Uneven Odds - End of showcase

The inception of this project was aimed at showcasing my ability to prototype something quickly, and play test for a few iterations again within a short period of time, to determine its merit in becoming a long-term development project.

My project game idea is called Uneven Odds, it's a rogue-like RPG with card game elements and set in a cyberpunk world. Uneven Odds should be a game that someone could play and get into immediately at the start, and stay with the game when it ramps up in difficulty at the end, and not falter and give up when they lose.

To achieve this, I set out to create a set of simple rules that will stay with the player for the entire duration of the game. I will hammer down on the playtesting of these rules and emphasise these rules the most in the game as compared to anything else. As this serves to set the foundation of all future player strategies and additional frameworks. But in the end, the game should never be too complicated and yet still complex enough to accommodate multiple play styles.

In order to relate these rules closer to a real world scenario, Uneven Odds was initially planned to be designed closely resembling a gambling type of game that people are familiar with, whether it will be playing dice or poker cards, the sense of hanging on a lose thread of chance and taking these uncertain risks with great payoff is also a desired theme in the mood development of Uneven Odds.

Deriving on this, the initial design looked something like this

Uneven Odds uses a combo system to build player strategies. The initial and current design of Uneven Odds both follow a positional combo system, where all cards' neighboring cards are checked to see if they are the same type.

Initially, the idea of dealing a random card and not having an actual deck fit in the idea of a dice well. As I designed no more than six cards of six of these combos and having a six faced die where that every die is always a possible face of six the odds of each face is always the same. Eventually I found myself worrying too much about animation and getting the feel of each die right rather than the core gameplay mechanics, hence I dropped the idea of using faces of a die to represent these different abilities that the player is randomly given each turn, instead I began working on them as cards.

And voila I have now the current version of the game with them as cards:

The nature of all of the mechanics and all the developmental changes made in response to some of the playtesting feedback can be read in another blog post.

However, what this served to showcase is the drastic re-imagining of an idea that though during the initial design phase filled me with a sense of mild certainty that the it was 'solid', was but a foundation to a series of improvements that proved necessary. This is essentially what playtesting was for. I realized that all the time and dedication would carry their own uncertainty if I had kept developing the game without setting playtesting milestones or have not done so early in the development. Though I would still make mistakes wherein newer and conceptually cooler mechanics are added without even a current grasp of whether the game is enjoyable as is or not, like the idea of a shop in-between rounds.

In conclusion. I was able to prototype to a very playable extent within a period of four weeks. Thus this somewhat demonstrated my development strategy of always carrying a level of realistic doubt throughout early development and not let myself be sucked into the grind of a full developmental process without first gathering some certainty. I believed finding a disciplined approach of high-fidelity core, low-fidelity everything else, and play-test the core as early as possible will go a long way as an Indie Dev, which is what I sought after initially. I knew the burden of resource and time-management would be magnified when developing alone, thus came the decision to test myself as a showcase of how well I managed myself.. Or not.

Following the feedback I have received for Uneven Odds I believe I will continue on the development of it for no more than another month. This is the measured deadline I have set for myself as also a means of managing the time I have and can be used for other things. I aim to publish the game on both steam and the play store, and look into gaining funding for the remainder of development. To do this I have created a patreon account and plan to at least have an attempt at crowd funding, though this is beyond the scope of this showcase, it's an natural extension from the current project to move on to also demonstrate an awareness on marketing and financial needs and make indie developing feasible, again this will be muddled with uncertainty as well.