cyborg battle game analysis

© 2014 DigiPen Institute of Technology

Khan Sweetman GAT210 - Spring 2014

Khan Sweetman

Gat 210 - Spring 2014

Instructor: Jeremy Holcomb

Game Analysis: Project #2: Strategy Game: Cyborg Battle



Playtest 1:

Rules: v1.0

Testers: Ryan Baker the Ork([email protected]), Troy Barnes the Elf([email protected])

Time: 30 minutes

Things To Do and Other Notes:

● I wasn’t able to figure out whether or not Robot Duel conveys the experience that I was

going for. The players didn’t seem to have much of a reaction to the theme one way or

another. Then again, players tend not to remark on themes unless they stand out

because of uniqueness or excessively good or bad quality. Testing ended up mainly

focused on the mechanics and how well they worked, as well as exploring the difficulties

associated with developing a custom card game.

● The cards themselves seemed to be one of the biggest problems with the game. The

common consensus on the Robot cards was that they didn’t feel right. All of them had a

unique ability as well as the ability to directly deal two damage. All dealing two damage

was generally regarded as making the cards feel too much alike. This didn’t matter too

much though, as the players almost always elected to use the special ability instead of

dealing flat damage. While I liked that players preferred the special abilities over flat

damage, never having the flat damage chosen means that it probably wasn’t a

strategically viable option. Most of the time, that was completely true.

● The Robot Destroyer in particular lacked balance between its special ability and its

standard, deal two damage ability. The average damage of its special ability dealt 3.5

damage, this was supposed to have been balanced by the drawback of the card having

a one in six chance to blow itself up. In retrospect, that isn’t much of a drawback when

you can construct a replacement Robot on the subsequent turn.

● My attempt to make different playstyles through the cards turned out to have been

addressed too directly and clumsily. It was rather obvious what card were supposed to

have high risk and which ones were supposed to have low risk. Rather than address this

idea so directly in the future, I think it would be a better idea to address the typical play

styles associated with this kind of card game and tailor cards to match those styles.

● It was remarked that the playstyles in the game all felt the same. The high risk cards

tended to not have big enough drawbacks, and everything in general tended to have

middling risk values.

● The mechanics of the game were good in some aspects, lacking in others. The biggest

issue with the game is that player interaction is low. Most card games of this type have

some way of affecting the other player’s field. Since I did not put in a way for Robots to

attack each other, I tried to make up for a way to interact with the other player’s field by

adding lots of Technology cards that allow players to affect each other’s fields. This

didn’t really work out that well, as adding cards to fix the shortcomings of the way that

other cards work just isn’t a good idea. This means that I should probably add in a way



for cards to attack each other.

● Balancing the cards is one of the bigger issues I need to address for the next iteration of

Robot Duel. This will likely be mostly tweaking math. A bigger issue in terms of the

actual design of the game is enabling different play styles with the same cards. One idea

to allow high risk, medium risk and low risk playstyles with preconstructed decks was to

put a high, medium and low risk ability on each card. Having all these abilities that feel

different would be rather clumsy though, and it was agreed during discussions that this

wouldn’t feel elegantly designed.

● After that idea, I discussed different ways players could choose their playstyles when

they couldn’t construct their own deck. These ideas mostly revolved around being able

to choose your cards from the number of cards available one way or another. Derp

Rock: The Summoning(Ryan Baker’s game during lab six) had a mechanic called

drafting that enabled players to choose cards at the beginning of the game in order to

tailor a deck that fit their personal preferences. Dominion’s deck building mechanic did

this as well, but during the actual game.

● An idea that I’m leaning towards is having plenty of cards that enable the player to

choose the cards that they draw through looking at the top cards in their deck, shuffling,

discarding, redrawing cards etc.

Playtest 2:

Rules: v1.1

Game participants: Leo Saikali the Orc ([email protected]), Eric Kube the Troll

([email protected])

Time: 35 minutes


● This playtest was from the lab in week seven.

● The main focus of this playtest was to test the changes that I made since week six. The

major changes that I made were oriented on fixing the most apparent problems with the

previous version of Cyborg Duel. The biggest problems were that the rules and cards

were confusing, players were limited in their playstyles, the mechanics didn’t flow well,

and that there was little significant player interaction.

● On the field of play, the interactions between the players were frequent and significant.

Off the field of play, they verbally interacted constantly, and in a mostly constructive and

light hearted manner. I managed to get the level of interaction up to this point since last

time by changing the effects of many of the cards as well as implementing a mechanic

that allowed players to attack each other’s Robots instead of just each other.

● Not enough playtesting was done with enough playtesters to see if different playstyles

emerged, but the playtesting that was done leads me to believe that there is a variety in

playstyles. Not a huge variety, but enough for the scope of this game. Making different



playstyles was done by redoing the Draw Phase so that players would encounter a

variety of cards very quickly, as well as by redoing many of the card effects.

● The mechanics appeared to work fairly well. There was an interesting contrast between

the experience of the two players though. Leo is an experienced Magic: The Gathering

player, and so he jumped into the game wholeheartedly. He seemed to enjoy the game,

especially figuring out card combinations on the fly and figuring out how to bend the

rules in his favor. His feedback was very useful, as his playing revealed many holes and

ambiguities within the rules. It did not take him long to see the similarities between

Cyborg Duel and Magic: The Gathering. In fact, it didn’t take long for most people to see

the similarities between the two. However, many people remarked on these similarities

after just seeing the cards, so the fact that I used an application called Magic Set Editor

to build the cards on Magic templates probably had a lot to do with this occurrence. Eric

on the other hand, played much closer to the way I expected. He followed the rules and

played the game along the lines of the way I intended them to be played. Neither player

seemed bored with the game, although they both argued vivaciously over what they

were and weren’t allowed to do. I believe that they enjoyed the game.

● To fix the problem of the rules and cards being confusing, I rewrote the rules, cut out

parts that were confusing, and added more information to the cards themselves. The

rules didn’t seem overly confusing to the players. There is still much room for

improvement to the rules, but they are currently passable in their clarity and ability to

explain the game. The main issues left in this part of the game is with the cards and

making sure players know how they work. Removing ambiguities, loopholes and filling in

what gaps I missed is something on my to-do list. What players can do and when they

can perform certain actions is also one of the bigger remaining issues.

● Playtesting as much as possible will be the biggest thing in regards to what to do next.

As much as I thought about cards before I made them, it never took long for players to

see what what was wrong with them, or how best to exploit them.

● Some cards were overpowered, but Professor Holcomb advised not spending too much

time on balancing, so I will probably only bother with balancing the cards that thoroughly

break the game just by existing.

● There were many small points of clarification that cropped up, as well as many small

things that stopped the game from working properly. I say small because they have

quick fixes, but most of them could qualify as, “Major Hole in the Rules, -5%” because of

the way they can thoroughly stop the game until a situation is reached. Thus, playtesting

enough to find these bugs will be of utmost importance. Some of the mechanics also

seemed suboptimal at times, so I want to try out a few different implementations to find

the one that works best.

Playtest 3:

Rules: v1.2

Testers: Spencer Mauro the Musician([email protected]), Sarah McGinley the



Artist([email protected])

Time: 23 minutes


● Spencer won the game at 29 health using Secret Weapon Unleashed!. Sarah had 18

health the turn before she was defeated.

● When starting the game, the players performed actions in the order that they were

written. This resulted in them needing to take the Factory cards out of their hands in

order to start with 3 factory cards, then go through the deck to find more, then shuffle,

then redraw. Since this slowed the game down, the next ruleset will have “Each player

starts with 3 factory cards” before “Each player starts with 5 cards”.

● Players were confused about whether or not Factory cards generate Construction Points

on the first turn. Writing in that they do indeed generate Construction Points on the first

turn should be written into the rules somewhere.

● Players tended to take the example set-up diagrams as how the cards must be set up,

rather than just an example of how cards could be organized. This should be clarified in

the diagrams.

● Magic: The Gathering players tend to construct equipment cards when they can, then

assign them to Robots later. It should be clarified that equipment cards must be

assigned to Robots on the turn they are constructed.

● The “Quick Swap” and “Secret Weapon Unleashed!” card combination automatically

wins the game. “Quick Swap” isn’t broken though, it’s really just “Secret Weapon

Unleashed!”. It’s a fun card that players tend to like, but it definitely needs to get nerfed.

● Playtesters and spectators alike tend to immediately recognize “Secret Weapon

Unleashed!” as game breaking. They like it though, because it is a card with cool art and

because it is incredibly powerful. They also recognize the card’s picture as Exodia from

Yu-Gi-Oh! fairly quickly. This is a good thing because people seem to like Yu-Gi-Oh! and

the Exodia card in particular, but I might have to change the art to avoid breaking

copyright laws.

● Spencer brought up a good point during playtesting, and that is that players will almost

always opt to directly damage each other instead of breaking their opponent’s Robots.

Players did not go for each other directly 100% of the time though, so the current

attacking mechanic isn’t useless, but it does require changing. I like the way that it works

right now though in terms of player choice, strategy and the way that players don’t tend

to constantly have fields empty of Robots. Having the ability to designate blockers might

be okay, but it doesn’t have the feel that I’m going for(offense favored game, with Robots

fighting alongside their controller, not just minions to be sacrificed). It is also exactly the

way that Magic: The Gathering handles attacking, and I do not want to remake an

existing game. To fix this problem, I think I will add more abilities and Technology cards

that make players want to attack each other’s Robots instead of each other. Potential

things to add:

○ Special Ability: Rivalry: Deals +1 damage when attacking other Robots.

○ Special Ability: Power Hungry: Must attack opposing Robot instead of opposing



player if there is the option to do so. (Takes away choice from the player, might

not want to add this)

○ Scrap Titan: Construction cost: 5. Health: 5. Ability: When this card destroys an

opposing Robot, construct a token(1 health, 1 damage) for free on your side of

the field.

○ Adding Magnet Pull(Special Ability that lets Robots force attackers to attack

them) to more cards might increase the level of interaction between players.

Making player interaction more significant in terms of quantity and quality is one

of the main points of letting cards attack each other, so even though it wouldn’t

make players want to attack each other’s Robots more, it would still potentially

improve the game.

Playtest 4:

Rules: v1.21 (Same as v1.2, but the decks had Secret Weapon Unleashed! taken out for

balancing, as well as to see how the game progressed without the ability to instantly win after

constructing a specific card)

Playtesters: Spencer Mauro the Musician([email protected]), Eduardo Gorinstein the

Troll([email protected])

Time: 34 minutes


● Playtest 4 took place immediately after Playtest 3. The game was started by Spencer

saying, “That was fun, again?” to Sarah, so I am inclined to believe that he genuinely

enjoyed the game. Eduardo seemed perfectly willing to play after spectating part of the

previous game too, so Cyborg Duel seems to be a fun game to both watch and play. I

am unsure why people have watched rounds of Cyborg Duel played though. Possible

reasons:

○ To satisfy curiosity and to answer questions. There are plenty of questions that

designers would want answered that they could best answer by seeing each

other’s games played.

○ The components are somewhat polished and eye-catching.

○ The game resembles Magic: The Gathering and players wanted to watch a round

of Magic.

○ The genre of Cyborg Duel is popular.

○ Spectators are attracted to the game by the level of engagement of the players.

○ The actual quality of the game is unlikely to be the reason why it is fun to watch,

as it is difficult to tell the quality of a game just by walking by it.

● Reading “Each player starts with” at the beginning of the rules gets repetitive. Replacing

those words with “...” and an indent might make the rules more succinct.

● Since Robots cannot attack on the turn that they are constructed, having the rule, “The

player that goes first cannot deal damage on his first turn” seems redundant and so shall



be removed.

● A suggestion from Spencer was to put, “+1 Construction points per turn” on the Factory

cards. I do not think that this is necessary though, as players do not seem to need the

reminder as to what Factory cards do. If I were to eventually add Super Factory cards

that produce 2 Construction points per turn, I might want to add the text in to avoid

confusion though.

● Players sometimes seemed to encounter problems with not having enough Robots or

Factories, but the high draw rate and the ratios of types of cards in the deck seemed to

mitigate this problem sufficiently. Having no Robots to construct was only relevant for

one or two turns anyway.

● Players knew what the Portable Time Machine was meant to do, but the wording on the

card is ambiguous and allows for some opportunities, in the words of the players, “to be

a douchebag about it”. The wording on the Portable Time Machine card will be changed

in the next version to remove this opportunity.

● People enjoyed the recognizing the cards that were from pop culture. Since cards that

are too iconic break copyright rules though, I’m not sure if I will be allowed to keep all of

the art though. Checking with Professor Holcomb on what I can and can’t keep will be

necessary to avoid plagiarism.

● Special abilities are sometimes mistaken for flavor text because they are in italics, which

is the convention in certain other games in the TCG genre.

● The wording of Cyborg Vanguard’s ability has been leading to the card being misused

and should be reworded.

● Deathbot should not be allowed to sacrifice himself, though he can given the ambiguous

wording of his abilities.

● The wording of EMP Blast needs to be redone so that players know that it does not

destroy factories. This would make the game stalemate.

● The next iteration will have some changes to the rules for the attacking mechanic, to

explore how forcing players to attack each other’s Robots would work.

Playtest 5:

Rules: v1.3

Playtesters: Khan Sweetman(myself), Leo Saikali ([email protected])

Time: 20 minutes


● The main point of this playtest was to see how well the game tested with people who

had prior experience with the game. I wanted to see if the game would play any

differently, if there would be more strategy, and to see if the game would no longer be

engaging the second time around. Thus, I, the designer played against Leo, a previous

tester.

● Leo won the game with 30 health. I had 18 health the turn before I was defeated.



● Leo discovered a card combination that breaks the game. Equipping “Magnet Armor”

and “Force Field” to the same Robot forces the opponent to endlessly attack an

invincible target until he manages to remove one of the pieces of equipment. There are

only two cards per deck that can do this.

● To make this combination not game-breaking, I am changing the way that “Force Field”

works. Instead of making a card invincible, it just gives them a lot of health. This way, it

still has a similar effect to its original, and it will still synergize well with “Magnet Armor”,

without breaking the game.

● “Secret Weapon Unleashed!” is not a fun card to play with. There are many ways to get

around its high construction cost(“Quick Swap”, “Enola Gamma”, just waiting a few

turns), and so it ends up getting constructed fairly quickly after it has been drawn. Due to

its high damage output, it tends to wreck everything else on the field until the opponent

somehow manages to overwhelm it. In other words, the game tends to revolve around it,

which is not an enjoyable experience. In the next iteration, I’m changing SWU!’s ability

so that it completely ignores all Technology, including “Quick Swap”, so that it is harder

to summon. I am also reducing its attack and health, while still keeping both stats high.

Doing this will also keep it in line with the the original feel that I was going for with this

card. The original attempted feel was a card that was completely apathetic about every

other card because of its immense power.

● After talking to Professor Holcomb, I am redoing the art for many of the cards to avoid

breaking copyright issues.

● “Lightning Field” is overpowered and allows players to deal too much damage in one

turn. It will be removed.

● Unfortunately, I did not manage to test many of the new cards I made since the last

iteration. This means that I will probably need to remove some of the already tested

cards in the next playtest to make sure that the new cards get tested. That, or I need to

just playtest more to eventually get a good amount of the new cards tested. This would

probably be better, as it would allow me to test the way that new cards work with the old

cards.

Playtest 6:

Rules: v1.31

Playtesters: Enrique Rodriguez([email protected]), Collin Bissey

([email protected])

Time: 30 minutes

Blind


● The primary goals of this playtest were to see if the game could be played blind, and to

see how well the attacking mechanic worked if players could not attack each other



directly, and they could not move their Robots out of the way either.

● The diagram of the example playing field was taken out for this play test. This was done

to see how well players would set up their cards without an example to guide them.

● Throughout many of the playtests, Magic players used Factories like they would use

lands. By this I mean that they would turn used Factories sideways in order to keep track

of how many Construction Points they had left each turn. People who hadn’t previously

played Magic on the other hand, had no idea how to keep track of which Factories they

had and hadn’t spent each turn. The Magic player playtesting usually showed the non-

Magic player how to keep track of spent Factories on the first or second turn. It has just

ended up that every playtest has had at least one Magic player in it, so this hasn’t

actually been a problem yet. However, I figure that I will eventually hit a playtest where

neither player knows how to keep track of spent Factories.

● Robots have become a much bigger presence on the field, and focus has shifted from

the players to their Robots. This has been a gradual shift, but it was quite noticeable in

this playtest where players were forced to go after each other’s Robots.

● The change to the attacking mechanic was not a good one. Rather than a bad change

though, it was more that the change to the attacking mechanic broke many of the other

mechanics, which were designed to work with an attacking mechanic that was

completely different.

● In this iteration as well as in all previous iterations of Cyborg Duel, Factories have the

Technology - Permanent type. This has ended up being a problem in several situations

where cards that can target Technology - Permanent cards have been able to target

Factories when I did not intend them to be able to. These situations were often

potentially game breaking situations too. In this playtest, one player was able to use

“Hades Alpha” to destroy Factories and prevent the other player from creating any more

cards.

● The game was even in the beginning. However, one player was able to press a minute

advantage and snowball out of control. Within a few turns, the other player was unable

to do anything and ended up redrawing his hand during his last few turns in hopes of

getting the one card(“Time Bomb”), that could wipe the field of Robots and turn the game

around.

Playtest 7:

Rules: v1.32

Playtesters: Ryan Baker([email protected]), Jesse Hibbs([email protected])

Time: 25 minutes

Blind


● This playtest was rather different from the other playtests. Partway through, one of the



playtesters felt that he could no longer win and began killing himself as quickly as

possible. Occasionally however, he tried out different card combinations in an effort to

retaliate. Unfortunately for him, his opponent discovered a game breaking card

combination that made all his efforts in vain.

● The other player however, seemed to enjoy trashing his opponent. He also enjoyed

making effective card combinations.

Playtest 8:

Rules v1.4

Playtesters: Micah Rust the Elf ([email protected]), Joshua Biggs

([email protected])

Time: 40 minutes


● To be honest, I spaced out for much of this playtest. This was completely a controlled

and deliberate decision though, as the two main goals of this playtest were to see if

Cyborg Duel was ready to be played without me there for guidance, and to see if the

revisions made since the last iteration fixed the last of the bugs that I encountered. This

playtest wasn’t completely blind so that I could focus on analyzing the experience of the

players more thoroughly. I also was fairly confident in the abilities of the players to figure

out how to play since previous playtesters tended to get how to play the game, even if

they got a little bit confused along the way.

● Upon starting the game, players still did not get how the starting Factories worked. They

were not sure whether they were supposed to play two Factories from their hands or

whether they were supposed to dig through the deck for them. Both of the playtesters

used logic to deduce that digging through the deck for the cards was how the rule was

meant to be interpreted.

cyborg battle game analysis

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