Induction Project- Day 5

Today started with a talk about game play dynamics and character archetypes.

Differentiating characters in a game allows for player choice. Giving people a choice allows for player investment e.g. A favorite champion in LoL, a favorite class in TF2, their main WoW character. People become attached to their characters and it makes them want to continue playing the game. Also, by giving different characters strengths and weaknesses, you encourage collaborative play between players.

In game play terms, an archetype is a common character seen often in games. These often appear as classes, of which there is generally four kinds; Damage Soaker (Tank), Damage Dealer, Healer and Utility (Support). Balancing the classes ensures variety and that there is no "I win" button. Like in a game of rock, paper, scissors, everything should be strong against something and weak against something.

After that we moved on to forming groups and started work on creating our games and the mechanics for them.We started by deciding to have a stat system for each of our characters. Looking at our designs we decided which character archetype would be suitable. In the end we had a damage soaker, two damage dealers, a healer and a utility which was my character.

The stats for each of the characters are;
HP: Health
Attack: Damage dealt
Defense: Damage received is reduced by this %
Speed: Turn order- fastest goes first
Range: How far away a character can attack from
Skill Point: Needed to used abilities

Inspired by Skylanders, a game which in itself uses figures, I suggested the idea of having stat cards for our characters so that people don't have to remember all the stats of the top of their heads.

We added abilities to each of the characters. They have passive abilities which constantly happen and active abilities which require the player to activate them and which use up the characters skill points (mana). The damage dealers and the damage soaker don't have many skill points in comparison to the healer and the utility. The healer and the utility also have an extra ability.

I finished with going up with designs for the cards. I looked at cards from Pokemon TCG, WoW TCG, Top Trumps and Magic the Gathering for ideas.