Design of Bocardo

Hello! I am Geun Yoon, designer of the Bocardo and as a designer and I designed most of the basic systems such as combat and card systems. Today I am going to talk about some of the design challenges and problems we faced during the production process and what we did to overcome them.

Cutting it as much as possible

The biggest challenge we faced from the start of production was that our time for development was very limited. This project started around April 2020 and we have to release the game around April 2021. The fact that our team was small (only 4 people including me) didn’t help either. To overcome this, I focused on reducing overall systems through removing unnecessary systems to simplifying it. After the concept stage where we had an idea of what we want to do this was something I did a lot. It was sad as a designer that I had to remove some part of the game that I thought was cool but I found out simplifying the game doesn’t always mean that the game is not fun. Then how did I decide what should be removed? Some of them were based on technical feasibility, but most of them were decided based on the playtest result.

Playtest is important

Seriously, playtesting is important. You must conduct them as much as possible. We didn’t conduct a playtest at first for 4 months or so which led to our game not feeling original at all when we did our first playtest after 4 months into production. Eventually we completely scraped what we had and started over. Since then I try to do as much as possible. One of the easiest ways is doing on paper before digital as it could show strengths and weaknesses of your game without putting too much effort into making a prototype for playtesting.

It doesn’t have to be totally unique

One of the design problems that we faced was keeping the player engaged enough to keep playing the game as the game did not have enough limitation on the player becoming super strong. What I used to fix this problem was making the number of cards in player deck functions as player’s health. Yes this is not a completely unique idea as it is easy to see on IRL card games. Yet it was something that was not common on video games, and it did fit well with existing movement systems. In the end, I learned that it is not individual systems that have to be unique, the player experience has to be unique.