Week 5 & 6 Update - Play Testing Results
So this past week has been about play testing the game which I still have not settled on an official name yet. It's highly likely, at this point, that this incarnation of the game will be Freya's Odyssey Epic as the cards, characters, as well as gameplay elements are all taken from that world.
After a lot of play testing, we've come up with some ground rules to go off of which we enjoyed. First I'd like to talk about some concerns I had going into this design. The game is centered about a fail group of adventurers that are incompetent in battle and are more likely to hurt themselves than the opponent. There was concern that having your heroes continually hurt themselves would lead to great frustration, but after testing it seems to be not an issue and can be a source of great hilarity. Another concern was that the rules would be too complicated, but in tests, the amount of math involved became more of a concern than rules. While it was still fun, I can't deny that it was a very math heavy game and not everyone will be willing to sit through the calculations, so I've heavily reduced the math involved in game play by reducing the amount of additions to attack and defense.
So I've decided to make a quick overview video of how the game will be played. Note that this is still early in testing so there will be a lot of adjustments to fix some issues with the game, but this should be enough to give you a general idea of how to play the game.
One thing I want to immediately append from the video is that attacks can be cancelled. This means if there are no enemies on the board, you do not have to roll your attack. It also means if you block an ally's attack with a counter attacking move, you do not have to roll the counter attack. However, cancelling an attack will not net you any experience, so there will be times when you do want to purposefully hit your ally.
A problem I encountered during test play is that we never really brought out a mini boss simply because it could be avoided. I'll be making an adjustment to have one of the quests require you to bring out a mini boss.
Overall, I'm pretty happy with the progress we've made. One thing I'm especially happy with was the feeling of control you have the entire game through. It was very important to me that the game wasn't too luck driven, and I feel like I've accomplished that. Hopefully by next week I will have completed the program I'll be using to generate the new cards.
