Agilicious - Part 4

With each week that has gone by, I found myself consistently picking mechanics tasks. I'm a firmware tester 40 hours a week, and go to school for programming, so it makes sense that mechanics are what interest me the most! My introduction to the board game involved designing buff cards. These are cards that provide your character a type of beneficial effect. In video games, you might get this type of effect from eating food, or drinking a potion. In card games, you can activate a card that will boost the health or attack power of a creature on the field.

I've played my share of video games - I began playing since I was a year old, back in 1987 on an  Atari. My dad had a picture of me sitting in his lap, holding my hands onto a controller as he pressed the buttons. I started playing cards games when Pokémon came out, moving on to Yu-Gi-Oh and Magic The Gathering. I dabbled a bit in Dungeons and Dragons as well. I'm pretty familiar with what players expect out of effects in a game, so I felt that I was well equipped to begin developing them.

My first iteration of the buff cards suffered from the same issue in my second blog post in this series. Since all of the details were far too fuzzy, I had no idea how I should design the buffs. At some point during the half-sprint, one of the other team members came up with a dice mechanic. I ran with that idea, and created a handful of buffs that we would be able to test - generic stat modifiers that seemed they could adapt to how the game would change.

Featured Picture: A sample of the initial buffs I created