Foom – Devlog #3
Too Many Resources
The most obvious issue out of the most recent playtest is that 6 types of resources is far too many to keep track of. For each card the player wants to buy they have to calculate the differences of three different numbers. Then they add the results of each of those sums to their bitcoin number. If the card is Space or Medical and they have some of those resources they add whatever is left to the appropriate type. If the result of all that is negative the player can’t afford a card.
It’s just about possible to do all of that in your head, but it is error prone. It’s also quite a lot of work to do every time and wasn’t very fun. The resource tracks from V2 helped but weren’t nearly enough.
The first order of business was to reduce that load. That involved a few changes:
- The Medical and Space resource types are gone. They were there as an attempt to encourage specialization in certain kinds of cards, but I’m going to try to handle that a different way.
- When a bitcoin is acquired it becomes a type of resource of the player’s choice, but that choice is permanent.
- There are no longer any resource conversion trades possible between the remaining three resource types.
Awkward Game Endings
Another significant issue was with the leveling up process in the game. The way it worked in V2 was that players bought the next level from one of four level stacks. The level stacks were themed and had a high cost and a large reward. The final card in each stack was “you win”, so whoever hit level 4 first won the game.
The only thing I didn’t like about this system was pretty much everything. Having four extra stacks of cards was strange when everything else in the game was in the main deck. The stacks themselves were themed poorly and two of them ended up being pretty broken. Only having three steps to victory also seemed to take away from the drama of the end of the game a bit. And it was tough to tell if a player could even buy a victory on their next turn because of the difficulty determining if anybody could buy anything that I mentioned above.
The fix here is to replace the level up cards with “Advance” cards that represent permanent upgrades to a player’s capabilities. These are in the main deck and are dealt with just like all the other cards. The other change that will hopefully help these issues is that now the rule is that a player wins when they are the first to hit 10 resources in two types. There is more work to do here, but I think these will be a step in the right direction.
Events
The approach to event cards I added in V2 worked well. It was a little awkward to have events come out in the initial draws and the events themselves need work, but I like the direction things are headed.
Attacks
Between V1 and V2 all of the Attack cards were removed from the deck. These are added back in V3 with a twist: Attack cards now cause a permanent resource cost to the player doing the attacking (and probably to the player being attacked.) I think these will need a bunch of tuning, but I think they’ll also work better than the “steal a card” attacks of earlier versions of the game.
Here is the latest version of the game if you want to see all the changes. Now I just have to rope some people into playtesting.