A Mad Scientist’s Approach
Jacob p -
I will now present this week’s blog post, virulent victors. I have mixed feelings about this week. It’s a really weird one in comparison to the other weeks of my project. The title is a little teaser for the new angle of the game which I will discuss a little in this post.
A major goal I had for this week was coming up with more gene and disaster cards so that there would more variety in playstyles. Because of this, I spent most of my time thinking, writing, and googling. I went about my week as usual, but tried to write down every idea I had on a piece of paper or on my laptop. This got me quite a few ideas but I was feeling like they were becoming stale. I then tried looking up a ton of stuff on Google about bacteria’s roles in environments across the globe, but this didn’t yield much. All these searches told me the basics that I already knew or focused mainly on bacteria in relation to humans. Thankfully, I did end up with enough cards through just writing down my thoughts.
Initially, I only had two types of cards: genes and disasters. Genes acted as buffs that helped you win the game while disasters had effects on every player. As I came up with more ideas, the disaster cards eventually strayed away from this and started giving individual players benefits. Because I didn’t want to change the core function of disaster cards, I decided to create a new category: research cards. These basically give one player a benefit while not contributing to the win condition. I decided to call them research cards because I am exploring a new angle for this game which I will explain next.
I realized that being a game where you are just a bacteria was going to restrict the audience and only end up appealing to biology nerds, like myself. To remedy this, I talked with some people at my site placement about what would make the game more appealing. I believe I have arrived at an answer: mad scientists. Basically, the game is changing from playing as a bacteria, to playing as a scientist who is developing a super bacteria. This still keeps the game’s focus on highlighting bacteria outside of strictly human applications while making the win condition for the game make more sense. The win condition for the game was to get a certain amount of gene in the player’s genome to win the game. This doesn’t make perfect sense when players are the bacteria themselves because bacteria don’t need to collect genes to thrive. Now that players are mad scientists trying to take over the world with bacteria, collecting genes does actually make sense to win the game. I really like this angle, but I would love to hear any feedback you all have about this.
A lot of card games have multiple ways to play them, for example, Magic has commander and standard (R.I.P. standard). This allows players to play very differently with the same cards. In commander, players have a central card that determines their playstyle, while in standard, players build their deck to win in a certain way through manipulating the odds of drawing cards in their deck. I always wanted to have something similar to this in my game but could never think of how to do it, until now. The mechanics so far for my second gamemode are not fully fleshed out so I can’t explain them here, but I can reveal the basics. For the original game, it mostly centers around having a randomly generated board. In this new gamemode, it would have no board, and be entirely a card game. Most of the cards would be compatible with both games but a few would not work (mostly because switching from a board to strictly cards is not the simplest). I would like to have a playable version of this by the end of the project but that might be a little ambitious. It would take a little more editing of the environment artworks so that they could go on both a hexagon and a rectangle. This gamemode could go south easier than a Magnetospirillum Magneticum, so I’ll be extra careful to make sure the rules make sense.
I realize I forgot to put in pictures of the status tokens or ground water environment tile last week, so I have uploaded those below. Also this is a little unrelated to the rest of the post, but I am looking for playtesters. If anyone would like to help me play this game or would like to try it out, let me know! I hope to read your comments again this week, see you in the next post!
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