Climatic Crisis
Following the GDD guidelines, a small team and I designed and created the interactive board game Climactic Crisis on Board Game Simulator on Steam to raise awareness about global warming and the impact of companies on the environment. The game was featured in the 2022 FCAT Undergraduate Conference.
Personal Responsibilities:
User Research, Game Designer, Balance
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Tools:
Board Game Simulator
Game Design
My role and focus on the team was to design the game core mechanics as well as game balancing through playtesting. Game balance is an important aspect of game design that ensures the harmonization of different game mechanics that can impact the user's experience.
The game was designed and balanced around an economy that centered around two main mechanics, the income buy and sell phase, and the player event cards and boss cards. My job was to ensure that the income, buy and sell values were proportional to the event and boss cards that could either give, or take away money. I first had to create cards with imaginary values of x or y because the numbers would be changed for balancing purposes.
As the game balancer, I worked to balance these cards. For example, instead of Gain 500 or everyone gains 100, it would be Gain x or everyone gains y. After playtesting, the values of x and y would be adjusted and finalized to balance the game's economy. The end results of these balancing playtests are seen here.
Player Testing
The team and I went through five official playtests as well as many undocumented internal playtests. One key problem that arose during playtest was the overall balance of the game’s economy that heavily disrupted the flow of the game. Playtests were done both virtually online as well as in person.
Example Playtesting Notes
To solve these issues, I ran through extra playtests as well as taking in and analyzing player feedback through a Google Forms survey. Using this, I found two specific problems in the game balance, one being that players did not have much choice and decision, and two being that players would either have trouble gaining money or having too much. To combat this, I recreated the red and green token system in to help with decision making and balance of economy, as well as adjusting the x and y values of cards. In the GDD (Game Design Document), I also highlighted some early balance issues and how I decided to solve the issues through game balance.
