Project 2 Dev Diary - Pivot

Once we had come up with the concept of Rafferty’s Reaping i was really happy that we had such a strong concept to run with and thought we were in for some smooth sailing on project 2. Boy was that an oversimplification. As soon as the project got going our idea had to be iterated, our cards had to be iterated upon and of course so did our crisis ideas. The entire three week project was non-stop pivot. Although we constantly had some solid ideas the fact that we had to wrangle so many aspects at once was incredibly daunting. Compared to a digital game where the start of the project is designing and the rest is executing it felt like we were constantly designing new aspects of our game.

Crisis

Our first aspect of pivot that we had to handle was when we started work on our Crisis Synopses. We had come up with 3 ideas for entire scenarios and originally decided to use those 3 scenarios as the 3 threads in Rafferty’s Reaping. This meant our A thread had a fear mechanic our B thread had a sanity mechanic and our C thread was trying to flesh out the preexisting oxygen mechanics. It was clear early on from the lack of a cohesive story that we needed to change things. After realising this we made the fear mechanic be the persistent new mechanic throughout all 3 threads this tied together our premise and opened up a lot of avenues for crisis cards. Once the synopses had been nailed down we ran our first few playtesting sessions, these were key components in pivoting mechanics throughout the project, we were consistently changing the values for condition cards throughout of first playtests trying to achieve a tense but tutorial style crisis. We played with numbers like 5 or 7 and teams seemed to breeze through the starting scenario, it wasn’t until one of my lecturers Steve said “Anything under 10 is easy”. We immediately realised almost all of the conditions we had predetermined for all 3 of our threads were far too easy which was fantastic as we were able to pivot and not only raise some of the values but also make players draw a random condition card adding a new more dangerous feel to the play. We were still iterating the crisis cards in the very last week of the project and after getting feedback from a fellow student Nick, i realised that our end crisis didn’t tie into any of the 3 previous crisis cards players would move from and didn’t tie into the overall theme of the game. This lead me to create an entirely new crisis which in the end became my favourite.

F.L.O.Y.D Scripts

Thankfully we were able to get basic scripts for F.L.O.Y.D up and running quite early in our playtesting. I had written them as short punchy one liner style jokes which i thought not only fit the character but brought some juxtaposition to the fact that the players in a dread filled predicament. Once my other lecturer Tony helped us with a playtest and spent time prior changing the one liners into longer more explanatory statements which still held same tone i realised what i had to do. I went away and fleshed out each of the other threads in a similar fashion and changing from these brief one liners brought a deeper sense of engagement for the players.

Items

Iterating the huge list of items was one of the most fascinating parts of project 2. When every team was instructed to go away and make 20 common items for the game, my team mate Victor and I were the only team to come back with items which held negative values. Our lecturer Tonly really seemed to like this idea and it became a task for the entire class to have at least half of the items they came up with be negative. This was a pivot which involved the entire class which changed the way items would be looked at not only in our expansions but in the base game itself. We brought negative items into the game so players would be forced to manage their inventories much better which was something we had aimed to do in our expansion but it was great to be able to bring it to the base game on a larger scale as well. Again from playtesting we gleaned so much information about items and changed the direction of items abilities not only for our scenario specific items but for common items as well. This stemmed from a lot of the classes common items having time consuming and confusing micromanagement as abilities, for example there was an item which started with 1 tech and each turn would gain 1 tech meaning a player had to keep an extra dice on the card to keep track. That in turn became a nightmare when if a player placed that on a condition and you were trying to count how many dice you got to roll against it.

Fear Mechanic

Finally one of our absolute core mechanics of our scenario, Fear. Not only did the fear mechanic change from feedback stating that it was far too easy and inconsequential too even feel scary but there was a time when there was an entire extra set of tokens to keep track of. It seemed like almost every time we play tested our crisis threads our Fear mechanic would change. This was in no way a bad thing though as what we ended up with was a great addition to the scenario. The mechanic was finalised as:

Roll a D6 - 6 = Not Feared

3,4,5 = sacrifice 1 AP/HP

1 - 2 = sacrifice 3 AP/HP

(Can be a combination of AP and HP - for example if rolling a 2 they could spend 2 HP and 1 AP to meet the sacrifice.

Once we had settled on this variation it was fantastic to go back and see previous playtesters try it and actually be fearful of running into rooms with corpses.

Overall the constant iteration throughout project 2 gave way to an insane amount of idea and mechanic pivoting. Even though there was so many different aspects to juggle from a design point of view the constant iteration made them manageable and gave a great sense of progression to the scenario we ended up with.