Character Creation
To continue the conversation from the most recent development blog, here’s a break down of the 4 original characters. Nok Nok will be a seperate post. From the outset we wanted each playable character to have a certain feel when playing this game. After the initial playtest we realised while we might have been in the same ballpark, we weren’t really playing the same game. None of them had any synergy, their unique abilities were a combination of circumstantially passive at best, too complicated at worst and in the case of Greg Piss, made it unwinnable. We went back to the drawing board to work out the concept of the character first before working out their abilities, movement and stats.
The framework we had to work with was health, their ability to hit, the damage they do, how skillful they are, their defence, a unique active or passive ability and how they moved around the board. It helped that we were changing rules, adding some and taking others away, as that happened it caused a cascading effect when working out the feel of each character.
Leo Shadow was probably the easiest and went through the least amount of changes. In the podcast he’s a halfling, former assassin, in over his head and a bit sneaky. For him we wanted it to feel like you were slinking through the city, trying to avoid being hit but can dish out a lot of damage if you plan for it. His sidestep lets him move around while avoiding damage, having him pick up an item as a free action helps in the early game by either gearing up to attack or helping with quests. The hit and run movement combined with his backstab is great at targeting an npc, but you have to set it up. He also has the lowest amount of health, he’s just a little guy afterall! But this also gave an air of fragility and needing to act with caution.
Periwinkle O’Rourke is an interesting case as we implemented a game mechanic that ended up on the cutting room floor late in development. Needless to say we had to redesign him twice. This also happened with Clara Norman, but not to the same degree. For Peri we wanted him to be a wrecking ball. An unstoppable machine, with a lot of momentum, rampaging his way through the city leaving a good amount of destruction in his wake. We wanted him to be a one man army, big and beefy with a good amount of health. For his moment we wanted him to burst onto the scene and this worked great for when we had walls. In brief, these walls were put between locations by the players at the start of the game and you couldn’t pass through them. Every player got two (Peri got three) and they were a way to make the city harder to navigate by putting in an obstacle. We’ll get to why we got rid of them in a future post, but just know they were a fairly important game mechanic. With that all said, most of Peri’s moves included a way to overcome those walls. Like a wrecking ball smashing through a brick wall while holding a sword. Or Kool Aid Man breaking through a brick wall (while also holding a sword). When we got rid of the walls, it was a dark day for Peri but we still wanted him to feel like that unstoppable juggernaut and had to tweak a lot of his moveset.
Greg Piss was an initial challenge, but like Leo, he didn’t go through many changes throughout the development. Piss was built around being a people person and his playstyle revolves around the concept of ‘if we can pick up items, why not NPCs? If we do that we can have more quests involving them and that gives more interaction with the board’. We implemented that rule, made all NPCs large for gameplay mechanics and gave Piss the ability to treat them all as small while limiting his backpack capacity. We wanted Piss to be a bit sleezy, a silver tongued devil, able to convince anyone to come along for one of his harebrained schemes. We wanted him to be quick around the board and to give him multiple options to change his strategy at the drop of a hat. To counterbalance that we made him a bit garbage at combat, but with the right tools he can do alright. Or at least stop you from winning.
Clara Norman was another character that was built around a mechanic that no longer exists. She was also the first playable character we worked on that wasn’t a main character in the podcast. For Clara we wanted a slow, methodical healer who was armoured up and walking down battle ravaged streets. We had a game mechanic of saving throws (which we changed to defence) where in combat you got to roll a dice to see if you would avoid taking damage. Most players would only succeed on a six, we lowered that for Clara. We didn’t give her a dash move as we wanted to have the feeling of marching through streets. She could take damage, dish out damage, mitigate it and heal. Her skill check was average and we often would default to her as being a good character to use first as she didn’t have anything special but she was a good allrounder. This unfortunately made her a bit boring and would often see her dead last in every game. When we got rid of defence we went back to the drawing board and played around with her concept of being a Priestess. That led to the idea of people following her as her congregation and the game mechanic of her being able to pick up an NPC as a free action once a day. That one simple change made her a viable option able to keep up with the other characters and when we added that, it felt like a missing piece to the puzzle as it all clicked into place.
When designing a game with many different moving pieces, when changing one aspect has such a cascading effect, it was a really good habit to get into to keep going back to the core concept of how does this feel and does this make narrative sense? Having a narrative we could draw from and archetypes to go back to really helped when designing each of these characters and matching that with maintaining a fun game design really helped flesh out the rest of the game. Once we worked that out, it bleed into what we could do with the locations, the items and the NPCs. What’s the story we’re telling? Can we do that with a game mechanic? Is this fun? Words to live by.