When people gather around a table to play a game, there are two elements that heavily impact the enjoyment they experience from that game. One is of course the game itself – the rules, the goal, the pieces. The other is the people, who are choosing to spend their time together and share those moments. Today’s post is about how those two elements interact and how as game designers we are attempting to make space for that second uncontrollable (to us) element on how our game is played.
For the purposes of this blog post, let’s call these ‘table moments’. Table moments are what happens in between what the game demands of its players.
If you pick up the Monopoly card that says ‘Go directly to jail. Do not pass go.’ – that is the game. If your friend mocks you for it then immediately ends up in jail himself – that is a table moment.
Table moments are a huge part of what makes playing games fun, but they’re very hard to design for because by their nature they are uncontrollable and indeed unique to each group or unfolding of the game. As a roguelike/roguelite, Aethermon Ascent is intended to be somewhat unpredictable anyway – therein lies some of its replayability. Including additional factors that up the spontaneity index, especially in pro-social ways, can encourage these moments of camaraderie, competition, instant karma, heroism, etc.
Enter: Friendship Tokens.
The goal of Aethermon Ascent is to climb the tower and defeat the big opponent at the top. During their ascent, players battle smaller opponents in classic dungeon crawling style. Occasionally, players get the opportunity to double-team these smaller battles, thereby earning Friendship Tokens which can allow them to play cards into each other’s battle down the track.
This could be a life-saver if your Aethermon has no heals, for example, but you share Friendship with a healing-heavy build.
This also means that a build which is fairly lightweight on the attack power can nevertheless be a big influence on the game experience.
As a co-operative game, it’s you and your team against the scenario, but what that looks like should and will change each time. By designing the play experience with space for unscripted player interactions, we can generate more of them.
Have fun, AetherRen!