Developer's Diary: September Update & Unit Cards

 Update update UPDATE!

Welcome back all you cool individuals that take a moment out of your day to check out what we got cooking over here with Project Hexed! As I have said before, these blog posts come at very sporadic times and with no real schedule to them… As much as I would like to keep you informed on a regular weekly/monthly basis, there isn’t always enough new info to cover.

However, since last we spoke there has been some incredible progress made with this project. We have officially locked in the core mechanics of the game and now that we have our flavor of ice cream figured out, we are testing to see what is the correct mix of toppings that we can add that will make this a delectable treat that you will want to share with your friends and family for dessert every night (I won’t count the calories if you don’t).

Unit Cards

Let's discuss what has changed about unit cards (previously called legacy cards). We were not in love with the old name considering there is an entire genre of board games known as Legacy Games. Which if you’re unfamiliar, is a continuous playing of a single story line, or that one game’s outcome influences the next time you play to a certain degree.

New Unit Card Design

Old Legacy Card Design

        What we intended for these cards would be upgrades that you would give your tribe, affecting unique meeple types specifically and not the rest. This idea allowed for cards to be strung together to create small point gathering machines. They also had a secondary purpose of being secret objectives that could be revealed in the case that you had accomplished the task on it. 

        Having multiple uses allowed for more options in how you play the game. One big problem we had with these cards was the multiple options they provided added a large amount of complexity to the game. This complexity

upped the amount of time players needed to take their turns and ultimately made it so once players filled up their three slots with upgrades, they would often not worry about swapping out cards for different upgrades because there was no real value to it. Some cards were also broken in nature and we found that it was frustrating that there wasn’t a way of getting them off the board. This extra complexity coupled with cards that you didn’t want to swap out meant that we wanted to find a new avenue to achieve our design goals.

Another issue we had with the game's design was the amount of meeples on the board.   Each player had a total of 10 Meeples that could be scattered across the battlefield. And with just 3 players this basically looked like Red, Green and Blue chaos all over the table (image reference below). Hard to see what was happening, but also, ensuring you made all the appropriate moves before your turn was up. This resulted in longer than desired playtimes.  Which then brought the discussion of reducing our meeple count to 3 per person.

So keeping these 2 big flaws in mind, we reinvented the old Legacy Cards into the new and improved Unit Cards. A Unit Card  influences 1 of your 3 Meeples. We currently have roughly 30 unique unit cards that can be used throughout the course of the game (with plans to add more). 4 of these reside in every player’s starting hand, which can be played throughout the game in the case they have no other card to play. You can also purchase more from the marketplace (more on this to come in future blog posts!)

    We will use this Thief Card for an example. This is one of those starting cards that I mentioned. As you can see in the top banner there is the name of the card followed by a distinct shape. This is 1 of the 3 Meeple types in the game, which would entail that this card can only be played on that specified Meeple spot on your player board (more on this to come in future blog posts!).

If that slot is occupied by another Unit card, then you should likely hold off on activating this troop choice unless it may be beneficial for you to do so sooner. There is also something called a Job at the bottom of the card (more on this to come in future blog posts!).

The 3 Stat Types

        Below the abilities (the colored boxes in the middle of the card) are your 3 essential stats: Health, Range and Power.  As I am sure you could assume, Health is the literal health of this unit. When installing this card to your playerboard, you would then adjust the health count of this card to that of the counter that is on the board. When that unit gets into combat and loses, you would total up the damage being dealt to you and remove that number from the health tracker.

        If that unit’s health tracker ever gets to 0, then the card is removed and the meeple is placed back at the spawn location for your team. Although the card shows a unit’s starting health, unit cards are able to gain more health than what their card suggests through the actions of other units in the game. The maximum amount that you can have on a single unit card is 6 health.

    Display of the Health being assigned based on the 
Total health in the Red slot on the Unit Card.

Range applies to several aspects of the Meeple. The main purpose of this stat is to show how far this card may be able to travel in a single move turn. Some cards can travel a good distance around the board while others are very slow in nature.

This design makes players have to create a cohesive strategy between their units to ensure that they get the upper hand on the battlefield. Range also translates to that unit’s casting or influence distance. Some units are capable of dealing damage from afar, while others are able to support their team members as long as they are within that range total.

This has often resulted in games where two units travel close to one another while  a third is doing an alternate objective.

Next we have the Power stat, which is the ability of that unit to draw combat cards after the dice have been rolled in hopes to either get another triangle to aid you in combat abilities, or an extra leg up on the damage total. We have had a few discussions on adding more to this stat like potential reroll abilities, or influences on the battlefield, but have not come to any major conclusions at this state of the game. Look for more changes on this in the future!

Skills

Aside from individual stats, each unit has a unique skill that influences the way you interact with the board. There are 3 types of skills that Unit cards may have: Combat, Passive, and Cast.

Combat Skills (like the thief has) can only be activated during a combat phase. So, you would roll for combat, hoping that a triangle is rolled to activate your combat skill. You would total up the damage of the dice, add combat cards into the mix based on the Power of the card, delegate who won the transaction, then conclude with combat skills being resolved. So if you happened to roll a triangle with the thief, you would get to steal a resource from the opponent’s stockade.

Passive Skills are something that is triggered when a unique scenario happens in the course of a game, typically happening through the course of your turn. This is probably one of the more confusing of the lot, but it’s one to constantly be running through your mind and ensuring that this hasn’t unfolded in front of you without realizing or else you could be missing out on Victory Points. 

Cast Skills may be performed during the cast phase and potentially the combat phase (we are still ironing out the details of this ability…aka we need to do more playtesting). Basically it is a supportive skill in nature that can benefit your tribe more so than the opponents.

In Closing…

So I am sure you have heard some of the feedback we have gotten through the very lengthy past few topics. Again… sorry for this being such a gap between our posts. 

To be honest, the thing that really drives these blog posts is our playtests. 

We have had a bunch of side things come up through our lives and sometimes the schedules shifted enough to where we couldn’t meet. Summertime, parties, events, weddings, so much happens in the summer. It’s almost hard to sit down at a computer when the weather is as beautiful as it has been the past few months.

We have decided that this has gone on too long and set ourselves a goal to playtest this again. At the beginning of July, we said the end of the month… WE WANT TO PLAYTEST! And not only that, it really inspired us to put the nose to the grindstone and develop these new mechanics. So some of our meetings went well over 2 hours, which were mixtures of workshops, feedback and pitching concepts to see what could fit. But this meant that there was a lot of work happening throughout the week so we could ensure we had made the appropriate advances towards the goal.

From the beginning of the month, we saw the mountain’s worth of development that we needed to achieve the place we were comfortable with playtesting at, and we shot for it. It really shocked me that we were about 90% complete within the first two weeks, and the final 10% was mostly last minute cosmetic changes. 

One of the things that has fascinated me, as we slowly approach a year of development of this delightful little project of ours, is how much of a puzzle that this process has been. We are constantly generating new ideas for different ways to design parts of this game and a lot of the time we end up having to shelve those ideas, either because they don’t work where we are trying to put it or they don’t feel like they are adding to the fun of the game. But like a puzzle we sometimes get epiphanies and realize “oh that idea was just in the wrong spot” and we move it into a different spot and it fits perfectly. 

The initial ideas are far behind and have been re-sculpted to almost an entirely different game then the first actual posts. However, so many of these shelved ideas had crept back into the limelight as we discovered their actual homes in the game.

So there you have it, we are getting through the largest parts of the game's design, and hopefully finishing up our last few mechanics to the point where playtesting can start to become more routine. With that, hopefully these blog posts can as well.

If you made it this far, you’re a saint. Taking the time to digest this whole update is truly amazing. If you do have any feedback, questions, or concerns, please send me a DM or comment on here. 

Thanks and keep on truckin’!

Gavin

Ps. be on the lookout for our next blog posts regarding more combat changes, playerboard design, the marketplace, and much much more!