Transform, rotate, and attack in this tabletop reimagining of a beloved game!
Roles: Game Designer, Card Maker.
Tools used: Miro, Microsoft Word.
Group Project – 6 Members, including me.
Nobody Saves the World: Tabletop is a board game we created during a Sheridan game jam. The theme was adapting pre-existing digital games into an analogue format. We were assigned Drinkbox Studios' Nobody Saves the World, an action-RPG where the player unlocks and can morph into various forms throughout the game.
Roles
Game Designer
We decided to focus on adapting the original game's combat, dungeon-crawling, and character-building. I suggested having almost all enemies only be able to be damaged by specific damage types to incentivize swapping between forms that could deliver them, emulating how you change forms to suit the scenario in the game. I also had the idea to categorize enemy types into specific threat levels that the player would progress through, simulating the escalating difficulty of a dungeon. This eventually became the difficulty modifiers for the four quests in the game.
Challenges and Lessons Learned
We struggled a lot with balancing the forms and incentivising players to switch between them. Even with damage types, initial playtests still had players getting through without switching forms much due to low enemy health numbers. My proposal to change how damage types worked as an easy solution that avoided the potential consequences of adjusting individual enemy values directly. It's something I'll try to use again for similar problems in the future.
We had difficulty adapting certain features, with some being cut or heavily downscaled, such as quests. We wanted to include them as a full mechanic similar to how they are in-game, but they needed to be reduced to just enemy encounters. This was my first time adapting anything into a game before, so in the future I'll remember that not everything can be transferred from one medium to another while still keeping the same complexities of the original.
