Note: Any aspects of the game that are unchanged I have left out of these blog posts so these are shorter and quicker to read making them more information dense.
This week I have been working on different conversion rates and the production rates from each source of each planet.
The reason being this week (yet I had many play tests this week with about 2 iterations) from making the game too easy to win and exploit, every one struggled to win in any form. What I mean is, I rose the cost of energy from the trader too much, and because players could only earn one currency per mass, and each energy from the trader cost 5 currency, every one struggled to make more than one trip around the game world.
Everyone who has play tested my game has said they like the idea of it. However in the previous iteration I have made it far too difficult.
Energy Resource Transactions
Another aspect I changed was that it costs two energy to move and one to stay still during the turn. This was because I found one player only moving one space at a time and they racket up plenty of resources. There fore to remove this aspect and make people more around the world more I implemented the rule earlier in the paragraph. However... When testing this rule in the next iteration I had made a few errors. Firstly I changed an aspect of the game based upon one person, which is a pretty bad idea. Secondly, it was not much of an improvement from the previous iteration. The player was able to move around more and gain more resources, but not very much.
Due to this massive request I will revert the movement cost back to how they were and find a way to make the game more challenging yet make the difficulty curve less steep. In the next iteration movement will cost will be a lot lower, and the cost for being waiting in the same spot for a turn will be removed, but I will find another way to keep the player moving around the game map.
Trader
With the trader, every one though the cost of the energy resources was far too high and this made the game vastly too difficult. In face each game, lasted only a few minuets. To counter act this, I lowered the transaction for the trader. I lowered the conversion from 5 currency to three currency for one energy resource. The trader has another entity attached to it some where off the board, so all resources that it exchanges stay in the game. In the new iteration, many people still found this expensive but they preferred the lower price from this iteration to the last iteration iteration. I will fix this in the next paragraph which many people suggested.
Buyer node source
With this iteration I introduced another converter into the game. A number of players thought it was strange how they just gain currency from 'mass' resources and they also thought there was little reason to move around the game wold.
To fix this and give the game more context, they player once they have mined all the resources from a planet source, they can visit the nearest buyer node and can convert their tangible 'mass' resources into another tangible currency resource. This slightly improved the game, however the game was still too difficult. This was because again the conversion rates were not high enough. The player would convert all of their mass to tangible currency resources with a rate of one for one, due to the cost of the energy being
More energy resources or higher mass to currency conversion rates
Many players kept asking for more energy resources or higher mass to currency conversion rates so they could travel more before they become stranded. Due to this I increased the quantity if resources the player starts with. This alteration was met with praise, and I shall keep it in the game for now.
In the latest iteration (no. 5) I rose the quantity of currency the player gets in exchange for the mass resources, from one for one, to one for three. This way the player will be able to purchase at least one energy resource from the trader for every mass the collect.
However this was met by another challenge. Some players complained that they would not get enough mass to make another trip and many others thought the game needed to be less predictable.
Planet Mass production rates
I thought to make the game less predictable, I would introduce an element of randomness to the game. By this I mean the resource connections and the rate at which each planet source produces mass resources. I change the rules so that, every turn, each planet source in the game (four planets) were equal distance from each other, and they produce one mass a second, however every turn for each planet I rolled a die. When the die shows a positive number an extra resource is made. This worked to make the game less predictable, and many people liked it because there was a 50:50 change of a source making two resources a turn. I will keep this feature and play around with it for the next week to refine it more.
Another issue I fixed was how many mass a planet could hold until it resets, I lowered this to 7 because people thought this was too high. So far people like the change, but I may reduce it to keep people moving around the map more. And I need to add more spontaneity to the game with the resource production. Like more sources that are more valuable.
What Have I learnt this week?
In future, I will not change an aspect of the game unless many people request it (I have been doing this most of the time, unless some one found a major game breaking flaw), and I will alter as few aspects of the game as possibly in each iteration. This will make it easier to see which feature works and which needs tweaking or tearing every time.
Another thing I will do in future iterations is, I will either use dice to keep track of resource counts... Actually I will just use the machinations visual scripting tool for play testing because, there are more sources to take care of, and more multipliers it has become more difficult of resource counts. Also it will dramatically speed up game play and if a player does not like an aspect of the game I can easily change it. In face I need to start using the tool more often during play testing.
Another Note: This link below is the the blog post that contains the references I need from books or other sources.
http://josepheasterdissertationblog.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/bibliography-references.html
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