Prototyping
Created: 9/22/23
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For this prototyping project, I ended up going through some giant alterations to my game mostly due to me missing an entire week of working on the game due to me forgetting to work on it along with a busy schedule. So I will mostly be brief about the first couple of iterations of the game mostly because they look nothing like the game that I have now.
Starting with the first prototype. This first of the game relied heavily on matching cards with some strategy of using your turn to roll a die and gain some health back or cards depending on how you rolled. I never expanded on this version because it was during the week I ended up missing, but during the second playtesting session I was told it didn't follow the guidelines of not being a card-style game. I ended up scrapping the game and tried to make something entirely new. One of the major downfalls for this game was the fact that it was whipped up in an hour and had many problems with it.
This second prototype was incredibly dull and and some potential for a good mechanic, but lacked any polishing and really needed some work done with it. The main and really only mechanic to it was that you could level up a pawn to do more damage. The main problem that made the game unplayable was that you could spawn in a pawn or upgraded pawn by the time you got to the other side and block off the attack.
In the final prototype phase, I try to build off the last one and create a bigger board with different variations of buildings and troops you could upgrade or “Mutate” into. Now, you could create roads, towers, defensive, and offensive units while also having other objectives on the board to create a form of advantage for the player if they don't head directly for the enemy's base.
Some of the final tweaks I did after playing with some of my friends and find some flaws with buildings being to weak or a rule that enemies could not use your roads making a new strategy of roads becoming a form of wall. The main difference that I made was switching from a d4 to a d8 allowing for games to move by a lot quicker. One of the main problems I ran into was the game takes more than 15 minutes sometimes to complete due to how many pieces there are.