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 :)
