Developing a system through aesthetics

During the latest week we’ve been designing a system and created a playable prototype of that system. Once we decided the aesthetics we wanted which were ”feeling of having to defeat an enemy before he/she/it becomes too powerful”  we started to think of what kind of system we wanted for that. To get some inspiration Mariam and I met last weekend to play a Swedish board game called ”Drakborgen”. The reason we chose that game was because the players had to go through a labyrinth to succeed in the game, which was something we were interested in.

From that I got an Idea, that we should have bigger tiles with more options to choose from where the player wants to go in the maze. And to make it even more interesting the players or dungeon master could turn the tiles to sabotage for each other. That’s my ”darling” and I really would like to see that work, but at the moment that isn’t anything we have decided to work forward with, at first we are going to polish our dungeon master system til it gets flawless!

The whole process deciding aesthetics and building a system had its ups and downs because everyone didn’t agree with each other at all times and because of that the process took longer than it should. But I’am satisfied with the result we have right now and I’m looking forward polishing it.

Other than brainstorming together with everyone else in the group I made sure that we had all the tools that we needed to create the prototype itself, such as scissors, pencils, glue etc. The day before letting other groups play test our system I tried to balance the amount of cards the dungeon master gets from each room on the board. By doing so I changed the numbers on the tiles and managed to get it ”okej” until the play testing. A thing that was both good and bad was that we didn’t get any negative feedback from the people who play tested our system, its bad in that way that we didn’t get any advice of something we could improve. But luckily we noticed some problems ourselves that we need to work with through polishing.

The two other systems that I play tested was one when I had to flip tiles to find my way out from a cave which I thought was really interesting because the players has a health/energy meter that goes down for each turn, and to keep that meter up the player has to find food somewhere in the cave. But the food cards are limited so once all have been looted its time to focus on one thing and one thing only, get out from there as fast as possible. The second system I tested were one where all the players sits around a table and shoots each other with toy guns. There were cards in the middle of the table which tells which people were going to duel and the player last alive wins.

If you are interested of knowing more about our becoming game, visit our blog at: http://teamwizards2000.blogspot.se/