Playtest Pack of Heroes Right Now!

So sorry it has been a while since my last post! Life got a little crazy, then there was a holiday and all sorts of other things... but we are back!

I am pleased to announce that Pack of Heroes is now open for an INTERNATIONAL PRINT 'N" PLAYTEST!

What does this mean? Well basically, it means you can download the prototype of the game, print it out, play it and tell me what you think! This will be a fantastic way for me to get feedback on the game from a wide range of players. And with so many different hero cards interacting, this will go a long way to catching all the combination and balance issues that might be lurking below the surface.

So if you are interested, head on over to the Print 'n' Playtest Page, where everything will be explained.

Oh yes, and as a little incentive, really helpful feedbackers will receive their name in the credits of the finished game. I'll also be sending out free copies to some playtesters who go above and beyond!

Enjoy!

Combat in Games 2: Cards vs Dice

In my previous musings about combat in games, I talked about how uncertainty in combat is a good thing, but so is having control. That is, the outcome of an attack shouldn't be a complete certainty, but at the same time the players should feel like their decisions really affected the outcome.

In designing Pack of Heroes, I naturally thought I would be using dice for combat resolution. Dice are great at bringing uncertainty into a game, but control - not so much. I tried a whole bunch of ways of using dice that mitigated their natural randomness: rolling heaps of dice, being able to affect results after rolling, etc, etc. But I finally came to the conclusion that no matter what I did, a random number generated in an instant would never give me the decision points I wanted to be in Pack of Heroes.

When I finally made my peace with axing the dice, I of course had to come up with some replacement mechanic for managing combat. Enter: cards. Yes cards! You may have heard of them! They are that other classic age-old randomiser in the game designer's toolkit.

Cards. Yes, cards.

Now, since the German design renaissance of the 90s, there have been many games that essentially use cards as a randomiser where perhaps dice may have once been. A classic example is the Spiel des Jahres winning Niagara. If the game had been designed in the 70s, I am pretty sure you would move your boats by rolling a six-sided die. But instead, each player has movement tiles numbered 1-6 in their hand. The player can choose one to play to move their boat that many spaces, but must play each of them before they can take all 6 back into their hand again. So it's kind of like having a perfectly weighted 6-sided die and getting to control which number comes up when. This gives the players plenty of control, but they still need to play the low numbers sometime. Ideas like this one popped into my head, and I started to consider how a set of cards could be used to trigger attacks and blocks in my game.

And so, after plenty of scribbling in notebooks and play-testing... I give you:

THE WALKER-HARDING ACTION DECK SYSTEM (TM). 

Okay, okay, it's not as ground-breaking as the name suggests, but how cool would it be to invent something that one day might be called a SYSTEM by someone!?

Here's the basic idea. Each player has a deck of nine cards called energy cards. Each card is one of three colours, and there are three cards of each icon. Each power that your heroes can do requires spending one or more of your energy cards of a specific type. For example, punching with one hero might cost 1 red energy, while defending with another might cost 1 blue. On your turn you can either spend energy to use a power, or draw more energy into your hand.

This is a really simple way of triggering actions in combat, but I found it brings a whole lot to the game. Most importantly, your combat abilities are always constant and known. You can choose when and how to attack. However, the timing of when you can pull them off is kind of uncertain to you, and a little more uncertain to your opponent.

There is lots more to say about this design choice, but I better stop for now. In my next post, I'll talk through a few rounds of combat and show exactly how these energy cards work!

Hero Preview 4 - The Serpent Sisters

Name: The Serpent Sisters Team: Freakshow Five Rank: Sidekick Catchphrase: "You're hissstory!" Love interest: Monsieur Mongoose Origin:  Legends of a serpentine set of siamese twins can be traced back centuries in the folk tales of Eastern Europe. But the world was shocked when in 1937, The Serpent Sisters were first photographed as performers in an obscure Romanian circus. Shunning their newfound fame, the sisters disappeared into the world of vigilante crime fighting. Seemingly ageless, The Serpent Sisters are sure to appear wherever the cry of an orphan, widow or sideshow freak is heard!   Health: 4 ..  Movement: 2 Arrival power:  Serpent Stare: Stun opposite hero. Force attack power: Sword Slash: The opposite hero loses 1 health.

Special power: Split Personality: After attacking with The Serpent Sisters, you may move and/or attack with them again. The Serpent Sisters are essentially two heroes in one, so it only makes sense that they can take two actions! After attacking with them, you can move and/or attack with them again on the same turn. Of course, you do need to have enough energy in hand to do this, but if planned carefully you can pull of a clever combo and inflict damage usually reserved for higher ranked heroes. The Serpent Sisters movement of 2, and stun arrival power make them all the more ussseful!

Hero Preview 3 - Disco Droid

Name: Disco Droid Team: Data Brigade Rank: Sidekick Catchphrase: "That's the way I like it!" Arch enemies: Superfreak, Punk-a-tron Vehicle: The Stardust Disco Van Origin:  Designed in the late seventies as the latest in home robotic dance instructors, Disco Droid never made it to market and was left to rust in a warehouse. Decades later he was discovered by ex disco producer and robotic engineer, Stanley Stardust. After a full internal overhaul, Disco Droid hit the streets. His mission: to clean up the city by winning wayward youth over to the disco beat!  Health: 4 ..  Movement: 1 Arrival power:  Amazing Dance Moves: Stun any hero. Special power: Don't Stop the Beat!: Opposite hero loses 1 health every turn.

Disco Droid, like many of his teammates in Data Brigade, has a power that automatically triggers every turn. This means you don't have to spend energy to make his power work, which is super handy. In a mad flurry of dance moves, Disco Droid attacks the opposite hero for 1 damage every turn. This means you can set him off, and he'll just keep attacking! Even better, when he arrives in play, his disco dancing is so awesome it mesmerises 1 hero, stunning him for a turn. Don't let anyone tell you that Disco sucks!

Hero Preview 2 - General Rhinoceros

Name: General Rhinoceros Team: Safari Squad Rank: Leader Catchphrase: "Chaaaarrge!" Headquarters: Rhino Resort, Ivory Coast Love interest: Wonder Hippo Origin: Years ago he was Rob LaRocca, the leader of a fierce anti-poaching squad in central Africa. One fateful day, a mission to defend a rhino went horribly wrong and Rob’s legs were severed. His friends knew the only way to save him was to perform an incredible operation. Rob awoke with the legs of the animal he almost died to defend, and a renewed  passion for animal protection. General Rhinoceros - half rhino, all man!  Health: 6 ..  Movement: 1 Arrival power:  None. Attack power: Stampede!: Opposite hero loses 3 health.

General Rhinoceros has no arrival power, which means that that when you bring him into play, your turn is basically wasted. However, he makes up for this by having one of the most powerful attacks of any hero! Not only does "Stampede!" do 3 damage, but it is triggered by a single energy card. This means that it can be pulled off pretty often. All this means that any opponent better have a plan in mind when facing a team led by General Rhinoceros!

Hero Preview 1 - Zombie Lad

Name: Zombie Lad Team: Guild of Ghouls Rank: Sidekick Catchphrase: "Brains..." Arch enemy: The Brain First appearance: Brains #1, 1957 Origin: Growing up, Brian knew he was different. But it wasn’t until his sixteenth birthday that Ma and Pa Brent told him he was actually... dead. The detachable limbs and appetite for offal suddenly made sense! With a renewed sense of confidence, Brian became Zombie Lad, and devoted his life to fighting for the rights of dead people everywhere! Health: 4 ..  Movement: 1 Arrival power:  Sudden Strangle: Stun opposite hero. Attack power: Bite 'n' Chew: Opposite hero loses 1 health. Special power: Graveyard Grapple: Stun opposite hero after attack.

Zombie Lad doesn't have much health or a very strong attack, but if used carefully he can take any hero down! Just like in the movies, this zombie is most dangerous when using the element of surprise. When he arrives, Zombie Lad strangles the opposite hero, automatically stunning him for a turn. Then, after every successful attack, the opponent is also stunned. As long as Zombie lad is grappling his enemy like this, he can keep chewing away until he finally gets what he's after... brains! 

Combat in Games 1: Chance and Control

Ah, combat in games - quite the chestnut! If you decide to make a game where one piece can remove another piece, you are entering an age-old discussion of how to model combat in games. To simplify it right down, here's the way I see the two extremes of how it is usually done:

Controlled combat: If I move my rook on to your pawn's space, I defeat it. This is always the case, and both players know it. This leads to very analytical, often abstracted games.

Chancy combat: If I attack your warrior with my wizard, I roll a handful of dice. The resulting numbers determine how successful I am. No one knows quite what will happen. This leads to more surprising, visceral games.

I have often heard game designers and reviewers say of chancy combat that it is more realistic because combat in real life is never a sure thing. No one knows for sure who will win a fight or a war, there are always random elements. I agree with this, but I still find that chancy combat in board games often leaves me cold. I think the reason is, that while I am more than happy to accept uncertainty in fighting, I still want a strong feeling of control. Let me explain: If you were to watch a fencing match as a spectator, and the unknown underdog wins, this may seem somewhat random to you - it was unexpected. But to the underdog himself, who trained hard, focused well and made clever decisions all through the match, it would feel anything but random! And as game players, I think we should feel more like the fencer than the spectator. Dice rolling can often smooth over decision points and reduce the success of combat into one random moment.

Now having said all this, when I first started designing Pack of Heroes - I whacked dice into the design without even thinking! Superheroes fighting and dice seemed like the obvious match! I tried quite a few mechanics for using dice in combat. The one that stuck around for the longest was putting a simple combat results table on each card to show how a die result would effect the power in question. For example, here's an old prototype card for Bazooka Boy:

Ain't he cute!
(Art by the amazing Chris Morphew)

The idea of this card is that Bazooka Blast is a very chancy attack to use. On a roll of 1-5 it does nothing at all. But on a roll of 6, it does 4 damage! (Which in the scheme of the game was very powerful).

This simple system allowed me to get some interesting twists into the game's combat, but of course it also has a big flaw. Every use of a power becomes its own random moment. Every time you try and fire your bazooka, it has a 5 in 6 chance of doing nothing. You could even try and shoot it 20 times and just be really unlucky! The combat in the game came down to dozens of these random moments, and there was nothing connecting these moments to each other across the game. Surely a bazooka which hasn't triggered 4 or 5 times in a row will know its just got to work soon!

It was my frustration with all this that eventually stalled the design. I pretty much put the game in a drawer for two years! The game just wasn't that satisfying for me to play multiple times. Plus, I figured there are so many good games with dice combat out there, why make another one? Well, the thing that got the Pack of Heroes prototype back on the table was coming up with a new diceless mechanic for combat. It brought a good balance of both control and chance back into the game's combat. So in a future post I will talk through this mechanic, and explain how combat works in Pack of Heroes, so stay tuned!

The Art of Pack of Heroes

Pack of Heroes was always going to need some pretty cool art. There are heaps of different characters in the game, and each one needs to evoke the feeling of a classic comic book hero. Plus, there's a whole history of comic art to be reference and be inspired by!

I knew an artist for this project would be expensive. Character design is something that takes a lot of time for an illustrator, and I knew I would need at least 30 unique characters! Looking at some preliminary quotes from some local illustrators confirmed my suspicions. The artwork costs were getting close to making this humble little self-published card game unmakable!

Enter, John D-C! A local artist who owns a cool art shop / gallery space in my suburb, Sweets Workshop. Not only is he a cool guy and great illustrator, he loves comics! And the icing on the cake - he was so taken with the sound of the project that he offered to work for a percentage! Woo! No upfront costs, yeah!

So here are John's qualifications:
1. He's a great illustrator and graphic artist.
2. He loves and collects classic comics.
3. He has a customised hulk van. Yes, A CUSTOMISED HULK VAN!!

You can check out John's most recent exhibition on his blog here.

John and I have sparked quite the collaboration, and things are progressing really well. He is excellent at taking my character ideas and making them 50% more fun, unique or just plain crazy. Plus, he has come up with plenty of character ideas on his own, which often puts new ideas into my head for powers and character interactions.

And to finish this post, I thought I'd share one of my favourite early sketches from John's notebooks... Ladies and gentlemen, I give you GENERAL RHINOCEROS!

General Rhinoceros - half rhino... all man.

The Prehistory of Pack of Heroes!

Hello and welcome to Pack of Heroes! I thought this would be a fun place to chronicle the development of the game, and introduce its characters to everyone. But lets start the story by going way back in time...

I suppose the earliest version of Pack of Heroes goes way back to when I was 12 or so. My brother, cousin and I often designed silly little board and card games, and one (which we had multiple versions of over the years) was simply known as 'the fighting game'! It was more or less our own version of Top Trumps, but each card was a character, and in each round, everyone played a character from their hand, and all of them fought! The fun thing about this game was we could always add new cards whenever we liked (almost like a primitive collectible card game!) So, if we thought of an idea for a fun character, we'd draw him or her on a piece of paper, come up with his stats and add him to the game. Sometimes the characters were superheroes, sometimes they were fantasy characters or creatures, and sometimes they were just plain weird. I remember a bizarre Kool-Aid Man type guy, known only as "Juggy"!

Kool-Aid Man, the godfather of Pack of Heroes. Why is he holding a jug of himself!?

So when I got into 'serious' game design around 2007, my mind wandered back to this old game. I still really liked the idea of each card in a game being a character, with his own personality, stats and fighting style. I thought tying the theme down to the superhero genre would be best, as there is so much creative space to work with given the history of comic books, as well as plenty of room to keep things fun (and even funny).

The earliest notes I have are very basic, and I don't think I even got an actual prototype up and running until 2008 or 2009. Needless to say, this game has been my 'on the back-burner' design - something constantly bubbling away in the background as I designed other things. It never quite took off and became ready to focus on, but it also never went away.

But this year, the idea re-emerged! A whole new approach to the fighting mechanic finally brought the game to a level where I thought it was ready for serious development. There'll be more stories about how this game came to be later on, but I thought I had to start with a nod to 'the fighting game' that started it all!