[Левиафаны]First Game Design Concepts
Добавлено: 01 июл 2009, 13:49So I knew what type of game we wanted and we had rough concepts down for how to track damage on ships, so now I needed to put fingers to keyboard and generate rules.
One of the very first decisions to make was whether this would be a true table-top miniatures game (using rulers and such to measure movement) or whether I’d use some type of grid system. After doing a lot of research and looking at a host of games on the market (along with erring on the side of the type of game I was trying to produce) I decided against the gridless system.
So if I’m going with a grid, what type of grid should it be? Plenty of popular games use square grids, but that didn’t feel right, especially in a game where all miniatures are going to fill more than one space. The thought of these warships moving forward and then turning 90 degrees instantly for a turn made me laugh out loud.
The answer, of course, was sitting in front of me the whole time…I just tried ignoring it because I didn’t want my own many years of development of that game to bleed over into Leviathans. But after several fits and starts it became very apparent that a hex grid simply worked too well. What’s more, due the rough scale of the miniatures we wanted to produce (1:1200), the BattleTech hex-size simply worked perfectly (i.e. 1.5″ corner to corner). [As an added bonusit made playtesting easier as I could just tell people "go get a BT map."]
With the style of board defined it was time to dive into the game design full on. As I’ve previously mentioned, I wanted to be very sure to keep the game on the simple end of the spectrum. And that meant keeping the number of modifiers to a minimum. Now you can’t dump them all, of course, or there’s no possibility for tactics in game play, which makes the game not very fun to play, which kills off re-playability. So as my fingers began banging out initial rules for playtesting I had a rough figure of no more than 8 total situational modifiers for the core of the game (enhanced scenario play rules don’t count… . As it turned out, the first draft left me with 7.
To be continued….
See ya next duty shift!
Randall
One of the very first decisions to make was whether this would be a true table-top miniatures game (using rulers and such to measure movement) or whether I’d use some type of grid system. After doing a lot of research and looking at a host of games on the market (along with erring on the side of the type of game I was trying to produce) I decided against the gridless system.
So if I’m going with a grid, what type of grid should it be? Plenty of popular games use square grids, but that didn’t feel right, especially in a game where all miniatures are going to fill more than one space. The thought of these warships moving forward and then turning 90 degrees instantly for a turn made me laugh out loud.
The answer, of course, was sitting in front of me the whole time…I just tried ignoring it because I didn’t want my own many years of development of that game to bleed over into Leviathans. But after several fits and starts it became very apparent that a hex grid simply worked too well. What’s more, due the rough scale of the miniatures we wanted to produce (1:1200), the BattleTech hex-size simply worked perfectly (i.e. 1.5″ corner to corner). [As an added bonusit made playtesting easier as I could just tell people "go get a BT map."]
With the style of board defined it was time to dive into the game design full on. As I’ve previously mentioned, I wanted to be very sure to keep the game on the simple end of the spectrum. And that meant keeping the number of modifiers to a minimum. Now you can’t dump them all, of course, or there’s no possibility for tactics in game play, which makes the game not very fun to play, which kills off re-playability. So as my fingers began banging out initial rules for playtesting I had a rough figure of no more than 8 total situational modifiers for the core of the game (enhanced scenario play rules don’t count… . As it turned out, the first draft left me with 7.
To be continued….
See ya next duty shift!
Randall
