Zombie Armies

Research

• Having not played a boardgame besides monopoly since I was younger, I began by playing old and modern boardgames and researching them. I looked into their mechanics, player count, if they were influenced by another medium e.g a book or film, were they based on adaptions of existing IP and were they a sequel to a running series of games. Here is a table I made to show this, along with a few examples:

Concept

• Next I began to come up with concepts for my game:

• I decided to take the time to see how my concept idea would work using different structures, how well the core concepts would fit into them and whether it would be better to change structure from this concept or use a new one. I chose a handful of my favourite structures for comparison, the table below shows the findings of this research:

• My overall conclusion was that my game would stay with the team based structure as originally planned. Whilst I would have liked to add some things mentioned above, I find that they would add too much complexity for younger players, and personally I liked the accessibility of the original concept . Some of these ideas could be incorporated such as the scenario/mission/campaign structures or even the cooperative version for an older audience and this is Something I mentioned in my pitch. 

Pitch

• Once the concept was decided, I began using photoshop and PowerPoint to create a pitch. I tried to create a presentation that touched on all key points when sharing my idea to make it as clear as possible. To do this in my video I used a lot of my own images and animations as opposed to a wall of text.

Description of the game to accompany the pitch:

Take control of your own zombie army in a bid to infect the town and turn as many humans to the undead as you can.Fight against your opponent’s zombie armies and against the military called in to protect the town and it’s civilians from your rotten grasp. The game includes a set of unique undead pawns to move around with their own cards showing their statistics and personal biography and a detailed board to place them on. Play alone or against up to 3 other players to raise the stakes from the ground in an intense war that will have you feeling peckish for braaaains long after it’s over!

Prototyping

I began to make a prototype of the game by using simple drawings on paper, cutting out pieces of card and finding cheap tokens so I could test how the game would play out when real people played it for the first time. I also created a questionnaire form so the players could give me feedback on their time with the game:

• The game went through a few iterations before being completed as I responded to feedback from the players and made the changes needed whilst still keeping the game balanced and fun for everyone. An example would be I reduced the amount of tokens the players had at the start of the game to combat the long length found in the play tests. It took around 40-45 minutes to finish the game with just 2 players, this needed to be lowered especially considering the target audience. I also added extra cards for the option to test the game with 4 players and also rebalanced the stats so that a player was not able to win extra zombies as easily (I had a problem of running out of tokens on playtests):

• After numerous testing I was able to find the right balance of fun and balanced challenge and created a definite rule sheet for the game. Next I could begin looking at how the finished product would look in terms of art style. To do this I did a lot of research into what people found attractive and what would appeal to my chosen demo graph. Here are some of the images for my cards, tokens and box:

Finished Product

This is a playthrough of the final product along with a video on how to play the game: