Post 6

 Rule Sheet Version 2

    We have made significant progress since our first version of our game. I'm quite happy to present some of our newest changes and "artwork" for the game as it is becoming more and more concrete.

We made two major balancing and gameplay changes that we hope would increase both the pace and enjoyability of the game. Firstly, we changed the times the player can attack to twice, instead of one. This is because we wanted the games to go quicker, and because our maps are larger then traditional Battleship. Next, we made it so ships that had been hit were no longer capable of moving. This was primarily done as moving damaged ships was a marking nightmare, but the change ended up sounding not only realistic, but really spurred on the gameplay

 

    Above is an example of how my board looked like after playing for around 20 minutes. Note that this was done before we increased the attacking limit. We copy and pasted red hexagons to mark areas where we had been hit. The green hexagons being islands/rocks that we would need to go around, this would be mirrored on the enemies board as well. This game was also played entirely digitally.

The reason we made the game playable completely online was because we believed it would greatly aid in the playability for our actual target audience, which is of course our classmates. Whom many of which, respectfully, are too lazy to print out a board game and its associating pieces. This is the primary reason why I believed my last game was so weirdly and ridiculously successful on all the forum posts. Of course, going along with the assignments requirements, it can also be printed out and played as a more traditional physical board game.

We each used two boards swell, with the 2nd one being used to mark where we had attacked (blue markers being locations where we fired shots, and green being the mirrored land masses:

    The biggest progress we made was with our randomized events. These would be chosen every 5 turns by both players. A 20-sided dice would be rolled, as there are 20 events, the player picking the one that corresponds with the number their dice landed on. These range from simple abilities such as more attacks, to healing ships, or completely ending the game if the requirements are met.

    The game is still in the earlier stages of development though, and we are still exploring ways to further improve gameplay. We are considering adding "difficulties", which really translates to "how fast do you want the game to last". The only changes would be increase/decreasing the time for pulling the randomized events. A game that has increased events would be considerably more chaotic, which could be more attractive to some players. While a game that has them significantly more spaced out, might attract players who enjoy longer games.

Another big topic were considering is the art of the board. Since the game itself in theory is quite simple, we can do very dramatic and complex art on our game with out taking away or distracting from the gameplay itself. This idea became apparent to use when we finished and shared the results of our first game. In which it was quickly noted how I used very vibrant neon colors to create my board, while my partner used a more monotone color scheme, as seen below.

This is also what gave us the idea of making prebuilt maps, instead of just giving players the freedom to make their own. This would significantly decrease the setup time of the game for those who would want to  take this path.