First and second Iterations

This may be a concise post.

This week after I refined my design document I set to work on my first iteration. At the start my game had a source, a drain and a few entities. This idea for the game was, the player (single player game) could move up to five spaces per turn and every turn each source produced one resource. Also the game world was constructed on a single grided sheet of A4 paper, 8 by 6 spaces. When the player moves, this takes up one energy and hey have up to five each turn. Also when the player i adjacent to a source, they can gain one resource per turn and they loose when they run out of fuel. The win condition is when the play gets as many resources as they can.

However, after a few play tests I needed to take it back to the drawing board because, I needed to include a trader, and a converter. This was the feed back from players. Also there was no threat in the game and because the game world was too small is was too easy to win the game. There was little challenge. I had simplified the game too much by stripping too much out.

Second Iteration

In this iteration, I doubled the size of the game world to spread things out since the all of the players asked for this, along with this I spread out where each node type was, making sure it they were not too near or far away from each other.

I added two new resources into the game. Energy and currency. The energy tokens are there so the player can easily visualize how far they can move across the game world. Also when the player gains resources, they also gain one currency token for every resource they gain. When the player visits a trader, they can trade one currency token for one energy. The loose condition when they run out of fuel.

Also the player can purchase a converter, that converts three mass to one energy or the other way round for three currency. Also, the player can collect all the resources in one go from a source. Also when a source has been cleaned out, it remains inactive for 5 turns.

Results:

One player found a few major exploits.

If he moved one space per turn gradually nearing a source planet, he would gain tonnes of resources from each planet very quickly with little effort. This drained away the sense of achievement. Because he could do this he could go to a trader and buy more energy resources and farm each source planet. This meant when a source was deactivated, it would do nothing to affect the difficulty of the game. This also made the converter irrelevant due to the exchange rates.

Suggestions:

One suggestion was to make the game multi-player. I may include this in a later iteration, but this is not my main priority. This would be to add some more strategy and accomplishment to the game.

Another suggestion was to add an artificial threat, like a space pirate that could attack the player so they loose some resources. I may include this in a later iteration but I have to fix the exploit at the moment.

Another suggestions was to penalize the player for moving one space at a time.

the last suggestions was to raise the trader exchange rates making the energy more expensive. As well as this, the converter should be set to a lower conversion rate then the trader. E.g. 3 resources one way for one of another, whilst the trader could be five currency for an energy resource.

What I will change in the next iteration?

In my next iteration I will make each source planet have a maximum number of resources they can hold, after this quantity, the resources are drained and reset to zero for that particular node source. This will add a negative feedback loop to the game. Also I will have to experiment with the trader and converter rates.