REFURBISHED
Project Overview
Refurbished is a card game where the player takes on the role of a gladiator robot who must scrap with two opposing players in a duel to the death. The last robot standing gets to live another day and fight in the arena once more.
Team Size: 5 Members
Roles: Game Designer and QA
Timeline: 1 Months
Tools Used: Miro, Excel
Design Process
Project Goals
Creating some form of PVP card game where players would have to utilize strategy and skill to overcome opponents
Create an environment where 2 to 3 people would be able to play in one game
Wanted some form of progression where players could acquire additional cards to boost their strength as the game progresses
Conceptualizing the Game
In the conceptual phase, we brainstormed a whole host of ideas. Initially, we wanted our game to be a 1v1 where players would be given a basic deck and throughout the game they would be able to draft cards and build more synergistic decks to overcome their opponents.
Card and Verb Brainstorming
Card Mechanic Brainstorming
We also wanted to introduce a system where different cards would have different speeds that indicate which cards would be played before others. These speeds would include instant, fast, and slow cards.
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Focusing the Vision
While the team was brainstorming, we realized that there were too many mechanics and too many cards to juggle in the allotted time frame, so we knew we had to reduce the scope.
We reduced the scope by reducing the amount of cards and mechanics that would be present in our game. We also decided that we were going to eliminate the drafting concept. All players would have the same deck and wouldn't get any additional cards. Lastly, we decided to scale back on the card speed system and we got rid of the instant and fast cards, only keeping the regular cards and slow cards.
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Playmat
Over the course of development, the playmat was what stayed consistent throughout all versions. The major elements of the playmat that changed over development was the placement of information. The target slots allow players to target one of the two players with a card. Player health is displayed in the final version at the bottom: players have 15 total hp. The discard slots are featured below the targeting slots and have arrows to indicate the order in which players are able to receive that card back.
This led us to our first version of the game that was ready to be playtested.
Playtesters Feedback
To keep track of all of the changes to cards, I built a spreadsheet that contains information like the minimum and maximum damage a card could do, the history of changes, as well as reasons behind those changes.
Card Changes
During our playtest, we noticed the relative lack of importance of card speed. The speeds on the card only created more confusion, so we decided to cut it. The second major change we wanted to make after viewing the playtest data was the ability to stall the game out. Since there were only two discard slots and three blocking cards, players would always have the option to utilize one.
Problematic Cards
Shield Reconstruction
Shield reconstruction was changed to help with the dominant strategy of blocking and stalling of games. Since the overall damage output from cards have been reduced, we felt it necessary to reduce this card's blocking ability from blocking all damage, changing it to blocking half to keep the game's quick pace, as well as confining the healing factor to a conditional statement to enhance dynamic gameplay.
Karmic Reflector
Karmic reflector was changed to boost the viability of this card, since a lot of other blocking cards have been nerfed. It felt necessary to remove this card's punishing side to increase its play.
Damage Mitigation
We knew we had to remove one of the defensive cards, and the damage mitigation card ended up being the one that we decided to remove. The other two defense cards were seeing a lot more play and with the reduction of overall damage, this card would have been more of a problem. For these reasons, we felt that this one should be removed.
Shrapnel Cannon
Shrapnel Cannon was the most underused card out of the entire deck, as there were just better damage alternatives. The card mechanic of Evergreen (a card with this effect cannot be discarded) was removed to keep the card more consistent with the other cards. The idea that I pitched was to alter this card, giving it the ability to deal double damage if a player tries to block it. This way the card is rewarding players for predicting what the opponent will do.
Death Ray
This card was arguably the most oppressive damage card that was available. Death Ray's initial damage was reduced. However, depending on the player's health state, it would increase its damage. When the player was at low health, it would return its original damage value of 5. Players could now dish out great damage to stronger opponents to quicken game rounds and avoid total game blowouts.
Death Ray
These two cards had minor tweaks and quality-of-life adjustments. Oil Drum was changed to have a damage cap on it. This card was solely responsible for the one-turn KOs that could be pulled off in the game. Flamethrower was tweaked to have a new condition. Once one player was taken out of a round, this card became completely unusable in a 1v1 scenario. I gave it an alternate ability that if this card is used when one player is left, it deals an extra bit of damage.
New Cards
Blank was added in order to conceal player intentions before all players revealed their cards in order to minimize the amount of metagaming and cheating that could potentially happen. The addition of the Charge card added a lot of counter to defensive strategies and punished those defensive strategies. This new card allows for both a strong blocking option and a strong attacking option but it comes with a delay. This card also emphasizes our focus on predicting opponent plays, as now players can fake out opponents by using Charge and forcing out resources from other players.
Impact of Card Changes
The changes we saw from implementing these changes was an overall reduction of defensive strategies. These changes also helped in reducing the amount of damage that can be achieved in one turn, allowing players to not be be defeated in one turn. This was a massive downside, as the three player experience created more immersive gameplay. We also saw an increase in the speed in which players could play, as there were less defensive options and ways to punish being overly defensive.
Upgrade System
The introduction of a new upgrade system was also added: once a round had concluded, players would draw three upgrade cards. Then, by order from last place to first place, players would pick a card out of the three. This upgrade system introduced a comeback mechanic in which players who would get last place would be ordered to pick a card first. Players who won the round might get stuck with one of the junk cards that gives them no additional effect. This system also allowed each round to play slightly differently giving more replayability value.
