Castle Siege
Castle Siege - Game Design week 2 prototype: strategy game
Tips:
- Yellow signals where you can move
- Red signals where you can attack
- Chess-style capture only happens when doing a melee attack
- A spear and bow attacking from range will not switch places
- A spear attacking next to a unit will swap places, however
- Hammers can break down walls
- The king is overweight and cannot move from his throne
Good luck!
By:
Tinos Vafias
Diana Zhao
Rodrigo Arguello
Comments
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Hello! I found the NYU Game Design Jams for this semester and decided to try your game off of a recommendation. This is game is really really cool.
I can't really say much for balance because I only played one game but my friend and I had a lot of fun. My only criticism is that some mechanics should be explained or foreshadowed better. Being able to destroy the enemy's walls is really cool, but it kind of came out of nowhere and lost me the game because I didn't know you could do that. I think you should be able to destroy your own walls for consistency, more strategic depth and to show much earlier that walls are destructible. The discovery phase of finding new mechanics cool and fun, but comes at the detriment of the strategic element of the competitive board game, which I think is ultimately a negative.
Anyway, here is a youtube video of me and my friend playing your game over discord vc. We only started recording in the middle of a game and he forgot to unmute himself on OBS for half of it, but hey. Its gameplay. And its a cool video game.
Wow! Thank you for the feedback, I didn't expect to get any from anyone not in the class. I would have replied much sooner had I known you had left a comment. Unfortunately, though I was a dev for the game, I am not the owner of the game page so there was no bell ring.
Now, let me address your feedback.
The game was originally intended to feature more center space and potentially space between units to allow for board development the way it occurs in chess. However, a constraint of the game jam was that the games should finish within a seven minute window (for rapid testing), so we modified the board to account for the quicker gameplay. Some balancing was done around that but it is not definitive.
If I recall correctly, the hammer signals it can capture stone when it is next to it, while other units do not. I understand your criticism is that one would have to find themselves positioning the hammer next to the block to find that out, which is unintuitive. We didn't have time to create a tutorial but if we were to make a serious release there would be a mini capture session for each unit to familiarize the players with each one. I decided against breaking your own walls for fear that players would do it to waste turns or that optimal strategy would quickly center around "freeing" one's bows which radically constrict the battlefield. Bows had to be nerfed several times during development (there used to be four on each side!) and the blocks, besides being a cool addition to the chess format, also serve as a balancing factor for the bows. I'll think about your suggestion and test it out. If the meta doesn't become "who can get their bows out the quickest" then I'll consider keeping the change in.
It's awesome that you included a video of you guys playing. The very first time us devs played the game it was on the board in the image attached, with my friends calling out their movement and me cutting and pasting units to their final destination. Coordinates would have helped a lot, that's for sure going in the definitive edition.
Thank you for playing our game! I'm glad you guys found it fun and appreciate the insightful feedback. You'll hear from me if a definitive release comes out (mobile, perhaps?).
Cheers.
P.S.
The reason why the spear doesn't capture via "ranged" attack is because the units are too close in the "fast" format meaning early-game spear captures were basically kamikaze attacks. By making it so they can attack from afar without jumping into the enemy, they make progress by forcing the enemy to move their piece away from spear range.
It's a similar reason why hammers and spears gained the ability to move diagonally: they need to be able to force progress vs bows that only run from them.