Charlie Bennett

Taking into account that this was on a small scale model with 6 different inputs it’s hard to believe it’s possible to balance systems and economies such as EVE Online. 

It all began with a tavern environment I developed earlier in the year as a greybox. I was keen to bring it back to life with some of the skills learnt throughout this year and potentially use it as the setting for my new game the question left was what would this game be?  A dice game? A board game?  No. It’d be a card game.

Once the card game decision was made the next decisions were focused mainly around the gameplay and how it would play out. One thing I missed at this stage was the value of how important initial layouts were and that card games do require quite a substantial amount of UI (well this one did in the end anyway).

I decided on a base layout and the basics of the game, it would revolve around a simple rock paper scissors mechanic of elemental monsters and the players health was tied to their remaining cards.

The next step was problem the biggest mistake, by attempting to keep the elemental abilities within the game in a fashion similar to top trump I found that the game had become too balanced. The game was perfectly balanced in the worst ways possible for a card game a player was guaranteed to be able to remove another players card and so it became a one for one until the end, a rather boring game in all.

With some research into elemental trios and how other games have successfully used them I came to the conclusion a simple bonus modifier would suffice, this combined with a predefined deck meant a new element of strategy was added to the game. Another layer added later in development was to allow players to attack the enemies deck at the expense of that monsters attack. This gave players an option to decrease health of their enemy while the underdog had the chance to potentially get some cards down without having them instantly wiped.

From there on the gameplay itself didn’t evolve overly but what became very evident is how necessary polish is to a game, a lot of key elements in regards to player feedback were revised and added towards the end of the month and a half or so of development. Important things such as  - Sound Effects - Music - Visual Feedback - Exploding Cards

Originally the game featured 3 different elements in which players could attack with but inevitably it led to a “Perfectly Balanced Game” one in which players would go card for card. So the journey for Perfect Imbalance began..... there may have been some bugs along the way.

The first step was to remove 3 Elements and combine them into one Power Value. From there the next crucially missing piece was player feedback, the goal was to allow the player to know what they had clicked and what they could click at all times this was done a manner of different ways - Particles - Movement - Glows

- Unravel Your Ideas: As soon as an idea comes up within the team if you can see the slightest issue start a discussion about it, pull at that idea until it unravels and you either have a solution or abandon the idea early. - Share: Even though you’re working on the same project people often have completely different ideas of what sounds exactly the same. Get your teams to draw, describe or recreate with pencils, whatever works. Be sure everyone expresses their vision throughout the development so everyone is on the same page 

A few designs were thought of for the backing of the cards as I’d inevitably be staring at them for a long time and so a little bit of art would help both clarity and making it easier on the eyes.

Having decided on the centre backing I then moved onto photoshopping together a rough draft for the Play Field. As not all of the card game has been fleshed out yet I wanted to keep the layout rather broad but as it stands now.

The game will be simple in its mechanics.

- Player’s are given 20 Cards - A Player can play 1 Card a turn with a max of 3 Cards on the Field - If both Players have Cards on the field, the player whose turn it is can attack - All Cards will have 3 Stats that work in a Rock-Paper-Scissors Triangle - An attacking player designates the fight type

The game ends when one player runs out of cards on their field, hand and deck.

After some initial bugs we managed to get together a working visual demo but had issues throughout the day when it came to merging our programmers code and so we had some slight delays today.

I began by stripping back the old greybox built in Unity and Re-Exporting it into Maya to give myself a template to work with.

A list was then made from all the objects within the scene so I’d have something to work off rather than picking a model at a time. 

With the early stages of pre-production, FLUX has already seen numerous attempts at different layouts. Due to the nature of our modular assets we’ve been able to pump through multiple levels and see what seems visually appealing.

Through the many iterations, we found that our camera was initially way too far away and have cut down the size of the level several times in order to convey a feeling of being on a large spaceship. We had to allow clarity through the visuals due to the chaotic nature of the game and so our UI and colour palettes are under constant reiteration.

It was only once we dived into the project did we realise as to what building with modularity entailed, as a designer it sounds well and good minimising assets, the time required and potential problems down the line but at the end of the day, there's still much work to be done.