Week 10 - Game Balance, Asymmetry, and Battle Battle 2

In week 10 of Designing for Play, we began to create our own game tailored to the BattleBattle style. For reference, BattleBattle is a versus game where each player has a card that determines their health points, abilities, and dice roll values. Two players roll dice simultaneously and the higher number wins, the previously mentioned abilities can alter this simple game greatly, allowing for less repetitive feeling matches. 

The game that we had to create was a 3-player vs 1-boss game. Our game's theme is a money heist where players try to crack the final safe inside the bank. The name of the game that I was thinking of was Cracked. We're working towards having five characters, a hacker, a lockpicker, a beauty, a "Chad" (tank/bruiser style character), and one more that we are still pondering about. Each one of these characters has their own individual values for their health points, abilities, and dice roll values, just like in the BattleBattle game. In chapter 11 of "Randomness",  Zach Hiwiller explains that in Civilization, a game by Sid Meier, "players felt that when they had a 1:3 army disadvantage in Civilization, they should win 25 percent of battles." Being that our game is set in this exact format, we had to make the vault (the single boss) extremely strong.

The vault has a unique playstyle with its dice rolls and health points, instead of having a token for special abilities, rolling a specific number will present its action for the round. 

- Rolling 1-3: Attacks Player 1
- Rolling 4-6: Attacks Player 2
- Rolling 7-9: Attacks Player 3
- Rolling 10-12: Unique action for each number

This does introduce mechanics that are heavily tailored to luck, as the actions on rolling 10-12 are significantly worse than each player taking a hit to their health points, but this allows for our players to effectively use their tokens to mitigate these "worst-case scenarios" that the vault can bring to the table, it is a boss after all. The randomness aspect intertwines with the skill-based aspect to create a game where "the player with the higher skill level" will not always win, as referred to by Hiwiller in his skill-based games section. 

Touching back to the health points of the vault, we've decided to base his HP at 100 initially as each player we made has their own unique dice and some of them can roll to do some serious damage. As the vault's health points drop lower and lower, it reaches a point where a "failsafe" mechanic comes in, changing its dice from a D12 to a D20, and acquiring two new abilities. This allows the vault to make a comeback even if the players have an overwhelming advantage over it. This is how we thought of "design[ing] around the limitation of a preconceived victory", letting the game play out a tad bit longer and raising the stakes with the last stand mechanic of the vault.