Astrowatch
A Tabletop Card rogue-lite game that was originally created for an Advanced Game Mechanics course.
Take Aways
The majority of the time spent on this project was fine-tuning the mechanics and numbers. Since this project was done physically for a card game, it was easy to quickly iterate over and over again until we found something that worked.
Iterating quickly and focusing on what things functionally worked was the most important aspect of the project.
Astrowatch was a game that was created for a group assignment for the course Advanced Game Mechanics.
Through this game we were tasked to create modular systems in the form of a card game. My role in the group was to create the rule book layout, and finalize the numbers and statistics within the game.
The art and look of Astrowatch was created with the use of Adove Illustrator, the project took a month to complete.
Process Work
Initial Ideas
In order to satisfy the assignment requirements, the initial thoughts we had were what makes a good card game, and how to make it long. We eventually thought out that the game needed to have certain aspects.
Resource Gathering, forcing players to spend time within the game in order to beat it.
Modularity, allows for multiples of several cards, allowing for complex gameplay from a handful of card types.
From those few ideas, we decided on our theming to be space, and started focusing on our game loops and general look of the cards.
The goals of the assignment were to create a card game and use a spreadsheet to control data
This all had to fall within a 30 minute game time limit
Rough Prototyping
We immediately got to work and began prototyping by creating several paper versions of our established cards.
We began with 4 types of cards.
Pilots - that would grant bonus starting resources
Ships - that would have stats
Planets - that had rewards and skill cheques
Blackmarket (Action Cards) - Provides bonuses or hindrances to the player.
We quickly realized that we had too many card types and stats to balance, and cut several of them out. Through our prototyping, we ended up with 2 Main card types and streamlined our stats and mechanics.
First pass through for mechanics and general gameplay
Concise Idea
Once we had our concise idea we worked away to create and complete the artwork and finalizing the rules and numbers for our game.
We spent several weeks narrowing down our final idea in order to get a clear and understandable game loop.
Original mock-ups for the rule book