Serengeti Smash

Solo DigiPen project September - December 2020

Tabletop Simulator

Overview

Serengeti Smash was a systems design project made with the specification of having four characters of specific archetypes which appealed to several different types of players. This board game was made and playtested on Tabletop Simulator due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

This is an asymmetrical four player game where two teams of two go up against one another. Players move their character tokens around the map to get in range to attack each other, add cards to their hands by going to certain tiles, then use their cards to attack each other. The last team standing wins.

Skills Honed

Gameplay Design

Board Game Design

EV Balancing

Rulebooks

Systems Design

Character Design

Features

8 characters with 5-8 unique card attacks each.
A streamlined rulebook to help players understand everything and quickly join the action.
An arena with varied terrain for the characters to take advantage of.
Extensive balancing of the 8 characters by setting up EV values and making a design defense for them.

Designing character archetypes for player archetypes

The offensive crocodile primarily appeals to the person who likes to do big "show off" and plays regardless of their practicality. To do this, the crocodile relies on playing cards in combo sequences.

The hippo appeals to social gamers with its focus on support. Many of its abilities interact with its ally, but I was careful to allow most of those cards to remain useful even if no ally was in range.

The elephant is the tank character with big flashy individual effects. The elephant does not have as much raw damage as the designated damage dealer character, but can damage a lot in bursts, makings its turns impactful. The elephant can also change the type of terrain around itself with one card. It appeals to players who want flashy individual turns by comparison to the crocodile's combos.

The meerkat is for adrenaline gamers who like elements of gambling and feeling a rush. While it is frail, it has evasion and multiple methods of boosting its evasion and lowering the opponent's accuracy. Roll Boulder is also the most inaccurate attack in the game, but has the biggest potential payoff. Balancing the EVs for this character was very important to ensure the averages did not make it either too strong or too weak.

Design Work

Detailed information on the characters and their archetypes can be found in the design defense. There are also design defenses of the map and overall system mechanics.

Post Mortem

Characters all had strong senses of identity and appealed to different players.
The game had a king of the hill style mechanic where players wanted to get into the water to avoid taking passive damage from the sun, fighting over the water and pushing other players outside of it. This naturally incentivized players to go to certain areas as I planned, encouraging more interactivity.
Paying careful attention to EVs (Expected Values) helped to balance the cards on a numeric level and provide insight on where to take things next beyond just playtesting and adjusting the game.

Cards that were meant to combo together with other cards could potentially become dead weight in a player's deck when direct attacking cards in the deck had all been used already, forcing players to try to cycle through to find more direct attacking cards.
Permanent death was an inherent problem with the game but it became too late to change it due to the class dynamics. Allowing players to die forever robbed some players of being able to play the game, cutting out their interactivity entirely.
Having to remake the cards every time I made balance changes was very annoying and I should've come up with a better system to do that.

Things that went right:

Things that went wrong:

What I've learned from this experience:

Designing characters for different playstyles of players is important, rather than simply making character archetypes.
Keeping up interactivity at all phases of the game is important. Don't let players be eliminated entirely, only penalized.
This game was my first experience with making EVs in a sheet and using them to help inform balance decisions rather than relying entirely on playtesting.