Global Game Jam 2019 Day 2

Hidden Objectives

Day 2 of Game Jam begins and the team and me start to work on the game mechanics once again. Something that I suggested for the game were hidden objectives and it was inspired by Ticket to ride's destination tickets and Reef's cards.

From left to right: Destination tickers from Ticket to ride, cards from Reef

In ticket to ride these tickets score at the end of the game if the player's train routes have connected the destinations shown on the cards and in Reef players can score points if their reef has the combination of corals as shown on the card. Our game's hidden objective borrows from both of these games in which it players can get these hidden objectives during the game and it scores at the end of the game if the board has the combination of ships shown on the cards like:

Hidden objective cards from left to right: easy 5 points, medium 10 points, hard 15 points

So as long as the boards has the combinations of ships shown on the card player would score the amount of points shown on the card which can range from 5 points for easy patterns, 10 points for harder ones and 15 points for the hardest patterns. We are still going through multiple playtest sessions by testing with the game jammers in the event site and we have been balancing the points and removed some of the objectives that are too hard and add in more varieties of patterns.

More Gameplay Changes

After a few sessions we also figured out that the game needed more depth so we changed how turns work and how drawing ship parts work too. We added a new dock mechanic where ships that player has built would be placed infront of them in their dock which can hold up to 3 ships. Each empty dock space is how many cards they can draw so it incentivizes players to not horde ships as that was one of the playstyles that is constantly happening during playtests and it stops players from wanting to launch any of their ships at all. Then we also changed the turn order as previously players could only draw cards then choose to built a ship or launch a ship then end their turn. Now players draw ship parts depending on their dock then clean up their hands which means removing any cards from their hands down to 7 cards. After that they can choose to launch a spaceship from their dock then choose to buy a ship or not then end their turn.

After all these gameplay changes we also changed certain ship abilities like making the Magnetron ship pulling effect to choosing any card that is aligned with it and moving it anywhere. This makes it more usable and creates more incentive to use it to achieve certain combos with other spaceships or setup their hidden objectives. After a few more test sessions we printed the mockups done by our Artist Jan Wong and test them with new batch of playtesters which gaved us alot of valuable feedback. After all these sessions we stopped for the day and prepared for the next day of work and testing.