Spectrum Force Design Journal.

I have been working on Spectrum Force for almost a year now and during that time I have made many mistakes and some moments of inspiration that I wanted to share in the hopes that it may help others with their projects and avoid some of the mistakes I have made.

The Inspiration:

I had been wanting to design a game for some time I wanted a game out there that I could go I did that and hope that people enjoyed it but nothing really came to mind on the direction to take.

At the last UK games expo I took part in a Sentai Role-playing game which got me thinking back to the days when I watched Power Rangers. I had some fond memories of the show and looked into what games were out there.

Very few games exist and the ones that do don't capture the theme of the show at this point i decided this would be the theme of my game.

Gametype:

Oh boy was this a mess it took some time to decide on the type of game play I wanted, at first I thought why not a miniatures game and I started creating stats, abilities and other aspects.

As time went on I realized that the game design was rather bland, not to mention creating a miniatures game would be very expensive so I quickly dropped this idea. A friend of mine who I was role playing with suggested I consider a card game format.

Now I have played a lot of card games ranging from magic, yu gi oh, battletech, star trek, drangonball z and many others.

The thought of creating so many cards was a bit daunting to me at first but I decided to try and after getting past my initial fears I actually found it quite easy to create the cards.

To anyone who is designing a game don't be afraid to try I know I was held back by my fears at first and after pushing through them I learned a lot and am glad I didn't get stopped by them.

Gameplay:

So I had my theme and I had what type of game I wanted but now I needed to decide how the game would play as this was a power rangers/sentai inspired cardgame I knew instantly I wanted to capture the fight between the rangers and the bad-guys.

I started re watching the show that inspired me and super sentai shows as a point of reference. Watching the old show has been the hardest part of the process sometimes its best to leave things in nostalgia land.

But having watched the shows the two things that stood out the most was that there was a story and that the rangers worked together. Working with these I decided to make my game co operative.

The next step was deciding how would players co operate the answer actually came from the tv show many times the rangers would work together and create combination moves this inspired me to create a team attack mechanic that would allow players to boost their allies attack power.

As for determining the power of the attacks I choose to use dice, having played role-playing games over the year one of the aspects I enjoyed most was rolling lots of dice. With this in mind the standard I started at was 2d6 as the baseline average.

Knowing that the average result of 2d6 was around 7 I started to create the rules of my game with this number in mind. The cards the players use would determine the number of dice rolled and players could boost allies with team attacks allowing them to roll more dice.

And thus the core combat mechanic of my game was born through the various iterations of my prototype this has stayed the same with only the numbers changing to get to a good challenge.

This will be all for now next time I will go into detail about how i created my first prototype and how bad yet informative it was. I hope this has been interesting and perhaps inspires others or shows you what not to do.