Timeline
March - June 2023
Project Type
Class Project
Role
Interaction Designer
Visual Designer
UX Designer
Amphibian Ambush! is a tabletop card game where players learn to cooperate as a team to overcome challenges. By rewarding cooperation over competition, Amphibian Ambush! aims to teach players the importance of helping others with the hope this lesson translates into other facets of life.
Challenges
Create a game system that encourages helping others.
1.
Design a short gameplay loop for replayability.
2.
Worldbuild a theme to build game interest.
3.
Develop an enjoyable experience that players return for.
4.
Timeline
Mar - Jun 2023
Role
Project Lead
Game Designer
Systems Designer
Project Type
Class Project
The conception of this project began as a game that challenges players to consider their influence if given advantages over others. Would they be generous with it? Can this translate outside the game? These were all questions we considered throughout our design process.
Personas
Unsure of where to start, we created personas to build a central vision for this project. Then we could latch on to this vision throughout our process to guide our direction.
Primary Persona
Name: Zach
Age: 26
Occupation:Real Estate Agent
Since getting his real estate license, Zach's life has flourished as his goal of self-sufficiency has been attained very early into his career. All this success has made him question how much is enough? He has thought about the influence behind his fortunate position, however, has never been confronted with sacrifice when helping others.
Secondary Persona
Name: Rachel
Age: 21
Occupation:Grocery Store Clerk
Rachel currently works a minimum wage job to fund a college education for better opportunity in the future. Her background is less fortunate, meaning there haven't been many opportunities for support. When there are, Rachel struggles with the vulnerability that can come when generosity is offered - leading her to opt out from said help.
Moving from our personas, we decided that our game archetype should be a cooperative multiplayer game. Additionally, it should be a tabletop game due to the impact that could arise from a portable and accessible experience. From here we needed to research current games in the genre to create a new, yet familiar, experience for players.
Research
Part of our research was focused on other game's mechanics since these systems will define a player's enjoyment. This laid a foundation for us to build from. Based on our insights from research, I generated the following objectives so each team member could have a dedicated roles moving forward in our process.
Conceptualize item, character, and boss cards for gameplay
1.
Wireframe card designs for characters, items, and bosses.
2.
Develop back-end gameplay mechanics and balance card systems
3.
My direct focus moving forward was designing the game systems while also overseeing my team's work. The biggest challenge in this was balancing luck, scaling, and overall player enjoyment. My first iteration followed a standard distribution to evenly split overpowered and underpowered opportunities. Additionally, bosses were deliberately challenging to necessitate that players cooperate, trade, and manually balance each other's power level.
Standard distribution graph used to balance mechanics
Game Flow Wireframes
Each game loop consists of three total flows. In the first flow, players select their characters and draw traits. The next flow has players draw item cards to determine power and gives them the option to trade with each other. In the final flow, players fight a boss to test their strength. These last two flows repeat three times to make the central gameplay loop.
Phase 1 - Draw character and potential cards
Phase 2 - Draw item cards [Knick Knacks, Snacks, and Attacks]
Phase 3 - Boss fight phase
With the mechanics figured out along with the content my groupmates produced, a deck of paper cards was generated for game testing. Testing a low-fidelity prototype was valuable especially since we anticipated iteration upon feedback of our design.
Iteration
Many of the existing designs didn’t give players a rewarding experience. Their overall enjoyment was diminished by the game's straightforward design. Revising the game system and rebalancing the power scale was the next necessary step as this was where of the negative player outcomes stemmed from.
Frustrating Combat
Mental math was a requirement which generated frustration.
Lack of Diversity
The lack of diversity extended into player satisfaction / fun.
Competitive Feel
The design of the game made players focus on unintentional goals.
Too Straightforward
Game loops didn't have diversity as well, which prevented replayability.
Once our changes were made, a mid-fidelity paper prototype was generated to test our new ideas with users. This version was more promising and addressed the challenges we faced throughout this project.
The core design choice involves rewarding player generosity. This forces players to make an active decision on what they want to 'give-up' for the sake of winning as a team. Whether this translates outside of gameplay is still TBD.
Our goal for a short gameplay loop was 10-30 minutes per game. In testing, a game with four players was 10 minutes long. This is estimated to double in instances of eight players.
Our cards were centrally designed to fit within an amphibian theme along with it's related associations. In addition to this, we generated a background story for our characters.
Following our insight to implement randomness, player enjoyment was drastically improved compared to our first iteration. Embracing this decision made players want to try new characters in future games.
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I have always had a curiosity for game design, so having the opportunity to conceptualize and test an original design idea was a valuable experience. In reflection, I should have directed my team more proactively as a leader, however, as a first experience we remained successful as a team. Although our final deliverable for this project was a prototype, I'm interested to develop this game further and possibly test the efficacy of our design on our original goal (promoting being in service to others).
