After sharing the first version of our game, Professor King and course mates gave us plenty of feedbacks which is really helpful. And this week I had my first playtest with my partner.

Furthermore, I’ve read some of papers relating to game balancing and deck building.

To start with, changes on the rules. It seems that all course mate doesn’t really like the Rock Paper Scissors (RPS) game within. We may need an alternative plan to ensure randomness. And method of drawing cards is also a key adjustment to our rule.

In replacement of the RPS game, we choose a really easy one. And luckily it’s totally accessible and random. It will be played with back side of the cards which is same for all. Back side is divided evenly into two different parts. If players shows with the same end, this game is successful as below.

In the way of drawing cards, Prof. King suggested to use “pick one and swap the hand” in gameplay, while I thought it may be fun just draw randomly. It need more playtest to figure out.

During our playtest, some occasions raised my concern. First of all is that it might need clearer rules in step 4 Cast each skill card’s function with sequence: Control>Defense>Attack. When 2-4 cards interact with each other and the board suddenly turned into a mess for beginners. As a designer, it should not be this confusing. So in later version I will clarify exact sequence of implementing card’s function.

Also, in drawing cards, I once draw so many control card that makes me really passive in playing. It feel bad when you can only deal with opponent’s attack and cannot fight back. Firstly I wish to buff the control card in situation like this (Mist card: IF PLAYER HAVE NO ATTACK CARD IN HAND, Judge only once). But when we tried the “pick one and switch hands” way, it soon became fun to play because both of us can feel that we’re stealing the limited resource. And this is way more strategic considering the hero ability.

In all, this method gives players a way of building their deck. Deckbuilding is a challenge that involves a big and rugged search space, with different and unpredictable behaviour after simple card changes and even hidden information [1]. In Hearthstone, the player will choose 30 cards out of more than 600 cards, and in Mahlmann, Togelius & Yannakakis’s research of the game Dominion, they chose 10 cards out of 25 to balance the game [2]. 18 cards game may not be that complicated, but also need game balancing considering building decks. For example, there’s a Ragnorok card in our game which is only one in pile and seemly stronger than other attack cards, will it be the winning hand? Need more playtesting on this.

[1]García-Sánchez, P., Tonda, A., Squillero, G., Mora, A., & Merelo, J. J. (2016, September). Evolutionary deckbuilding in hearthstone. In 2016 IEEE Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG) (pp. 1-8). IEEE.

[2]Mahlmann, T., Togelius, J., & Yannakakis, G. N. (2012, June). Evolving card sets towards balancing dominion. In 2012 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (pp. 1-8). IEEE.