Wow, it has been a while since we posted here! Not because we’ve been slacking off (okay, we may have taken a bit of a break around Christmas and New Years), but mostly just due to a case of writers block. But this week, blog-post inspiration is back with advantage! We’ve spent a lot of …
Category Archives: Helorian Battles
Step Back to Step Forward
Creating a game is hard. Creating a game as a fun hobby with no game-design experience is harder. So over the past month we’ve taken a step back and started to research game design to help with the pitfalls we keep running into. 90% of this research is reading through a blog referenced earlier, https://danfelder.net/. …
Combat Mechanics – Part 2
Still quarantined at home certainly has made it difficult to get a lot of meaningful work done on this game. However, thanks to recently learning about, and installing, Tabletop Simulator – I’ve been able to get a deck of cards online to play against opponents that aren’t just myself, which has been a tremendous help! …
Combat Mechanics – Part 1
Heavily based on a tabletop wargame, Helorian Battles relies heavily on combat to determine who wins the game. Throughout the combat system development, while not set in stone, several key features we want to include have driven our decision making: Dynamic lane based combat. The game starts with one combat lane, and can expand and …
Game Balance & Points Based Deck-Building – Part 1
When researching development for this game, trying to answer the question why there are no great point-based deck building card games, we came across an interesting article – Untapped Potential in Card Games: Deck-Building Point Costs While we had a notion of what the challenges of a point based deck building card game would entail, this …
Continue reading “Game Balance & Points Based Deck-Building – Part 1”
Scoring
Played through a few more games with new people who hadn’t played the game yet. The games went smoothly, but there were a couple pain points that came up. One of which was scoring. The existing scoring used player supply + points won from attacking locations = total victory points. Once you hit 20, you …
First Playthrough With Printed Cards
First shipment of our prototype cards came in today! The first thing we did was lay them all out, organize them, and then built two 600 point decks (about 30 cards) to play a few games. Playing with actual cards instead of hard-to-read cut up note cards made the game much easier to play. We’re …
Card Prototype
First iteration of our card design. Very basic design that will change over time – especially once we get a professional designer to work on it. The artwork is blurred due to copyright reasons. Meanwhile we are continuing to tweak the game. Each playthrough grants us further insight and gives us new rule sets to …
Action Economy
The action economy, a set number of actions a player may take each turn, is often referred to in RPG games like Dungeons & Dragons and Pathfinder. It’s also used in living card games like Android Netrunner & Arkham Horror: The Card Game. Generally speaking, most of these games have a set number of actions …
The First Playthrough
Our first step in designing a new game was to make a game that was fun and engaging to play. It all started with a rules brainstorming session on paper, that we then translated into hand-drawn note cards to quickly play through. It didn’t look pretty, but it got the job done. The game played surprisingly …