Capstone Project - Mechanic Building

 My Notes -

Looking at my benchmark research I was inspired by the 7 round gameplay look of Rococo, with there being a deadline on the 7th day. Using this as a reference, I jotted down some ideas of how I might implement this into my own game.

Using some ideas, the way my game would hypothetically play would be:

- There are 7 days in a week, with a client arriving on the 7th day.

- clients have priorities, which are stats they favour the best, get the most points in those slots will award you a higher rating.

-The player with the highest score wins.

- The client identity and priorities are hidden until the 7th day, Hotel Bunga relies on both time management and an element of luck.

- In the 6 rounds leading up to the deadline, Players must gather resources and craft furniture pieces to raise their cave's stats in certain areas. To do this, Players may use either their energy or their money tokens that are distributed at the beginning of the game.

- All players have a fixed number of tokens, there are several things you can buy with them:

   - Employees, Some will focus only on hunting, some only on gathering, some on crafting, and some can do all.

   - Pre-made furniture

   - Action cards

   - Advertising

- All of these options come at varying prices [I will have to work out the exact values during a mock up playtest] with more "powerful" options costing much more, these would include furniture and advertising.

[I still need to explore mechanics for hunting and gathering, I will look at some other benchmark games to see how they approach resource gathering to see if i can implement something similar. I do definitely want this to revolve around prehistoric flora and fauna though]

The actual setup of the board would be split into 4 quadrants, each with their own biome and unique cave. My reasoning for choosing a board over cards is there is certainly going to have to be a token mechanic within this game, Looking at other resource management games on the market such as Rococo, Superstore management and Takenoko, all of these games utilize tokens to visually represent the amount of resources players have. Having a board gives more room for tokens to be displayed in a logical and non-visually crowded manner. This will of course increase the budget for the game, So again this is something I will need to consider when adding up the hypothetical costs for the game.

Each quadrant contains several subcategories-

- Art of the cave [of course, i really want to make each cave look visually unique and appealing]

- Cave attribute scores [and space to mark down scores with tokens]

- Energy and money token pools

- Space for the client card to sit.

Underneath the board you would line up your employee, resource cards, and furniture cards, as well as any action cards you have purchased on your round.

Action cards would be placed face down, hidden from the rest of the table, a player may have a maximum of  3 action cards at any one time.

[I will illustrate the hypothetical board layout in the following section, all of this is likely to change as i playtest and tweak the game accordingly, but so far I am really liking the mechanics i have. I don't think it's too difficult to understand at this stage, But i would like to throw in some extra mechanics to make it a bit more engaging, I'm not sure what that is at this stage, but i will think on it more as i go.]

What is advertising?

Advertising space can be bought through coins only, It will take up 1 day to enact but awards the player knowledge of one of their client's hidden priorities.

Client priorities are revealed by the player sat adjacent to the player who bought advertising space, they should read out what one of the priorities are before returning the card face down to it's allocated space.

Truthfulness is key here, obviously there will be people who will bluff what the answer is and i might have to look into a way to penalize that. But even though this game is somewhat competitive, I think it shouldn't be based around trying to 100% sabotage other people. [there are ways to ethically sabotage people which will be mentioned in the following section, but lying isn't technically allowed in the rules. Or it might be? as i say, I'm not 100% certain on anything at this stage].

What are action cards?

Action cards can also be bought with money and have 12 mixed results. Some cards are immediately beneficial to you such as the "Me take" card, which allows you to steal one resource from the player next to you, alternatively there are some cards that might also be a detriment to you, such as the "Sun Vanish" Card which will cause a solar eclipse, making everyone think they have lost a day. 

I really want to make all of the writing in this game look and sound like it was written by a caveman, i think that would be really funny. Thinking about the amount of cards I will have to illustrate, Some of these will be repeated to save on time, for example there are only 3 unique positive cards.

Digital Demonstration -

To better demonstrate my idea, I will put together a short video explaining how the game may play at this stage.

Trello -

I will definitely return to this in the future after I have done some playtesting to see which areas need developing, in the meantime i want to circle back to doing some research on benchmarks and industry research to how other people create games to see if i can employ some techniques to improve my own work.