Prototype, iterate, prototype, iterate.

Hi everyone!

I'm here to talk about the process of working on my game Deadly Harvest, and how creating a design, prototyping and iterating on that design in a loop is slowly bringing the game into focus.

Deadly Harvest is a Micro-Tactics RPG with enfasis on the puzzle side of figuring out difficult combats. You play as a coven of witches defending your garden from Weeds, evil monster plants looking to destroy your garden. You use Area of Effect spells that leave magic plants in their wake to fight off these intruders, each of these magic plants has a unique effect.

Thanks to the turn based nature of our game we we're able to create a paper prototype that's pretty accurate to the final experience of the game.

With this prototype we started being able to tackle the problems with our design quickly. The goal of each level is to survive a certain amount of rounds (generally 5) and ending with a certain amount of a type of plant on the board (for example, 6 healing corns). Originally the enemies used the same plants as the player, but thanks to this early testing we we're able to figure out that that opened up the possibility of the enemy healer placing healing corn and winning the level for you even if you were playing horribly, so we had to make the enemies use a different variation of the player plants that doesn't count to your totals. 

The paper prototype also helped us balance out the different plants and characters, and help us figure out that if you give access to every plant to the player from the start of the game you're gonna confuse the hell out of them. We were able to notice these problems and solve them without writing a single line of code!

Paper prototypes are amazing and all, but we are trying to make a videogame here. So with a solid design foundation to start going off of we started on the first digital prototype.

Here's the first prototype I made. You can select between two units, move them around and attack. I puit it in front of players and quickly realized that i'm not giving the player enough information about what's going on under the hood. Players were confused as to why they suddenly couldn't move their units anymore, which was because they were simply running out of allowed movement in a turn. Of course they had no way of knowing movement was a resource.

The current prototype of the game now has a readout of player stats in the bottom left corner so the player can see how much movement they have left. Next up is adding enemies and giving plants their effects and getting this in front of players again.