New Project: Slaughternight FEVER

What is it?
This new project is a big attempt by me to create a deck building, character leveling, fast paced action game with variable player powers and lots of ridiculousness.  The game is currently themed as a future dystopian death pit game show where each player must kill off waves of various enemies and they get points according to how well and flashy they do it.

The Deck
The backbone of the system is deck building, which isn't anything new but I feel will work well for this theme.  Your deck is your carrying capacity as well as all your available skills.  You still pull some items out and equip them, thus taking them out of the deck pool.  So if you start taking on too many items/weapons/misc then your deck will start to get sluggish due to being overburdened.  In addition to this, you will take wounds as negative cards right into your deck so they will also slow down how well you can do things in the arena by clogging your hand.

The most interesting mechanic i've come up with so far is a way to have a feeling of randomness in combat while completely eliminating dice from the equation.  I want this randomness to be controllable by the player, and this mechanic resolved itself into "combat stats" on every single card that can be put into your deck.  They are three modifiers which lie on the bottom of the card, as seen on an example card below:

So whenever you make an attack, you figure out what your current attack power is (explosion symbol) and if you have the correct range to the target.  Then you do your "combat draw" which is simply drawing the top card from your deck and using ONLY these modifiers on the bottom of the card to see if you did enough damage or even hit the target.  With melee attacks you effectively always "hit" the target, but you might not do enough damage to overcome their defense.  With ranged weapons you have to have the range equal the distance away.  So you might have been 3 spaces away from the target with a range of 4, and missed because you pulled this card as your combat draw making your range actually 2 and therefor not enough.  

This is important because you for the most part have total control over what cards go into your deck, so you KNOW if you are putting crappy range modifiers into your deck, but this might be good enough because you need the extra defense modifier for when you are attacked...or you just love the idea of that +2 to your damage when you draw the card.  You don't need to worry about accidentally rolling low on a bunch of dice and feeling like you eventually lost the game due to bad luck.  Sure there is the luck of the draw, but you have the burden of making sure your deck isn't going to backfire on you.

The leveling

The next idea is actually taken from one of my first game development projects "Reliquary".  Its the idea of having a skill upgrade map that you move around in order to modify your base skills.  The original idea came from the video game Final Fantasy X.  Below is the current layout for the character sheet:

As you can see, you start in the center of the hex grid map, and as you level up you can increase various mixes of the three main attributes. The exact mechanics for how you move around is still being worked on.

The Arena

Lastly we have the playing arena where this game takes place.  Eventually I want it to be modular, but for now its the grid you see below with various white hex shapes to create obstacles:

The idea is that each player "controls" one type of enemy mob.  They don't actually dictate where they go, but these mobs only move on that players turn much like Castle Ravenloft.  In addition to this, that player has a responsibility to kill more of "their" mobs then others by way of a bonus point system.  If they kill more of that mob then anyone else then they get X bonus points but if someone else beats them in the kill count then they LOSE X bonus points.  This is currently the only real player interaction in the game, just denying the other players their bonus points. 

This photo was taken during the half hour first ever prototype game I played with Owen tonight.  It turned out to be way too hard for the players, and we were swiftly overwhelmed by hobbits and killbots (awesome mobs, I know).  This playtest illustrated that I have not given the players enough room to DO stuff on their turns.  I'll be modifying many of the base cards for the next play test, mostly consisting of adding in action chains so that after you play a card like "run" you can get another action back to do something instead of using most of your turn just to try and reposition yourself.

This game is about SLAUGHTER after all, gotta emphasize the action!  I know I have been somewhat light on actual mechanics so far in this post, but that is mostly due to them being very preliminary so far.  Hopefully i'll get some more work done on this as the month progresses and I can get more specific info up for you guys :)

Nanogrid 3.0

Really? another massive revision?

Well, sort of. I knew I loved the card play mechanic that was introduced in the last post but I also went abit crazy trying to figure out how to balance it so it wasn't so easily breakable. Mak, in our test game, proved he could just horde replicates and dominate with a win as soon as he was within boosted replication reach of his end goal. In addition to this, I had "boring turn" syndrome where energizing was simply not "cool" and it took your entire turn. I always did like it when you got to do two things on your turn.

which led me to the following revalation: By placing a card onto the public tableau, and then bringing a different card back into my hand I am in essence choosing TWO different actions. What if you perform the action of the card you play as well as the card you pick up all in the same turn? And in the order you choose? Holy crap that sounds interesting! I honestly had this idea very shortly after the last play test, but I didn't get around to trying it until about a week ago.

Why'd it take so long to try this?

My frustration with other parts of the game honestly kept me away for a while. It wasn't until a week ago that I had the second big idea that I got myself in gear and built it out into a new prototype: What if your cubes on the board can move? Not only that, what if they don't actually hold a value at all... they are simply movable playing pieces? Now I don't have to get my brain hurting with transfer distances, and swimming my eyes over a sea of pips on top of crazy connecting lines. PLUS it gives me a great excuse to use all those blank dice I purchased over a year ago!

After one quick playtest with movable cubes and the new two for one action mechanism I knew I was ready to try it with my friends. Below is a picture of the end of the first game with others. It might not be obvious on first glance, but yellow won the game by getting to the 6th green upgrade (he forgot to push up the skill since it was inevitable so everyone forfeited their turns).

This game was played with Geoff, Evan, and Erick and it was really interesting.  Firstly, they all said they not only enjoyed it but want to be a part of future tests.  As a designer there really isn't a better compliment then that.  There were definitely problems still however, most notably bieng the ability for one or two people to totally lock down the movement of pieces...which can completely nullify other peoples turns since they can't actually DO anything.

So a significant amount of brainstorming with everyone went into how to force people to actually play the cards in their hands instead of hoarding all the replicates while everyone else stagnates.  My solution for this so far has been to make the Primary (playing card down) action and the secondary (picking card up) actions more and more different.  In some cases like replication I am trying to make it actually slightly painful to pick up so that you can't just easily grab them to screw everyone else.  I want you to still be able to block in this way, but it has to hurt a bit.  I added a "spend energy to move a cube" action to the energize role as well in order to get more moving going on the board.

A second playtest happened two nights later and it was also very successful.  This time one big issue was that I reduced energy input far too much and we all hit a drought of energy which we couldn't get out of.  We house ruled it halfway through the game to keep going, but this lead to a great train of conversation on how small changes in one portion of this game can trickle through several other mechanics.

I am happy to say that at this point I feel I am finally out of the "innovate" phase of this game and now into the "balancing" phase.  I feel the card play mechanic is interesting and enjoyable, and now am going to be striving to get all these moving pieces to work smoother together.  I expect numerous small revisions in the next couple months as I tweek it, but its definitely going places.  

Nanogrid 2.0

After over a month of taking a brain break from Nanogrid development I have jumped back in. The issue I was running into was that the game was really just an interesting area control mechanic. So it wasn't FUN, just pretty. My previous couple posts were ways to make it more strategic but they all fell flat when I tested it with myself, thus me taking a break to distance myself from the game for clarity.

Nanogrid 2.0
The nitty gritty of the issues Nanogrid had was that it was for the most part multiplayer solitaire where each turn almost always had an easily deduced best outcome and no restrictions on what you could do. A few nights ago I was thinking about ways to restrict the players options on their turn when I came up with what I think is a great card play mechanism. Keep in mind the base game is virtually unchanged in this rev.

Each player always has a hand of 4 cards, and there is always a community pool of three cards on the board. There are 4 different card types, one for each of the actions possible (energize, transfer, replicate, place tile). A player can only do an action that they have in their hand at the beginning of their turn, and when they play that card it goes into the communal pool where they then take a different card out and put that into their hand for later. In this way you have the strategic implications of doing what you want to do now but not wanting to feed your left hand opponent exactly what they need. Added onto that, you are thinking about what you will be wanting to do NEXT turn, and that will influence what cards you bring back up from the public pool. Awesome.

I added onto this the ability to play 2 cards of the same color at once into the pool. This "boosts" that action, which lets you execute that action as if you had the next upgrade level already (ex .Your table says you energize for 3 pips, but you do a boosted energize so you actually add 4 pips to your dice). I also had a special combo of one transfer card and one replicate card, in order to do a replication one farther away then you are currently allowed.

I also changed the end game condition. Getting all your dice out just turned the game into a race, and that never felt right to me. Now the end game condition is tied directly in with the skill table. You win immediately if you either get your 6th upgrade of one color, or have all three color skills up to the 4th skill level at least.

The last significant change was eliminating the "hostile replication" and I attached the combat aspect of the game to the Transfer action. Now you transfer energy into an opponent, and they loose pips according to a simple difference between each of your Transfer skill levels. So if I have a transfer skill of 3 and my opponent has a skill of 4, then its a 1:1+1 situation and so my one pip of power kills 2 pips of theirs. This is meant to be a "beat up on the leader" mechanic, so the player with the lesser transfer skill actually gets the upper hand.

Playtest with people
Below is the end of the first game played with others.

Yellow : Mac
Red : Brad
Blue : Paula
Green : Me



Paula won by grabbing 6 of the green Transfer skill, it was getting close. I was one orange Energize upgrade from winning in the previous round but this was too much of a threat and Mac destroyed three of my dice with one transfer action, ouch!

One thing I really liked is that in order for Paula to win, she NEEDED to have 2 replicate cards so that she could "boost" the replication and lay down two dice. Since we can't see her hand, we didn't have one of those annoying end game situations where you can say for sure "Paula will win this turn guys". You can just say "she MIGHT be able to, depending on how she has built her hand". Plus no one noticed anyway, she was sneaky :P

Conclusions
Everyone enjoyed it, but I feel that the game went a little longer then it should have. It lasted abit over 2 hours. Here is a list of the input I got:

1. Energize is too slow and uninteresting, do something to increase the energy flow into your system
2. Having an end condition based on the number of energize locations you control would be cool
3. Transfer rate is perhaps too easy to get to ridiculously high numbers
4. Mac commented on the card mechanic being "rondel-like", and I see where he is coming from and don't have a problem with this.

So i'll be adding a new end game condition and probably changing energize to add that number of pips to more then one energize so you essentially get a 2x multiplier on your energize when you expand into more energize locations. Perhaps overkill? Only testing will find out.

I think i'm going to modify the Transfer skill tree as well, make it have a little slower of an escalation into huge transfer numbers.

All in all a great success, you all will hopefully be seeing me carrying this around and trying to get you to test it more often :)

Bitchin Hub Idea

NOTE: I haven't playtested ANY of this yet. But i've been crunching the "Hubs" idea for over a day and already I had some issues with it:

- Why wouldn't players just wait until the last second to build all three hubs? I.e. leave the third slot open but fully protected so that they can just replicate in at the end and grab all three. What incentivizes them into building them earlier?

- The skill block off was a good idea for this, but didn't make sense due to the last tier always bieng unavailable since the game ends when the third hub goes down.

Now i'll admit that i've been looking for a way to get neutral dice into the mix for a couple weeks. It hit me this morning, you have to actually BUILD the hubs. It takes a while, it takes a good chunk of energy over a few turns, and it is neutral until it is completed. So the idea is you start building a Hub and it is a 1 pip white die in the center. So as it is built it is essentially up for grabs, and someone can swoop in and possibly knock you out of position and take over where you left off.

The details of all this are still knocking around my head, I probably won't know exactly what set i'll use probably until I sit down at the first play test. But I like this idea a lot. Thinking about going with 2 hubs for end game in this case due to the game possibly dragging. Regardless, I am pretty sure this is how the next playtest will be tried!

Nanogrid: Build Hubs?

I'm pretty zonked, so this will be more of a brain dump for me to expound upon later.

Current issues:
1. Too easy for a player to call themselves off to the point of no one being able to ever get to them.

2. I am not happy with the current attack system. It is ineligant and crude, but I don't have anything better so i'll stick with it for now. It is definitely on the short list of needing some serious brain storming. I have even pondered bringing in dice roll based attacks, but i'm not sure if i want that much randomness in THIS game.

3. Feels too one dimensional to me. I don't really like the end condition and how the last couple turns seem to play out in a slow bleeding way until one person barely out produces everyone else. I feel like the game is currently a good foundation that needs something built on top of it.

What i've done to work on these issues tonight:

1. New winning condition idea formulated: First player to construct three Nano-hubs wins. A Hub is instantly created when a player has a die of their color in all three dice locations on a single hex tile. They then pull a glass bead from their player sheet and place it on the center of the tile.

2. These glass beads will restrict how deep a player can go into their tech paths. So by placing them on the board it will allow a player to access the higher value skill upgrades due to that location bieng freed up.

3. Maybe when an opponent breaks one of these sets of three dice, the hub is de activated and returns to the corresponding players sheet? I want to make this very lucrative to the attacker...maybe they get a full second turn if they pull this off?

4. Pulled out 5 of the 9 patterns due to them bieng problamatic to the new end game solution. Built 5 new ones that are slightly more conducive to making connections, yet made sure that no tile has all three locations actually connected. Hopefully this will make walling off somewhat harder, playtesting will hopefully tell me more.

None of these have been tested at all yet, hopefully will be soon.

Nanogrid Hex tile update

First, the eye candy!


Ok, so due to popular agreement that hexagon tiles are more interesting I dumped a bunch of time into making prototype 2 of Nanogrid. I have to admit that I am loving how its coming out. The hexagons, as well as the interesting path combinations they produce, are much more appealing to look at.

One note from last weeks plays was that the game should probably scale in tile quantity according to the number of players. The current prototype has 9 different tile variations. Currently you play with one set of these 9 tiles for ever player. This means a 4 player game has a total of 36 tiles available, and a 2 player game only has 18.

I put more time into the power up distribution. All three skills have a total of 4 power up locations in each set of 9 cards. This means that there is an average of 4 power ups per skill per player in each game. This might seem like too many since the skills can only be advanced a total of 5 times, but in my plays so far I haven't seen the skills over advanced.

One last big change was making the Energize locations location specific instead of tile specific. I also decided to make Energize locations all have only one path into them. This means you can never expand through them, you have to make a conscious detour in your network in order to grab a new Energize point. This gave them a two sided feel, one the one hand they were like building new outposts in the frontier. On the other hand they also seemed to act as missile launching sites, since you can strategically grab one near an opponent and then just charge up and fire into their network with great results.

Here are the rules of the game as it currently stands:
- The goal is to replicate all of your dice onto the board before anyone else, victory is instant upon placing your last die.
- On each turn, each player gets 2 distinct actions. These are chosen from the following 5:
1. Place a tile and draw a tile back into your hand if there are any left. This placement can not completely lock in any player.
2. Energize any of your dice on one Energize location (Yellow border and STAR in the middle). This adds pips to that die equal to that players Energize skill.
3. Transfer any number of pips from one die on the board to another of your die on the board. The starting die can not go under 1 pip in this fashion. You may send these pips through dice up to but not exceeding your Transfer skill level.
4. Replicate a new die on the board. Do this by reducing one pip from one of your die and place a value 1 die on a empty location that is within your current transfer skill distance.
5. Hostile Replication which places one of the player's dice and removes an opponents. This follows the regular Replication placement rules. The attack must have 2 pips additional power over the victim die. This means that in order to attack a value 1 die, the player must replicate with a value 3 or higher die. The victim removes their die, and the player places a new lvl 1 die in its place. The victim adds 1 pip to an adjacent die to the attack location as salvage from the attack. You may not attack an opponents last Energize location.
- Replication Skill increases allow the player to make a number of legal non-hostile replications equal to their Replication skill level for the cost of 1 action.

The game I played which ended with the picture on top lasted well over an hour. It was tough strategically trying to beat myself as I played each players turn. In the end Green pulled out a surprise win. I found it humorous that I could get so into playing each color, and even propagating animosity between two colors due to previous aggression, that I totally missed Green's victory possibility until his turn. Green was a mid game leader who got attacked by both red and yellow until it seemed Green had no chance for victory. Then Red and Yellow spent too much time attacking each other and Green bounced back. Blue was largely ignored all game and almost pulled off a win as well. I was very pleased at how close each player was, as well as the way an obvious leader could be kept in check.

By the end of this game I did not have any real changes I felt were necessary. Mid game i felt that the Energize skill was underpowered, but then seeing Yellow roar back from obscurity to almost take the game largely with this skill alone I changed my mind. This game is really ready for playing with other people now I think, time to see what zany ways my friends can come up with to break it :)

Nanogrid Playtested update, Hexes??

I couldn't help but continue to work on this game after the big post yesterday.

The first thing I did was create a photoshop template so that the tiles matched up better, and then I somewhat randomly scattered around three colored "power up" dice locations. These associated themselves with the three skills I wanted improved, Energize, Transfer, and Replicate. This was an idea I wrote about in december but forgot about until yesterday's re-read, it seems much more elegant then sacrificing dice to an off-board skill tree, and it allows players to "attack" each others skill trees by taking over their dice which are on an important color power up. To add a bit more strategy to tile placements, I also put in the Star which is the only Energize locations possible, and the "2 pip" locations which make higher value dice when replicated on.

I hastily played one solo 4 player game and then rushed off to game night hoping to get some plays in with other people. Sure enough the first thing I got to do was convince Paul and Ian to try this guy out before jumping into something bigger. Below is a picture of what the game looked like when we decided to end it.



I was red and running away with the lead due to the Purple skill tech bieng overpowered, so we stopped and discussed ways to balance this tech as well as ways to create attacks. The attack idea we ended up with was a hostile Replication where the energy needed is 2 more then the value of the attacked die. So in order to kill a value 1 die, you need to come in with a value 3 replication. This places a value 1 replicant, and the extra energy value is transfered into the closest adjacent opponents die. So the opponent looses a die, but a close one absorbs the extra energy from the conflict.

Much later that night we got in a quick game before Ralph had to run to catch BART. This game had the more ballanced purple skill (replication), and attacks. There was some conflict, but due to the rushed nature of the game there wasn't much discussion at the end of the strategy.

One thing that two people brought up was, "What if they were hexagons instead of squares?". My initial reaction to this was negative, despite my personal love of the shape. I figured it would over-clutter the playing board, not to mention bieng harder to cut out for these prototypes. It was brought up that a hexagon shape could probably scale better from 3 to 4 players then a square would, and because of this I decided to give it a shot.

So this morning I threw some stuff into photoshop and printed out a rough 3x3 hexagon grid with dice locations and a variety of different connecting paths. I "played" a quick three player game with the printed out sheet just to see how cluttered it might seem, as well as to evaluate if the pathing was still as intuitive as it was with squares. Below is the result:



Please please please let me know your personal opinion as to which of the two shapes seems more appealing as well as intuitive to you. I was suprised at how much I liked the look of the hexagon grid, but it already has a completely different "feel" then the square setup. Seems like there will be more wacky networks jumping all over the place instead of clusters of connected dice. This is purely cosmetic of course, both shapes will create similar "clumpings" of dice, but one seems to be more spread out and perhaps harder to take in.

Working Title: Nanogrid update

A lot has happened since my last update, but this grid concept has been on my mind this whole time. A couple weeks ago I came up with the idea of replacing the colored beads with colored dice, this way each piece would be more of a counter where the top value shows the strength of that figure. This rattled around my head for a while, i've been working non-stop for 3 weeks, and I finally got a chance to get some ideas down on paper yesterday.

One issue I had with the older prototype was that it didn't feel like the expanding board was "big" enough from a playing option stand point. There was this big grid, but not that many actual pieces out there, and it seemed to me that in order to fix this the game would simply get too big. The other issue I had was a "carcasonne-esque" player problem of having a hand of tiles and no where beneficial to actually play them. Within about ten minutes of working on this yesterday I came up with a solution to both of these problems. Every tile will have four positions on it instead of just one, and each of these four will always have two connecting paths leading out to the next available card. I can put in variations of paths between these four, but every tile will always be legally placeable orthogonally adjacent to any other tile in the game.

I proceeded to give a sample four player game a shot with very simple rules. On a turn you get two actions, and get to choose from the following pool:
1. Place a tile from your hand and draw a new tile
2. "Energize" a die on the board, adding 2 pips to its value
3. "Transfer energy" from one die on the board to any other in the connected network
4. "Replicate" a new die, reducing the pip value of one die and placing a new die on the grid adjacent to the original.

After a few rounds this is what I had, when I started brainstorming again:


It felt REALLY slow. I like keeping the number of viable options on each turn to be small and manageable to reduce Analysis Paralysis, but this was glacial.

I started thinking about a very interesting Designer Diary I read earlier in the day: The Endless Creation of Perpetual-Motion Machine. This game is a poker hand set creating game with an interesting Hansa T-esque skill development system. This is one of my favorite parts of Hansa T, why not try and put skill improvements into this game? Looking back at my last post in December it appears I had this idea then, but totally forgot about it. For simplicities sake I kept it to three different improvable skills to start. "Replication" would make creating new dice on the grid more efficient, allowing the player to eventually make 2 or three new dice from a single pip's worth of energy. "Energize" would gradually allow the player to add more pips then the standard 2 to a dice on the board. "Transfer" would allow the player to send their energy farther in the grid as it improved.

I put in a simple skill improvement condition, when you get four dice into a square pattern you could use an action to sacrifice one to the skill tracker and there-by make that skill better. Below is several rounds into this play test, sorry the image quality is pretty crap:


I like where this game is going, but it's still too rough to even call it an alpha design...still more of a proof of concept. My next ideas involve differentiating the cards a bit more. Perhaps only certain cards will have a skill boosting station? And other cards will have an Energizing station? Less sought after locations can have a modifier on them allowing a replicated die which starts there getting an extra pip? These are all ideas jostling around in my head, and I am definitely going to keep working at this.

I like the idea of the game ending once a player has used all of the dice in their stores, but also want to make investing in skill upgrades have a time penalty. So sacrificing a dice to put it on the skill board is a little too streamlined into being what everyone should obviously do as soon as possible. I'd rather that die went back into the players store, and the skill tree gets modified some other way...but this doesn't feel elegant to me.

The working title is "Nanogrid", I like the tentative theme of nano-bots vying for control by moving around and self replicating on a variable grid. It continues to be hard to work on these things alone, i'd like to sit down with at least one other person and start working through some of these problems, and to see if it is actually interesting/potentially fun for other people and not just me.