It feels like a while since we’ve talked about some aspects of design theory, so lets talk about combos. A power that lets you deal two damage to a target, but one to yourself is a good power. A power that lets you ignore one damage each turn is a good power. If you put them together you wind up with something that’s more than the sum of its parts, suddenly your attack power has no active drawback and it’s not really weakened the defence power to do it since your opponent wasn’t going to hit you much on your go anyway. Sweet combo.
Category Archives: arena
Retheming
Over the course of the last couple of weeks playtesting it’s becoming increasingly apparent that the hero conflict game is suffering for its theme. Mechanically it seems very solid, most of the praise it gets is about the gameplay itself, but the theme could not be more generic. Fantasy warriors fighting for, well I guess they like fighting or something?
Meet the Games
Game design for 3DTotal is still somewhat exploratory, with 404 we made a (fiscally) midrange game and Wizard’s Academy was at the top end, with lots of minis and chrome. To complete the triangle our next game will explore what we can do on a budget. The brief is to create a 54 card game using existing art. This is a serious challenge for me, because so far all of our games have been praised more for their mechanics than their art (and the art has been beautiful) but this set of restrictions are all things that limit what I can do mechanically while utilising art assets that we already know to be exceptional. On the other hand wouldn’t it be spectacular if we manage to put something together that got rave gameplay reviews but that anyone could get for around a fiver?
Tabletop Simulator
I’ve been seeing a lot about Tabletop Simulator recently, a virtual environment for playing board games that some creators have been using for easy prototyping. I thought that for today’s post I’d crack it open and throw a recent prototype into it, in order to see how it works and gives some impressions of the thing.