Instead of trying to promote a board game I made, I wanna do something fun and explain the process of play-testing and designing my game!
I like D&D as a concept. I love the idea of exploring dungeons, collecting treasure, and being a hero in a fantasy setting. But I have severe ADHD, Iâm terrible at math, and donât have many friends I can reliably play D&D with.
So the initial idea I had was to make a single player board game, that has customizable pieces, randomly generated dungeons, and a simplified attack system. Iâd also like to publish this through The Game Crafter so I need to find ways to try and keep the cost down and keep it relatively small.
The first step was to make the randomly generated dungeon tiles. This was going to be the primary way youâd interact with the rest of the game, and itâs most exciting feature in my opinion. I settled on puzzle pieces because theyâre small but would still connect together in satisfying ways.
But this left me with the first of many problems. How do you move through the dungeon? You canât roll a dice, because youâd quickly either run out of room or spend a lot of time wasted backtracking. Weâll come back to this later. For now I just needed something that fit together.
I came up with the idea of having some dungeon tiles contain treasure chests on them, and some with skulls. Treasure would mean youâd get loot, and skulls would mean youâd fight monsters. This way as you traverse the randomly generated dungeons you would have randomly generated encounters too.
When attacking enemies I wanted the system to be simple. A sort of Heroâs Quest style of attack where rolling dice and reading their outcomes would be how youâd determine how powerful your attack or damage would be. At this stage I settled on 3 wooden dice with skulls on some sides. To keep track of the enemyâs health I settled on using small 8mm cubes that you could move down the card as they took damage.
Probably the most ambitious thing I wanted to make was a modular character tracker. The goal of which would be that you can swap out the health, attack, and player character as you grow and gain experience. This would provide you with more attack power, more health, etc.
I settled on 4 interchangeable characters with the vague idea that down the road I would like them to have special powers, making each one unique and helping the player pick a character that fit their play style.
To round things out I added some domino mats to keep the layout of all the gameplay elements in check, and some play money to keep track of treasure.
The first impressions I had was that I was on the right track. The puzzle pieces worked beautifully. Likewise encountering enemies and treasure was easy too. The game mats were a bit cumbersome, but I loved the tactile feel of moving the HP down when attacked, and swapping out modular parts as you leveled up your character.
However, one of the immediately apparent issues was movement. How do you move through this randomly generated dungeon? You canât do it through dice rolls, and if you just move by yourself on your turn it makes backtracking boring. Once a dungeon was explored there was no danger anymore, and it was trivially easy to escape if you were in a pinch.
Additionally the domino mats I added were helpful⌠but cumbersome. I included an XP tracker, but the problem was that keeping track of your XP level required a LOT of space. If you only level up at level 20 or 40, you need 20-40 empty squares in between to keep you place as you gain XP. That meant an entire domino mat was dedicated entirely to tracking the XP, and it looked like a spreadsheet.
Ideally youâd want a way to keep track of your movement, but I did not have much space on my character tracker to do that. One of the play testers I had try my game suggested I keep track of movement with a D6. You would rotate the dice as you moved and gradually spent movement points down.
This was an AMAZINGLY helpful solution! Now movement was restricted, you couldnât just exit a dungeon whenever you wanted, it offered gameplay challenges and potential to upgrade your movement slots as you leveled up!
This one change suddenly opened up the game and created a risk/reward system that made finding treasure and leveling up through defeating enemies super important!
To solve the XP tracking I reduced the giant domino mat of 100 boxes into a simple abacus. Two rows. Top row are 1âs, bottom row 10âs. Now you could track your progress from 0-99 XP while freeing up the mat to include other information instead.
Then there was the problem with rolling attacks. With the 3 dice setup, it was easy to get stuck in a loop of constantly rolling blank sides (missed attacks) for both player and enemies alike. While browsing around the Game Crafter website I stumbled across a dice that has 3 outcomes. 0, 1, 2. Itâs called a betrayal dice and it was just what I needed!
With this one dice I could now make the attacks scale depending on the outcome! If you rolled a 0 as a level 1 character youâd miss, but if you rolled a 0 as a level 6 character youâd do 2 damage! All I needed was a chart that showed what the outcomes were and this could be a part of the character tracker that youâd swap out as you leveled up!
After another round of play testing I was finding myself enjoying playing the game quite a bit. It had a nice feedback loop that appealed to my ADHD brain. But there were still a few little things that were bugging me.
For starters, rotating the D6 every time you moved was cumbersome and annoying, especially since the numbers on the sides werenât placed in intuitive ways. I found myself struggling to find the right number to move down from, and after doing that 100 times over through multiple sessions it was getting tedious.
The obvious solution was to have a tracker you could put a 8mm cube in like I had with HP. It would reduce the stress and allow for the movement to upgrade along with XP. The problem was space. With all of these laser cut component I was running out of room to fit everything. The Game Crafter charges by the sheet, and I only had one sheet of chipboard to fit everything on.
The other issue was I kept encountering situations where nothing would happen for long stretches of exploration. There were blank dungeon tiles mixed in between the treasure and enemies, and that resulted in some quests having no treasure OR enemies and quickly running out of your movement points before you could find anything. This was especially noticeable during the early portion of the game.
Enemies too could just be straight up brutal. Randomizing the deck kept things interesting, but it could be extremely easy to get wiped out by a high level enemy when you were low level. If you didnât have the foresight to stock up on powerful weapons and health potions at the shop before hand, you could be in for a rough time.
And finally I had no real reason to swap out the characters. I had initially included 4 different player avatars you could pick from, with the idea that each had a special power to help you out. But I was finding that I often forgot I had powers at all and would frequently venture through quests never even using them.
I was having fun with the game, but it was becoming increasingly clear that I needed to tweak things again to fix these problems.
While doing some research into game design I came across a post that talked about the importance of player choice. The theory was that at no point should a player be doing nothing on their turn. Randomization is fun and all, but the player should still always be making a choice of some kind to keep them engaged.
With that in mind I went back to work retooling my game with an emphasis on choice.
For movement I got rid of empty tiles except for T-section dungeon tiles. Now whenever you encountered a blank T-Tile, you would draw 2 additional dungeon tiles, place them on either side of the T-section, and then youâd have a choice of which direction you wanted to go and engage with.
This worked wonderfully! If you were on a quest to collect treasure, now the player would have a choice to chose the treasure option instead of an enemy, and vice versa! This also greatly reduced the number of tiles on the chipboard that needed to be cut, freeing up more room for other pieces.
With that extra space no, I decided to commit to the modular movement tracker instead of using a D6 to track how many movement points you had left. Now just like your HP, youâd keep track with a small 8mm cube that youâd move (far less cumbersome) and the modular nature meant that it could be upgraded easily as you earned XP!
This focus on choice extended into the treasure too. I began adding locked treasure cards that youâd need to open. You could roll a dice and depending on the outcome youâd either open it or fail to open it. OR the player could spend one movement point for a guaranteed open! This introduced a risk/reward choice for the player. If money was tight they could spend precious movement points to unlock it, or they could take a gamble and roll the dice in the hopes that theyâll be lucky!
I had introduced a shop that sold items, but now I added an on sale item. If you could complete a quest successfully not only would you get a little bonus money, but one item at the shop would go on sale for 1/2 off! This offered incentive to complete quests and not just run away when things got hard.
There was one last issue I had to contend with. The special attacks. They were still useless. Up until this point I had had 4 interchangeable characters each with their own special attack. One regained HP, one did an extra point of attack damage, one regained your movement points, and one was able to unlock locked treasures.
For some reason these 4 options felt lopsided. I wasnât sure why until I re-examined the specials and their function. I realized that my character tracker had 3 main areas that upgraded as you earned XP. Your HP, Attack, and Movement. But I had 4 characters you could swap out, which meant I needed one extra special that didnât easily conform to what the tracker tracked.
And this is when I made a tough decision. I cut out one of the 4 heroes. Suddenly everything fell into place. Your sword wielder would do one extra damage, your wizard would regain HP, and your rogue could refill your movement. 3 characters, 3 powers, 3 modules that upgraded as you became stronger.
It was sad to see one of the heroes go, especially since art for them had already been made. But unfortunately cutting them was the right decision. And the additional space allowed me to fit in more movement modules.
I was still struggling with specials though. I needed a way to keep the player aware of them. I needed⌠to track them.
This was a scary realization so late into development. I had little room on the chipboard to create more modular pieces, but I needed something to ensure players would remember they had specials at all.
Thatâs when I had the idea to tie specials to the enemies you collected in dungeons. I could very easily add a little dot on an enemy card that would indicate how many special points youâd gain from them if you traded them in for a special cube you could put on your tracker.
Now again there was a player choice. To get a Special Point you now has to weigh your situation and decide if it was worth giving up potential XP in order to use your specials. And when some of those specials include refilling your HP or movement points, that could become a crucial decision to make if youâre in a tight spot!
The final thing I did was make enemies color coded and have 2 different attacks depending on what level your XP was at. Low level enemies are green, mid level enemies are orange, and high level enemies are red. And since there were 6 times youâd level up during the course of a full game, that meant enemies scaled up as you scaled up. I even wrote a rule to shuffle in the high level enemies as you progressed so you werenât always encountering dangerous enemies when you were still too low to defend yourself.
Since so much of the movement in the game revolves around movement points being spent, I decided to call these points Torch Points and focus the game around the concept of going into dungeons and fighting monsters while trying to keep your torch lit. Once it goes out you can still move, but monsters attack more frequently and so thereâs always incentive to keep your torch light lit!
You now got to pick your character, use their specials to your advantage, explore random dungeons, fight monsters, collect XP and loot which could be converted into special attacks, and buy items from a shop that rewarded you for successful quests!
I made an entire D&D style single player game that requires no math, has lots of replay-ability, and is relatively compact! Thereâs enough randomness in the cards and tiles to keep things interesting and different every time, while also providing the player with lots of ways to make decisions and have an active choice in their gameplay experience.
I think ultimately I was successful in my mission, and I am very happy with the results! It tickles the ADHD parts of my brain that loves exploring maps and planning for my next adventure without being overwhelming.
If youâve made it this far then THANK YOU for listening! I hope you found this exploration of gameplay design interesting and if youâre curious about checking out the game it can be found here:
https://www.thegamecrafter.com/games/treasure-by-torchlight
