Disaster Strikes

Today I was able to get some work done on both the board game I'm creating as well as a flash game that I'm making for one of my other classes. For the board game I created a table that shows how many resources are gained depending on the number of groups currently at the same resource as well as the six different disasters that can occur on the island. I'm going to take the disaster's I've created and put them onto cards that show how much damage a disaster does depending on the current age that the island is on.

Earthquake

Lava Flow

Lightning

Rockslide

Tidal Wave

Raining Frogs

New and old

For the board game I'm creating for class I had designed a board yesterday night however after play-testing other people's games and taking a second look at mine I decided I really needed to go over and simplify what I had. So after some sketches I came up with something that's much simpler and what I hope turns out to be better. Something that I've found out after making several games over the past year is that when you're first designing a game it's easy to add a lot of rules that you think are fun. The board then tends to evolve in order to accommodate all those rules, however when other people play the game the rules are difficult to pick up and the board can sometimes be confusing since they other have the rules to explain everything. I find if you then pick out all the key concepts that you really want, and try make the board and rules as simple as you can while still keeping those key concepts, people can have fun playing the game without being bogged down by unneeded things.

One thing that I've found helps when you're making a game is to have every rule explained in detail with an example, all labeled with a title that allows players to find the rule they're looking for clarification on easily. You should also have a quick-start set of instructions that allows players to get right into playing without having to know all the rules. Then when the players have a question about the rules they can read the ones they need to in detail.

This is the older board

This is the newer board

Time for some survival

So I haven't gotten around to making any more cards for the triple S game, however I'm now back at school for another semester in order to get my Game Design degree. I have three major projects until April so I'll be updating this blog with the progress I'm making on those. That being said I've designed 18 cards for a board game that is one of the projects.

It's all about making sure your tribe survives the longest on a island that is prone to many natural disasters. You can build structures that grant bonuses to your tribe, however you need resources in order to build them. There are three technological ages that the island will go through, changing after a certain rounds have gone by, a round is made up of every surviving tribe going once. The ages are Wood, Stone and Metal. An example on how building things goes is if it's the Stone age, you can build anything that's Wood or Stone as long as you have the necessary resources however you can't build Metal things even if you do have the required Metal resources.

There will be places that these resources can be collected on the board by each tribes group of explorers. If they're within the general area of a resource, indicated on the board, the group gathers one of the resource however if the group is right on the resource than the group gathers five of the resource, divided by the number of groups that are on the same resource.

I'll go into more details as I'm producing the game however that's a general overview of some parts of it. Here are the building cards that can be bought with the resources: