Design for Magic Writer. Blog post 2, Designing the Weakness System

After playtesting and iterating, one thing the team still tries to improve is the weakness system of magic writer. Why is it there and how did we change it.

The high concept of  our vision of magic writer is the the following:
  Scibblenaut meets typing of the dead.



At it's core, magic writer is about writing funny items into existing (Scribblenauts) and having a tactical shooter (typing of the dead) at the same time.

At this point, we're having fun with the basic gameplay. Typing words and throwing them works, but now we're going to expand on that.

There are a lot of ways to go about expanding on the game's core idea to make it more interesting. I'm going to firstly talk about how we did it and reached where we are now and then I'm going to take up ideas we didn't use and our reasoning behind excluding them.

This blog's artifact: The Weakness System

The weakness system

Straight from the concept document on which the game is based came the weakness system. The weakness system was set up in the current fashion:

• Each items has two properties connected to them.
• These are either Dead or Alive and Hard or Soft.
• Meaning a Skeleon would be Dead and Hard and a Panda would be Alive and Soft.

• Each monster have 10Hp.
• Each monster have one weakness which is randomized.
• You cannot see which weakness the monsters have.

• Items deal 1 damage.
• And item with a property which a monster is weak to deals 3 damage instead.

The idea of this system was:

1. Almost every item could be categorized with the properties.
2. It would create a search dynamic for finding the right property to throw at the monster, making you remember items.

How we changed it and why

During playtesting, we noticed that people had expectancy for what items would have for effect. For example, they thought spiky items would do more damage than soft items and that cold items might have a freezing effect. Due to these observations and testimonies we set out to rework the weakness system so it could fit the game better.

We changed it so that every monster have a unique visual based on their property.
We changed monsters HP to 4.
We changed critical damage to 2.
We changed the properties to Fire, Ice, Dead and Alive.
We changed it so every item only have 1 property.

We reasoned that the previous weakness system wasn't logical enough to use in the game. Even though each item could be categorized, the reason why they would be super effective against monsters were unclear.

The new system aims to make things clearer. All monsters now have a visual look which tells the player which property it is weak against. Together with this, we lowered the HP of each monster to make the game faster since less effort is put into discovering what weakness the monster has.

With changed to monsters, came changed to items. We removed Hard and Soft, since visual representations of a monster weak to only those two did not make sense.

Instead we introduced Fire and Ice, since a fire monster and ice monster have easily understood weaknesses. We kept Dead and Alive since we could create a Dark and Light theme with the monsters. All items now only have one weakness, since there are too few items who have a shared property between dead/alive and fire/ice. This is another reason the monsters HP changed to 4, because it's harder to get an item with the property you need all the time.

Summary

Artifact: The Weakness System

The design:

We changed the design of the old Weakness system to one that would make more logic sense. The biggest one is monsters now have a visual style. This also changed the gameplay into to make it faster.

I hope you liked this tour of Magic Writer design and tune in next week for another design related blog post.