Very cool, personal talk about the design of the Riot board game “Mechs vs Minons”. Really enjoyed the candidness here. Some nice nuggets about specific targeted play-testing as well. Cool unexpected slide cameos of Tom Vassel and Quinns from Shut Up and Sit Down as well. 🙂
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1024383/Board-Game-Design-Day-Mechs
Interesting talk about how mastery is maybe the fundamental driving factor behind long term player engagement. The speaker raises points about how if you include potential mastery over several skill-sets (execution, strategy, teamwork, knowledge, etc) you can allow “Random Parallel Learning”. This basically means that players are able to jump back and forth between improving on different axes at will, and often subconsciously. It also raises the potential of an “aha” moment during a match (or in the case of execution the realization of a growth in proficiency).
Another point raised is that rouge-likes set up failure as part of the natural state of play, so it doesn’t feel so harsh. Keith Burgun has advocated that a 50% win-rate is ideal for learning, and I wonder if 50% is in the realm where failure is expected. (I sort of anecdotally think the loss rate might not be high enough to remove a lot of the sting at this level).
