Day 13 of Game Design- The Flow of the Card Game and The Premise Poster
We had our character sketches ready.
We had a story ready.
However, we had one thing to tackle at this point. How will the game be played?
Being a choice-based card game, the scope was quite defined.
We had to make a flowchart of the game based on the actions that the players will have the option to choose from.
So, before starting to make a flowchart, we had to research how to make a flowchart. The reason is that if we made two choices for every choice that the players had to make, it would have looked something like the structure represented below:
This would have been chaotic and out of the skillet for us. Then the approach we found through research has been represented below:
This was a great start. We now had an idea for the direction to take for the flow chart but as it is a card game, we needed to have some restrictions for the gameplay.
Then we thought of having two simple resources: Time and funding.
Each choice would use up one of these resources and the game’s objective would be to keep that in mind.
As initially decided, the game’s goal was to reach the $1 billion valuation mark. So, the choices would use up resources and the impact would reflect on two parameters that would increase your valuation: Integrity and popularity. These two parameters can be subject to change but we have kept them for now.
To bring in the individuality of the characters, we added perks for each character. For example Ira, the youngest character has more time but less funding as a resource.
Then we researched and looked at the journey for a startup. We broke down the milestone for startups into a flowchart for the game.
So, the players build their own story with the choices that they make in this game.
The second thing we worked on was a poster. We had a premise but we felt that it lacked the company of the visuals to communicate the feel of the game. So, we looked at many graphical representations of landscape to get an idea of how to represent Bangalore.
This step also gave an idea about how to bring everything under a single design language. With the isometric illustration on the poster, we got an idea about how to represent our cards.
The next step would be to work out the illustration and defining the steps further.