Invasion Quick Fixes
Before I start this, let me explain that the Invasion project has come a long way since its first inception in October 2013. While the first post (which you can find here) explains a lot of the original creation of the game, this post is going to cover a lot of the changes and fixes that the game went through before its current incarnation.
During the last article, I laid out how the game was going to work, functionally. And then I highlighted some of the early concerns. Since that was the first draft, there was a lot of work to be done. I mocked up some cards and had some friends play test it. Sure enough, there was an obvious lack of player interaction. And during the whole time, no one “failed” to play cards with the die rolling mechanic. This said a few things to me;
The lack of interaction took out a lot of the fun of the game. During the five games that were played, only once did one of the players Raid the others camp. Both players were focused almost solely on the Aliens – which were meant to be a form of annoyance, and not necessarily the primary antagonist. Players won by moving faster than the opponent, and strategically accumulating more Speed.
The difficulty of the cards needed to be increased in order to make the die rolling relevant. The die rolling is supposed to evoke the feeling of stress and desperation. Instead, after the first few cards players didn’t even worry about it.
There were other minor problems that came up, but most of the can be squashed by just cleaning up the rules a little bit. The second problem is something that, for now, is an easy fix. Upping the difficulty of cards will make the die rolling more important, make players feel more desperate and adjust the game to be more balanced. This particular problem will be adjusted a few times before finding the sweet spot. This is something we should remember – because if the sweet spot can’t be found then we have to do something else with it.
The big problem is player interaction. How do we get the players to understand that they’re enemies with one another? The first idea is to increase the pressure on both players. We can do that a few different ways. By changing how the Aliens attack, by changing how players move, etc. We could say that players are attacked by more Aliens if they don’t attack. These all start involving more systems – and involving more systems ends up complicating the game a little bit more.
Another idea is to just weaken the Aliens. The players were more worried about the Aliens than they were about each other. They dedicated Allies, abilities and other cards to dealing with the Alien threat. The easy fix, then, is to decrease the threat of the Aliens and make the players worry more about one another.
That being said the easy fix isn’t always the right fix. But by doing these small changes we can keep a close eye on our problems and see if the fixes work or not.
These quick fixes allowed us to do more analysis when we play tested. Next week, we’ll look at the second round of play testing, and the idea that our game wasn’t the game it was meant to be.