GAME-4000/GSND-6000 Project 6

Defeat your enemy by mining minerals and upgrading the attack damage of your cannon. Use WASD to run to the mining area (on the left) and spam E to gather minerals. Use the minerals to upgrade your cannon by running back to the cannon area (on the right) and typing E. 

• Progression Mechanic Name
  • Player’s Attack
• Description of mechanic and its progression
  • In this project, player and enemy will continue attacking automatically until one of them’s health becomes 0. The enemy’s attack damage is going to be a fixed number the whole game. Players will start with a relatively low damage, however, players are  available to upgrade their weapon to receive a higher damage each time.
• Implementation description
  • In our prototype, players will start in a fort. The fort is composed of defensive walls with 1000 health, mines that allow players to collect resources, and a cannon that is used to attack the enemy and is able to upgrade through using resources collected from the mine.
  • The gameplay is based on the attack mechanic with a rule that whoever loses all the health, the game ends. Specifically, players will have 1000 health the whole time and 10 attack damage initially, with a linear progression of +10 each upgrade. The enemy will also have 1000 total health, however, 30 attack damage the whole time.
  • In our project, we have 2 very similar levels. The difference between those 2 levels is the cost of upgrading. On  the first level, players will have a fixed cost of each upgrade. On the second level, players will have an exponential growth cost of each upgrade. The comparison here is aimed to address the unbalanced part through showing the different power progression that players experienced in two levels based on the difference of upgrade’s cost.
  • Graybox / Design Sketch:
• Description of how your pattern(s) relate to the prototype. (Include a link the to pattern)  
  • First of all, our pattern this week is a pattern that aims to help games become more balanced. So for this unbalanced project, we set 2 different levels, one is a level without using our pattern, meanwhile, the other level is the one with our pattern.
  • Specifically, our pattern is about if designers want to keep the character progression curve within a controllable range, then implementing an exponentially growing resource sink could be one of the solutions. Therefore, level one will not implement the exponential growth of the cost of upgrade. And level two will have the growth of the cost.
  • We conduct a comparison between two levels to prove our pattern. Specifically, on the “no pattern” level, players will experience an over-powerful character progression that will lead to a result of easy win to present the unbalanced progression. However, for the “with pattern” level, players will win less easily by experiencing higher cost of upgrade that follows a more reasonable character progression.
  • “No pattern” level can be partially understood as a proof of our pattern through contradiction, which is not strong enough for proving our pattern by itself. Then we introduce level two, the “with pattern” level. Which can be considered as a direct proof of our pattern. Especially when the comparison between two levels starts appearing in level two, the effect of our pattern will be more obvious, which will make the direct proof more clear as well.
  • https://patternlanguageforgamedesign.com/PatternLibraryApp/PatternLibrary/3364
• Analysis describing your individual expectations of the unbalanced mechanic progression.
  • One of our expectations of the unbalanced mechanic progression is players’ attack progression. In the “no pattern” level, each upgrade will only cost 2 mines. Without the growth of resource sink, players are likely to have an excessive amount of resources to spend. Which will result in the situation that players easily become overpowerful through frequent upgrades. 
  • The unbalanced mechanic will most likely make the game really quick, not very engaging, and forgettable. There would be no tension, no real stakes, so the player wouldn’t really get any strong reaction to the concept.
  • Because of the unbalanced mechanic, some players may switch their goal from ”To beat the enemy before I lose the game” to “How many levels can I upgrade before I beat the enemy”.
  • Players will prefer the unbalanced game on the first playthrough because it’s easier to win, but if they play a few times, they will get bored and start to like the balanced game better

• Group thoughts on the results of the in-class playtest. (Was the result what you expected, why or why not?)
  • TBD