Whimsical Creatures

Myre & Milton

Playtesting = Game Design

Today I playtested "the mansion game" three times. It's impressive how much changes from one game to the next. Rules are tweaked and in this case the size of the board was almost halved. The result a faster and probably funnier game.

I haven't written the rules down yet. The game is a puzzle game and the mechanics are about movement, shifting the board pieces aka rooms around and moving the character in order to snatch gems. The goal is to be the first to get all the gems in your color. While playing your objective is therefore to rearrange the board so you can move as freely as possible while hopefully limiting your opponents movement.

Two Board Games

Testing the four-player-game with two players

Lately I've been working on making a couple of board games. Well it started with one -a four-player-game but being designed for four I can only playtest when there are four people around with an hour or two to spar. Strangely enough even though I share a flat with four other people it rarely happens that they are here at the same time. So I began developing a second idea that could be playtested with only two people.

To begin with the allure of making a board game is really that it is something I can make on my own (with the brilliant input of playtesters). I find when working on digital games as you can see in the very old previous posts that I get stuck in the scripting part of the process. And then the game mechanic ideas are sidetracked by the fight with the code. Though I actually really like coding I don't seem to be good enough to work my way through to a finish prototype on my own. Board game prototyping could be the way forward. I guess you could just call paper prototyping.

A 2D-3D-co-op platformer

I haven't giving up on the kid game. It's just resting.

In the meantime I've dug up another project. This game idea was born at the Nordic Game Jam and executed as You say Jump? I say How High!. Is a 2D-3D-two-player-co-op platformer where the main focus in the the verbal interaction between the two players playing. Both players control the same character. None of them however have full control. One player sees the character in top view and can move the character up and down. The other player sees the platform from the side and only controls the sideways movement. As both game view are flat 2D view neither of the players have enough information available on their screen to control the character alone. THEY MUST COMMUNICATE!

 This image is suppose to explain the basic game mechanics.

For the game jam we had a crazy set up with one computer and two screens. None of us had touched Unity at that point so we went with bad old flash for developing. It turned out to no ones surprise that it was a difficult task to code what on all accounts except the visuals is a 3D game in a 2D environment. So all in all not the ideal offset for the huge commercial success we all were hoping for ;)

After playing around with iPad I realised how ideal it is for two-player games. So now I'm prototyping the game in Unity.

!++

I let Christoffer be the ++ on the blog. He wrote one post. And then nothing...
So now I have to do something. And so I have. I've made a draft for the graphics for his game.

The style reminds me of drop7 right now but maybe it will get a life of it's own.

Why Not

Playing with size.