into +1 or -1 mana tiles instead.

This helped some but the wizard still felt too underpowered in the beginning of the game, and was basiclly just sitting and rolling his thumbs until he got the mana he needed to cast creatures and spells. So we decided to add more lower costing spells, creatures and traps.

While lowering the cost of some cards we also added some new spells, such as:

Demolish:

Destroy any 1 equipment in play.

We added this card since the players got a lot of equipment that they didn't have any use for. Say that a player had one +3 and one +2 sword  equipped, and they get another +2 while looting a room, they would just hold on or throw away that card . Now that the wizard can destroy equipment a player needs to keep reserves of weapons so they still have some value.

Teacher QA

We then had a QA session with one of our teachers, Marcus. He played two rounds of the game, first as a hero and then as the wizard, both games took 1h 45min. The first time we played Jonas played the wizard and the three heroes won. The next turn Marcus played the Wizard and it looked like the heroes was going to win again, but slowly but surely Marcus got back on his feet. And Marcus then hammered the last nail in the coffin when he used the "switcheroo" spell to switch place of the hero with two of the three key's with a monster at the edge of the board while the world was falling apart around them. Marcus then overwhelmed the heroes, filling the board with traps and monsters until the last man fell.

All and all Marcus liked the game and didn't have any criticism, he did however suggest that we try to change something in the exploration system. As it looks right now, when a hero steps onto a tile, that hero flips all the tokens(monster, traps and illusions) on that tile and then resolve combat, loot and such. He suggested that we try and play that you aren't allowed to flip the tile until you've killed all the monster-tokens on it, he thought that would perhaps create even more mindgames. So that's something we shall at least try and see how it affects the dynamic of the game.

A thing that we decided ourselves that we wanted to try was to remove some equipment cards and replace them with consumables that give similar bonuses, i.e. replace some +1 swords with some +1 dmg potions.

Tomorrow I've arranged a big QA meeting with most of the group in the course, there we will play the same version of the game that Marcus tried to get more opinions from various different people.

That's all for today, goodnight and thanks for reading.

-David Forssell