Day 2

Here you can see that I've scribbled some numbers, drew a graph, and wrote lots of little notes and number crunching here and there. This was last night as I began playtesting the game with a rough design outline and seeing how my initial ideas stacked up. I quickly realized, "Oh, some of this stuff won't work as I initially thought!" So on the fly, I began tweaking and adding to the rules and taking away. Literally jamming with the game like musicians in a jam session!

It was fun, and I don't always get to do this during videogame development. It's been nice to start by focusing on the rules and systems design of the game and I'm really looking forward to solidifying everything and throwing on some art!

Today though I need to complete the game loop. So, last night I got as far as completing this first map, with a total of:

• Stats are LF - Lifeforce, FP - Flame Points, MV - Move, DF - Defense (I forgot to use it this playthrough! oops)
• Four turns of gameplay before I reached the Goal at the top right of the map represented by G. The Start point is represented by S.
  
• I rolled 1D6 each turn to determine how far I MOVE. Initially I wanted each character to have their own MOVE distance, but I quickly realized that wouldn't work because I don't want to split up the party, they should move as one unit. Moving them individually might cause complications, but it is something I would like to plan for and design around and I don't know if I have enough time to iterate on that.
• Turn 1 had four rounds of combat, and one of my characters almost got knocked out! Still need to tweak the math and how I want to resolve damage. I haven't even implemented special powers and abilities yet!
  • Basically after we MOVE, we roll 1D6 for an encounter. 1-3 means no encounter, 4-6 means an encounter.
  • If an encounter happens, roll to see how many enemies you'll fight. This here is where it can get crazy. I could quickly run into a situation where your party of three may face six enemies with a high DS (Difficulty Score), and after your round of attacks, you get creamed by them. This here is something I need to keep tweaking.
    • I also need to decide the enemy types and how to roll for them, and what their starting DS will be.
• After an encounter, or no encounter, you initiate the CAMP phase. At camp, you rest, heal some LF, and initiate an event. I considered using cards to determine what event, but I think I might just do a list that you'll roll for with 1D6 or 2D6 maybe. We'll see.
• Turn 2 and 3 were easy peazy. Turn 4 I reached the Goal.

Now the micro loop is Move, Encounter, Camp. Repeat until you reach the Goal. At the Goal, which may be a town, cavern, fortress, etc you initiate the event for that Macro Loop (think of it as the end of a Big Turn rather than a smaller turn composed of moving, encountering, and camping). I don't know, I might call it a Chapter or something. Anyhow, after the event for that Big Turn/Chapter, you move on to the next one, and the cycle repeats. Move, Encounter, Camp. We do this macro loop three times and that's game.

We might have a BIG BAD you have to defeat at the end of the three loops, or something else. But that's the tentative gameplay loop in action. Now I need to tweak and fine-tune somethings, and then I'm going to send it off to some friends to see if they'll playtest while I work on some art!