Can Video Game Developers Make a Board Game?

for this four-part mini-series i teamed up with jonas tyroller we made a board game turned ourselves into a boss fight used barcode scanners as an input device and went into the forest to make a game with nothing but sticks and stones two of these videos will appear here on my channel while the other two will appear on jonas's channel so make sure to subscribe to both digital world is chock full of incredible tools and opportunities i'm trying to find a balance between my passion for creating video games and working on skills away from computers in this video i explore board game design attempting to create a great looking prototype in one day using classic materials such as paper clay dice cards and more because over the past two years i've been in love with these fascinating pieces of work from dominions fast-paced deck building santorini's gorgeous visuals so the question is can i learn this craft which in many ways resembles video games with its designing of rules mechanics and arts but on the other hand there's a lot more simplicity because there's no programming or complex softwares involved so here's a short story of how we created our game tone shift from the early idea phase all the way to the final play test what usually helps me when designing board games is just coming up with some sort of setting or theme first so what theme would you be interested in exploring i mean you remember that little map we saw yesterday in the city with the tiny little houses yeah i feel like those are easy to build out of clay lots of little town pieces or something like that i really like that some sort of puzzle game where you have to fit them on a map or something it is a placement building game okay it's kind of like a versus mode as well you've got to fill up every square with a building but to make that harder there's me attacking at the same time or like shifting your squares or moving your houses around with cards well there are two rivaling villagers and you're kind of trying to build in a way where you cut the other one off or sneak past them it's like it's a versus game right the end goal the win stay is filling every square with a building every turn you can place buildings play cards that are going to shift the terrain of the opponents and make it harder dramatically how does that fit into the fantasy of building a city it's like a moving test it's a fantasy like city city in the clouds or here like exactly yeah it's a wizard citadel or something so i feel like the first thing we should really try to focus on is getting something playable exactly and and then as step two will try to make a nice looking of course they will have to go clay latest recording eight four nine what if i don't have any card that places a building it's over we'll just draw a card and i would say well i'd say we need a lot of building cards maybe players building should just be a default option that's always available yeah exactly you need to play a card or place a building which is cost an action i like it because then we can also make put more interesting stuff on the car yeah like place building is not an interesting thing because we're gonna have to have like at least half the deck please yeah think of the most unique cards cool building possible and then we'll just see which ones are good which ones are bad slap your opponent in the face and if he survives yeah if you knock out your opponent you win the game electric condition as we thought about making some random wind conditions so every time you play you have a different wind condition right no longer win if you've got like a group of four buildings you know like two by two that's no longer the win condition the game ends once the complete mat is filled with tiles be it neutral tiles or your pilot enemies and there's like a point system here so for example in this example you get 10 points every time you get a square and also five points whenever you've got a tower adjacent to a normal house yeah we made a bunch of victory conditions so actually conditions just like how to hot skin points yeah for a quick recap each player is a competing wizard architect at the start of the game each player draws three cards every turn we draw an extra card card can help you build move houses around steal or counter your opponent's cards and of course destroy your rivals carefully laid out plans once you've drawn your card on your turn you must place one house on the grid you can either place on an empty square or on top of one of your existing houses to create a tower power can be part of the scoring system for example some rewards could be gained five points per tower but they can also help with the second phase of your turn which is playing one card from your hand this is optional cards have various effects and we made 40 unique card effects in total many cards cost something to be played for example to play a certain card you might need several towers or perhaps you'll need to discard a card from your hands or have three houses in a row some powerful cards even require you to destroy one of your houses or towers once all grid spaces are full the player who scores the most points according to that game's specific point system [Music] so how has this uh morning being jonathan we struck code very soon after we got lucky we got lucky we immediately came up with a concept we both kind of liked plan this afternoon is to playtest what we've got and after that the remainder of the day will be spent beautifying the creation using the clay to make cool little sculptures little towers so we spent some time balancing the cards and mechanics trying to simplify the rules whenever possible one of the many things i greatly enjoyed throughout this morning was discovering jonas's collection of excellent prototyping materials for example these solid white cards when trying to prototype games surrounding oneself with simple good materials like black sheets of paper packets of dice a white board and a clean spacious table can really go a long way it's three o'clock now we've got a couple hours left and what's the good news jonas the good news is we got the gameplay pretty much figured out we have a very well working prototype that i think we both really enjoyed super happy with it yeah it's like it's done in a couple hours congratulations man i mean i enjoyed to a point we both i think enjoyed it to a point where we wanted to play again we wanted to play again so that's a good thing a lot of art to create yeah set a time budget for each task we we have the playing field with the cards and with the model three things it's not too much and we we have to paint the models quite quite agreeable all right very agreeable to the touch i like those bushes these these are looking good they're they're also looking kind of like thornish there you go bake yourself we began creating the models and as we said throughout the process we needed to be content with them looking rustic or just good enough they weren't polished and if you zoom in too close they look pretty rough our goal was for the overall feel and look of the game to be satisfying not individual details we're extremely productive thanks to the time limit pressure deciding on making 10 models for trees which act as neutral blocks you can place with certain cards then 10 houses and 10 towers for each player a total of 50 figurines needed to be handcrafted and painted i thoroughly enjoyed working with clay outdoors here we were adding 3d elements to our little board game some parts fell off then glue them back together then paint them it's stuck then while we waited for the clay and glue to harden and set we began polishing the 40 unique cards each of us worked on some part of that rather long and tedious process rewriting everything in a nice chunky font creating simple and consistent icons for the card's costs so i'll forget of course to add a mini design to illustrate each card effects finishing up the painting of our figurines for our board games a lot longer than expected yeah sorry to say so we've been working for almost 12 hours [Music] [Music] yes no one in charge of doing art things of course for the last part of the video where jonas and i play a complete session of our board game township i wanted to thank you for checking out the devlog and i also highly recommend that you subscribe to both channels since we created three other completely unique experiments links in the description all right let's now get down to the final play tests who will win who will design the ultimate wizard town all right so we've got our deck of cards okay and here i have the deck of objectives yeah point system basically looks quite nice see how we earn points for this particular game all right draw one all right interesting so we get two points per square like a layout of four basically houses also when we get uh one tower uh ages into any building all right i'll put that here and so everybody takes three cards i've got three cards in hand let's say i start and so first i need to do is place a building yeah place it here i draw a card yeah and i place a building here and remind the viewers join us how the game ends the game ends either when all of the tiles on the map are full or if this backup deck runs out of cards yeah great that you remind me of that i'm gonna place building here oh got some good cars i like it i'm just gonna place a building here and pass on to you as you can see the beginning of the game was pretty even each of us keeping our precious cards waiting for the right moment to pounce filming here and i'm gonna play this card here which actually it requires me to have at least one tower uh-huh and i can place two forests um to each other okay perfectly and here okay fair enough here the opponent has to destroy two buildings but you can choose which ones oh that's nasty yeah oh that's a really nasty yeah i'm destroying i want to build here i'm going to play this free card and basically let the opponent decide where you build the building so i'm more or less caught up why i lost okay so i can place one of your buildings yeah here okay i have so many cards in my hand there's really upgrade this to a tower yeah good one keep in mind that each of us is playing with this all-important score system in mind we really need towers and two by twos to score points and hope to win a card do you have now it costs two towers and you choose any of your buildings to destroy all ages and once oh no destroy these two here what are you doing to me yes placing one house here discarding two cards to destroy an entire row i get rid of these two okay there's free action moving any building to an adjacent tile in here yeah just place one building card square guys yeah he's going to square he got two pines now would be a good time for me to end the game remove a car from my hand move one row by one tile like this okay transform an enemy building into one of your own oh really okay place one here oh build a tower that's nice at this point jonas is clearly winning he has more towers each scoring him points okay we will end it yes i will end it we'll end this effort by my best efforts jonas would sadly win this game scoring four points while i only earned two at the end of the day we've made a journalist we've made it what is the conclusion of the state almost how do you feel this this day went like 10 uh how satisfied are you are you with what we've made i'm pretty satisfied so of course but not finished game gaming this is a really nice looking and solid prototype something you could actually get people testing more like flimsy pieces of paper which people will immediately reject just because it looks ugly it feels horrible this at least feels good looks cool and then from there you can like you know lose your feedback and decide whether or not to expand really i kind of can't believe that we made this in one day because as mentioned i've tried so many times to make board games and never again this far in the day never ever this was a great experience and i look forward to making many more board and card games in the future we'd love to hear your thoughts about this mini project and also if you have any good tips when it comes down to board game design or projects you've worked on in the past and wish to share a mini story of how that was made thanks a ton for watching see you really soon [Music] you

Channel: Blackthornprod

Views: 63,525

Keywords: blackthornprod, board game, jonas tyroller, card game, physical game, Can Video Game Developers Make a Board Game?, town shift, collab, making of, devlog board game, how to make a board game, board game design, game designers, indie game dev, tabletop game, figurines, modeling, clay, prototype, paper game

Id: wE0xC4FEbc8

Length: 13min 9sec (789 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 15 2022