Praetorian 2150: The Battle For Carthas
Project Overview
Praetorian 2150: The Battle for Carthas was a board game that was developed between me and a group of students during our time at Full Sail University. It is a mainly 1 vs 1 competitive board game, with possible 2 vs 2 adjustments if need be, where the player's faction is trying to get more provision points than the other player to win the game. They battle it out with different playable troops who each have their own ability and combat each other over multiple rounds to win victory over their opponent. Each player can build defenses and gather resources throughout the game to better gain an advantage over the other player along with making combat easier for their faction.
Role in Development
Co-Lead Designer of project majority mostly including of
Designing game concept​
Designing character classes
Designing and revising mechanics
Fleshing out character backstories
Wrote and revised Game Design Documentation including
Writing first and final draft of GDD​
Revised final document after team edits/suggestions​
Revising rulebooks syntax​​
Documenting/organizing playtest notes lining with team feedback
Led playtests of game for balancing/flow purposes
Redesigned level layouts after playtests demonstrated claustrophobic map design​
Created game flowcharts to visualize states of play
Post Mortem
The main skill I had developed while designing and working on this project was game balancing and project management. We sought to create a game that started off as too small of a scope but then was scaled to a proper size by the end of the design. By going through this process it taught me how to deal with iteration and designing a game to be balanced while still keeping a flow that allows for fun game functionality. Handling the majority of design documentation further increased my skills of clear and understandable writing along with allowing me to lead the design of the game. This was because I was the first person to be able to see in visual writing the flow of the game and allowed me to feed that information back to my team so we could all work together in fixing any glaring issues in the design.
The biggest issue I believe I personally faced on this project was finding the perfect balance when it came to fun gameplay. It was difficult at first to find a sweet spot that allowed players to have full control of their characters while also not having so much control that it broke the game or led to excessive min-maxing.