Goon Game: Sprint 6 Retrospective

I went into Sprint 6 with the estimation that it would be one of the more time-intensive and difficult sprints so far. Then, half the items were done a week into it, and the remaining script PBIs, which I thought would take sixteen hours total to finish, ended up being done in about eight hours. A stroke of fortunate luck, seeing as how I was called away suddenly for most of the second week of sprint 6. But by then, all the testing had been done, and the script was finished, allowing me the chance to make revisions before moving into the next sprint. So, overall, this sprint went very well. But it has also highlighted a design issue that I want to shift focus to addressing in the sprints to come. That being the problem of scaling difficulty.

From the get-go, I wanted this game to be about dealing with and avoiding failure. About future planning and the importance of unorthodox thinking. Things that become rather mute if the game gets easier as the player improves. Now, you may read that as an oxymoron to some; however, difficulty, in general, should scale up alongside player skill and power. This allows the game to evolve alongside the player and test their skills in new and exciting ways it previously didn’t because the player didn’t possess the skills or game knowledge required to take them on. Plus, from a ludo narrative angle, if the story is about the struggles and trials of an underdog who is up against a superior foe and has to address threats in unconventional methods, then having a point in the game where they are on par with their foe to the degree they no longer need special strategies would hamper the story’s ability to convey its themes and messages. So, a balance has to be struck: one where the player gets stronger and feels like they have a better idea of what the game wants from them while also elevating the challenge to meet that new power level. At the time of writing, two issues threaten to upset that power balance: total number of Goons and Commanders.

Early on in testing, I quickly discovered that adding even one more Goon made the play style shift to more aggressive strategies as the players now had more resources and charges to push up faster. On the one hand, this is good and is kind of what I want as the game progresses. But on the other hand, it gets dangerously close to tipping things to the player’s advantage really quick. Especially when compiled with the additional power pieces that are the commanders, Titania and Raven in particular. In general, commanders give a radical bump to a player’s abilities that helps certain unit types function better; however, the sisters provide a lot of upside with not a lot of down, making it easy for them to help steamroll the game's challenges. Now, individually, there are things I plan to change to elevate this: tie additional goons to a Chaos purchase, adjust Raven’s kit so she’s more of a glass cannon, modify enemy stats, etc. Yet both of these problems do have a common solution: variant enemies.

As the player becomes more dangerous, the world reacts to them by deploying more and more effective countermeasures, and then it should keep them in that constant state of powerful but vulnerable. Systems are already theorized to accommodate this, primarily Threat Assessment and how each unlocked Commander bumps it up a certain amount. So now the question becomes: what are effective and challenging advanced units tier to tier? We’ve tested some in the past with mixed results. But I think the lesson from that is that we need to make these advanced units proactive and reactive. They need to be threats inside and outside of combat. These units need to throw a spanner into the works just by being on the board. A good start in my mind is the Cop Drone Advanced unit, as it has a far range and Line of Sight in all directions, allowing it to catch suspicious activity faster and interrupt player plans. Hell, just now, I think we could rework the Rookie Cop so that whether he’s knocked out or alerted, he still calls backup, the difference being the number and tier of cops he calls. That way, players need to weigh the option of taking these units out as they could be a difficult and dangerous piece to leave alone, but by taking them out, they make more work for themselves.

This is going to be the direction of the next sprint. This is the next iteration of the product. One that takes what we have already established as working and begins finetuning it within a larger system. By this metric, we should see the game grow closer to its finished version and be able to test more powerful units in an environment that will speak better to their actual abilities when players acquire them in the game.