Uprooted

Game Design Process

As game designer, I devised the rules and mechanics for the game. My philosophy in designing the cards was to design the cards to make use of current mechanics. This way it was easier to learn and implement.

A majority of the cards manipulate the board of roots by either adding roots, destroying roots, or protecting roots (fortify)

One of the plants you can play as is the Rose. The rose can place down thorns that block a tile, and then can trigger those thorns to destroy opposing roots.

The other plant you can play as is the Cherry Blossom. The cherry blossom can swap between either the dormant stance or the bloom stance. The cherry blossom has cards with different effects based on what stance they are in.

• Players would collect water which they could then spend on power cards.
• Cards were harder to play.
• Many turns where you wouldn't do anything other than place a root, a pattern that players did not like on the game's first play test.

To fix this, we made it so that players would gain water every turn, so that players could play cards more often and have the ability to cycle through their deck and explore their options.

Here we see one card that changed over the course of the game's development. One of the initial ideas was for the game to draw both root cards and power cards. The first version of War Of The Roses made use of this.

However, a few factors made us decide to make roots an action that would occur every turn. One of them was the fact that this was how roots were implemented in our first build of the game. The other is that it seemed overly complex to have two types of cards, both rule wise and UI wise.

Following this change, I had war of the roses synergize with the thorn card, that was already implemented, as an expensive but big payoff. Further evolutions of the card were made to make the card text more concise and clear.

UI/UX Process

As UI/UX designer I was in charge of designing our game's UI as well as coming up with quality of life improvements to enhance player experience. Not everything in my prototype made it into the final game due to time constraints, but it served as a good baseline for how our game would look.

Below are examples of the prototype (left) versus the final game (right).

Game Screen

Character Select

One of the changes I advocated for the implementation of tool tips in our game (pictured below). Essentially, when a player hovers over certain cards that require clarification, a small pop up will appear explaining that clarification.

One of the main cards this was used on was the Forest Fire card which sets an opposing root on fire. However, this fire can spread to your own roots. The card text itself was already lengthy, so there was no room to explain this on the card without making the font extremely small.

Takeaways

• Constant play testing allowed us to gradually refine our game such that changes weren't overwhelming.
• There were ideas that I didn't make it into the game due to time contraints. I had an idea for these objects called artifacts which would appear and the board and have different random effects. I also had ideas for 3 other classes for the game.
• Weekly meetings and would tell each other what we were going to work on for the week made work on the project a lot more coordinated.