Author: Valeria Voronkova

Since we have an advantage of a game artist in our team, we should use the opportunity to make our game visually appealing as well. Because I believe that visuals are responsible for the atmosphere and immersion into a game, even if it’s a game for videochat.

For our game we suggest players a template of a haunted mansion house.

This is an upgrated version of the original draft made by Arthur, that we used in our first playtest.

My task was to make it visually appealing and correlating with the whole game concept of a spooky house. That’s why I’ve chosen a dark blue-purple colour scheme with some bright contrasting colours, even though their vibrancy was slightly desaturated to keep the atmosphere. Also most of the rooms have red elements which catch attention. That can potentially play with players’ psychology and make them choose these rooms more often (for both teams) which will cause more clashes and game activity.

As a game artist I must take into account our rules and highlight the most important areas. First of all I clearly labeled all the rooms. Also you can notice that entrance area stands out of the rest of the rooms with lighter colours, even compared to the kitchen, which has similar light tiles. That was done on purpose as the Hunters team starts from that particular area. Same thing concerns Ghosts. In the rules they start from the attic. Though it’s not possible to place the attic, covering the rooms underneath, I decided to make just an entrance to a supposed attic area, where Ghosts will start their game. To underline that it’s clearly a ghost area, I used stereotypical green “ectoplasm”-green colour to encourage player’s familiarity and positive stereotypes. I have also spread some ectoplasm drops over the whole building, but for the entrance, since it’s exclusively the hunters’ territory.

Overal, I’m satisfied with the result along with my teammates. I believe I managed to create a firm visual base of our project and we will adjust the whole presentation to this particular style. It concerns the rule set document layout and colour scheme, which I’ll make while further playtests are taking place and the rules are being polished more and more.

Having considered and discussed the problems encountered from the playtest, we decided to opt for the last game option with 2 teams and develop the rules in that area. That’s how our rule set looks at this point:

First of all we have intervined the topic with the gameplay more by setting up different goals for each team to win. Now ghosts must claim all the rooms by filling them with ectoplasm while hunters must kill all the ghosts.

I think, we’re on the right track to solve the main issue of this version – “a lot of nothing happened”. At least we’ve introduced a rule, that hunters prevail over ghosts and now even if there’s a draw between the number of ghosts and hunters – hunters take over and kick out ghost players from the game. Also we have changed the way different teams are allowed to move, what brings an element of strategy. Ghosts now can move freely, what will significantly rise the amount of clashes and action.

We are still struggling with figuring out, whether players should take turns to take positions. From one point that would solve the problem of chaos, when revealing positions. From the other side the game would be laking that part of randomness and open possibility for cheating, that is to change position while other players are in the prosess of revealing. But I guess, that is the question of playtests. They will show if this fear is true or not.

For now we have 3 options to test, suggested by Triny and Arthur:

Option 1: Everyone moves at the same time (w/ Arthur’s idea)
Round starts with everyone secretly choosing where they want to go
The ghosts reveal their desired location to the game master as the hunters mute/deafen their voice chat
The hunters reveal their desired location to the game master as the ghosts mute/deafen their voice chat
Everything is revealed at the same time
(EVENTS OCCUR)
Round finish and repeat

Option 2: Team by team movement
Hunters round starts with the hunters secretly choosing where they want to go (teams cannot discuss)
The hunters type out their location at the same time, and the mansion owner marks down the new location of the hunters
(EVENTS OCCUR)
Ghost’s round starts where the ghosts type out their location at the same time, and the mansion owner marks the new location of the ghosts
(EVENTS OCCUR)
Back to hunters round and repeat

Option 3: Individual Team Movement (how order is decided i’m not sure)
A hunter chooses where they want to go and types it out
They move to that location
(EVENTS OCCUR)
A ghost chooses where they want to go and types it out
They move to that location
(EVENTS OCCUR)
Repeat with every player

Apart from that I’m starting to develop the visuals, particularly our mansion map. That part is on me and I’m planning to make the visuals a bit old style spooky house.

This week it’s time to playtest our game. By this time we have 2 versions of the game: more simple and abstract and thematic with developed rules and teamwork.

WE developed approximate rules for both options:

// Rules //

Player Count: 6-10 players;

• players are separated into two groups (red & blue), each player has 2 lives (or more).
• goal is to gain as many points in 5 rounds. team with the most points winds.
• points are won by taking out members of opposing teams. 
• at the start of the round players from each team choose which room they want to go to. 
• if there are more players in a room than the other, the team with the highest amount of players takes a point. the room used cannot be chosen again on the next round.
• a room w/ 1 player alone, or a stalemate gives no points.
• how the teams / players communicate is up to them, but voice cannot be used. decision making is kept to 2 minutes max.

// ‘Simpler’ version // 

Player Count: 3 – 6;

• players start with 3 lives
• each player must move every round (cannot stay on the same number)
• Round begins with players deciding a number from 1-9, they shout/type out the number, or display the number with their fingers
• if anyone calls out the same number then that person loses a life (how do we decide which of the 2 loses life?)
• If there is a clash and two or more people call out the same number, that number can no longer be used
• Rounds are repeated until there is one person left (or somehow all the numbers are called out)

On Thursday we had our playtest and here are some results and analysis.

Game 1 simple version

(we deсided that simple option will go without teams eventually)

5 players, 3 lives

Option 1: A square disappears till the end of the game:

+ it works as a mechanism to speed up the game as it limits game space, making players to clash more in the rest of the rooms. Taking into account that the game is pretty random, the less people are left the more tries will be needed for them to clash and proceed the game.

Option 2: A square disappears just for 1 round:

Potentially that could be of use if the number of players is big enough (10+), when decreasing the game space will cause too many players clashing at the same time and loosing lives too fast. The issue can be corrected with increasing the number of lives for each player, but still a playtest is needed here, which is pretty hard to provide with that amount of players. So, I guess option 1 is better for our case since we managed to playtest it and it worked well enough.

Major problems encountered:

1. Simultaneous answers. The game requires players reveal their positions simultaneously so that none of them could change their mind. Playtest revealed that it’s very hard to do in audio chat. Possible solution – using the writing chat, where players post on count 3-2-1, what worked well during the playtest of game version 2.
2. 1:1 final clash. When 2 final players left with 1 life remaining – they will both loose life when they clash. Possible solution – implementing a final round rule where a death square is assigned by one of the players or a game master. The player, who finishes in that square – looses. (But what if they both choose the death square? We’ll have same situation left. Or we can accept, that after the final round both can lose. TO BE CONSIDERED)

Some more questions to consider:

The amount of lives and rounds (if any for this version). We tested 3 lives which worked fine. I don’t think we need rounds here and just lest the game finish with the last one standing since the game is fast

Do we need a game master. During the playtest Arthur was in supervisor role and helped to follow the amount of lives and players’ positions in both versions of the game. I personally (as a potential player) would prefer having a game master without the need to follow myself. And it makes the game more organized. But for the simple version it can be decided by the players themselves, and the game master can play alongside others as the counting is not hard. Thus the role of a game master becomes more significant in the developed version with the mansion house as the game transforms into sort of a role-play as well, where the game master should not only document the process of the game, but to be a real host and sort of an entertainer as well.

According to the feedback, simple version is quick, easy, tense and random. The visual greed should be always visible to players, which is easier than draw the grid by players individually.

Game 2: long version – thematic: haunted mansion

2 teams: ghosts and ghost hunters aka team red and team blue.

5 rounds

Clash system – if there’re more ghosts than hunters in one room, ghosts score a point and vice versa.

Goal – get max team points for the set amount of rounds.

Team members don’t lose lives while in clash

If there’s a draw in the room – nothing happens and the game continues with no one scoring

According to the feedback, the game was more fun and entertaining as it can potentially develop a role play element, which will make the game more immersive. Adding strong visuals to our mansion scheme will be a bonus.

This time we tried revealing the positions via written chat, which was much more comfortable (for me as well since I was one of the players).

Major issue: ‘a lot of “nothing happened”’. During the playtest the majority of rooms were taken by one team member or “draw room” happened. We should think about how to increase the amount of action. Possible solution – set up a system of amount of playable rooms depending on the amount of players to make them clash more. We used the same system to cross out the clash rooms, but for the amount of test players that was still too much.

Communication questions: Originally we had 2 options for communication – silent or separate chats for teams. First would allow randomness and second would allow strategy. But during playtest we opted for the silent/secret one because we’ve realized that otherwise teams would just vote for all coming to one room and waiting. So we need to make them constantly change positions.

Suggestions:

To intersect the theme with gameplay. Playtesters offered to adjust teams possibilities to their roles. For example, ghosts can move to any room, while hunters can move only to one closes to the one they’re currently in.

To implement boosts. Game master can have a number of boosts for both teams that he can distribute during the round, before teams announce their positions. One spread, game master can’t change position of boosts. Like protection for hunters or “add one team member to the room”. Per round game master can display all or some boosts. Players don’t know where the boosts are. Game master announces if a boost had been activated in the room.

I believe that second option has more potential in terms of immersiveness and fun, because this session was more aluve and players were active with thematic jokes. Additionally this option doesn’t have major gameplay issues like 1:1 situation in the simple version. Even if we’re making a video chat game, it can be something more than just party games. The only thing I’m concerned about is that we can omit using video, which is good from one point since you’re still able to play it even if you don’t have/don’t want to use a camera. On the other hand, such omitting may be considered as project rules violation in some point. That’s why we’re also thinking about allowing team members use some code gestures to give hints to each other.

Today we’re sharing our findings and ideas. This is how our Miro board looks like now:

As you can see, our first preferences were 2 ideas

Unfortunately the discussion didn’t go far from that. Some of the other ideas, like classical words game, turned out to be too simple and already existing. While pitching ideas, Trini brought to our attention the following idea:

To us it seemed as the most relevant option, because it was something new and didn’t refer to any existing party games. We all agreed that this one should be developed further and we need to come up with some contest.

I came up with the following proposition:

The idea was accepted so the final concept for now looks like this:

We discussed some rules already, for example, the rule “one round – one cell” to force players to constantly change their position and the anount of players in each cell. Discussed the amount of lives, which for now can depend on the amount of players and/or rounds, because there is a risk, that one could be kicked out pretty fast till the very end of the session, which can be relatively long if the number of people is big.

Another important question was that the game we were discussing so far would work great as a digital one. But we should adapt the mechanics to non-digital to meet the brief. Where I offered the following, which is settles as working option for now:

Final thing that we got to discuss is the setting, which due to the spooky season, was collectively agreed to be ghosts and ghost hunters. The grid will serve as as a haunted mansion with cells as rooms. That would make the game more immersive and it would be more interesting to name rooms instead of plain numbers.

That are our achievements of the week. I think we’ve reached our weekly goal and can work further on developing and testing the concept. I personally believe that the game will look great in digital as well, and such duality reaches my personal interest in research over adapting digital games to board ones and vice versa.