CAGD 170 - Unit 2

 Group 9 - Devil's Key

Game Summary

    Devil's Key is a 2 player board game that sets players against each other in the context of trying to survive one of the devil's trials. Players must pick out the instruments and genre tokens they wish to use during a round out of a randomly shuffled pile of tokens. 

    The player who generates a higher score from this process wins the round while their opponent loses one of their three lives. The instrument token total is used to move player pieces along the board to land on spaces that grant them special bonuses or hindrances that take effect the following round.

Target Audience

    Devil's key appeals to college age players as well as those who are fans of light strategy and survival games. In general, gameplay is fast-paced which means players are encouraged to act quickly and think about how to counter their opponent. Players are multitasking in the short time period they are given by identifying what tokens they have just flipped over as well as how many instrument points they will need to move to a more desirable space. Failure to do so results in a possibly lower score after landing on an unfavorable space or to moving too slowly when sorting through tokens.

Iterative Process

    Our team was constantly changing aspects of the game that we felt were lacking, unbalanced, unexciting, etc. Our initial design was very barebones and just consisted of the initial hook of sorting through tokens, which were cards at that time. There was not much else to it and the initial playtest we conducted revealed as much, so we added the game board and modified some of the original numbers. The original gameboard was a simple design that didn't allow for much freedom of movement. 

    Through further feedback we were able to refine the board into something that gave the player more of a decision to make and offered some elements of light strategy. We also spent much of our time adjusting the number and manner in which tokens worked. I believe this refinement could still be taken further as the feedback we received from the most recent playtest noted that the process of calculating your score takes away from the intended fast-paced feel of the game. Overall, there were many changes that took place through the design process and player feedback proved an invaluable aid.

Speedbumps

    We ran into a number of problems during the iterative process that were eventually, for the most part, resolved. Our initial concept was very lacking and felt like the first half of what we needed for our game; it was incomplete. It took us a long amount of time to be able to turn the core gameplay loop into something enjoyable to play. We also spent a lot of time adjusting the numbers into something that wasn't a one-sided victory all the time.

Task Completion

    Tasks were completed a little later than I would've liked, but we were always able to get most of our work done in an orderly fashion. It did give us less time to think about and refine some of the later iterations since tasks were completed later in the week, but we still managed to resolve a lot of the major issues facing our game. In the future, we should get ahead of the process and refine our initial concepts earlier so that more time is available to make changes before the final iteration.

Future Considerations

    From this experience I have learned to take charge of tasks and get them done ahead of time in order to have more time to refine our game. I have also learned that balancing is a rigorous and extensive process that requires much time and feedback to correct.