Paper Prototyping - Round 1

Paper prototyping offers a variety of advantages for the development of Jupiter's Fall. It allows me to quickly test mechanics that would otherwise take tens if not hundreds of hours of development to digitally prototype. I can change battle layouts, variables for card, enemies, and the player, and test balance of designed cards, all without writing a single line of code. And the beautiful thing is, all mechanics of Jupiter's Fall can easily be translated to paper!

The first round of paper prototyping is to focus on one thing: FUN. I need to make sure the game I've got in my head is actually fun to play, and if it's not, change it until it is.

The core idea is simple and proven. A deckbuilder combined with a turn-based strategy game seems like a no-brainer, but testing it is still essential.

Parameters

For the first round of prototyping, the parameters will be constrained to a single, simple, early game battle. It has a small grid and the starting deck of cards for the player. I used dice to randomly select enemy attack patterns.

Results

The results of the first round of paper prototyping was interesting. I had some key takeaways and things to change from it:

1. It is fun

2. It's currently too easy to "lock out" the enemy from being able to deal damage

3. Once all units are on the field, the starting deck becomes rather boring and repetitive

So first and foremost, the main thing I was looking for is: Is this concept fun? Does it provide an interesting strategic challenge for the player in a battle? Thankfully, the answer is yes. The early battle was very fun as I had to consider where to deploy units on the battlefield, move units to block attacks, and consider future moves.

However, once the early stages were over and I had all of my units from my deck on the battlefield, that changed. With the small grid, it became very easy with 5/8 grid spaces filled with units to cover any and all attacks from the enemy with a unit and still attack and deal damage to the enemy while doing it. The energy shield card also made it so that enemy attacks almost never actually punched through to deal damage to my units. The result was essentially a "lock out" for the enemy, where they couldn't effectively challenge my defenses and I could simultaneously attack at the same time.

While this is supposed to be an early game battle and shouldn't be too challenging, it felt entirely too easy for my liking. I want there to be the chance of taking damage if you misplay or get caught out, but as it is now, there is a very clear "best move" that results in a completely safe battle.

There are a few different ways I could go about remedying this. I could increase the grid size to allow for more area for the enemy to attack, resulting in more strategic choices of where to place units to defend against it. I could increase the enemy's attack pattern difficulty, making it attack in more places at once causing more damage overall and the need to cover multiple hot spots. I could tweak the unit health values and enemy attack damage which would make it more easy for the enemy to destroy units and possibly punch through defenses. I could do a combination of the options above, but the best way to know for sure is to test it. This test gave me valuable information for my next prototyping session and gave me confidence that the idea is sound, but the values and mechanics need tweaking.

I'll make modifications and test again!