Fallen Fortress The Board Game 

We played different board games to get an idea of how we wanted our board game to work some of the games we played were discover Ireland, the game of life and monopoly. Discover Ireland was a big influence on our board game we enjoyed how they had a mix of strategy and randomness and also the ability to change the map, so the game is different each time and the pacing of the game and how the game pieces moved an around the map is something we took inspiration from. We didn’t enjoy the game of life, we found it very complicated and didn’t play it for long and wasn’t very useful for research purposes. Monopoly gave us some good inspiration and it's where we got the inspiration for our chance cards. We also like how players have the choice to team up with the winning player to increase their chances of winning by sabotaging them.

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The first design for our board game was drawn onto a piece of cardboard with a marker and we used random objects such as the tops of pens and small Lego pieces to represent our players and small scraps of paper as additional game pieces. We did this to get a feel for how the game would play and allow us to change a thing before coming up with a more refined board on illustrator. After playing on the first board ourselves I took the cardboard map home and designed the first digital copy of our board game.

 

The first version of our board game is laid out on a 50 by 25 square grid. This board was designed to allow us to test and experiment with our game rules and the layout of the board before we start to design a more artistic board. I got this board printed out so we could playtest the board ourselves and get our first round of user testing. User testing was the most important part of the process when designing the board as getting feedback from people playing the game was able to get new ideas and change things that weren’t working well.

   

The feedback we received was very positive and the players overall enjoyed playing the game. They suggested new game rules and sound shared their own ideas for different features we could add. One of the biggest changes the user testers wanted to see was more chance cards as they really enjoyed them, they also found the rules difficult to understand and didn’t get how the river was supposed to work so for this round of user testing they played with the river mechanic in the game.

  

We received very positive feedback from our second-round user testing session, the players were able to understand and play the game rules much more easily and they liked the layout of the board and pacing of the game. One player suggested we add a combat tile that if a player landed on the said tile, they would have to pick up a card with a number on it from 1-12 and they would have to roll that number on the dice to move off the tile we liked this idea and decided to implement it into our game. We also made this the mythical creature tile red as allowing players to place them anywhere was too chaotic.

 

We decided that we want the tiles that the player uses to move around the map should be steppingstones and we could use stones with symbols carved into them to identify our chance / special encounter tiles. I came up with 5 different tiles that he used in a random pattern that gave us the look we wanted.

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These tiles were sized to be a bit smaller than the bases of our characters but big enough for the characters not to be standing on multiple tiles.

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The next step was to copy the layout of our grid map and recreate it using the new tiles. To do this I printed out a copy of the grid map and numbered each tile and counted to make us they were equal. One problem I encountered was the board we designed was a different shape than the board we physically had so the map had to be shortened to fit so some tiles were removed to achieve this, If I had to remove a tile from one path, he would remove one tile from all the other paths to ensure the game was still balanced the way it was before.

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After most of the assets were finished and the layout was done, I brought the layout of the tiles into Photoshop and created a background for the board. I experimented with different brushes to create different textures for each location.