Escape from Heagney

Role: Game Designer, Artist, Graphic Designer, Balance Engineer

Applications: Procreate, Blender

Team Size: 6

Time: 4 weeks

Finish: September 2024

The Game

This is a search and rescue board game where a team of 3-5 team up against "Heagney" to gather treasure and escape before he kills them. Heagney, who is the antagonist, is defending his house by placing traps and doing damage. He cannot see the board for the first few turns, and has to guess at the player's location before placing traps. These can do damage, trap a player, or send out his minions to chase them. Each player also has a different type, that being types of game designers, each with different abilities. For more information, check out the files/links below!

Challenges

I have never made an analog game before, and being group leader is challenging as well. Our game was also quite complicated, and so a lot of rules had to be tested and changed before our final product was playable. There are many complex systems like the trap tokens, items, and player movement points, and it was difficult to come up with intuitive methods of incorporating these rules into the gameplay. I also believed we could produce very high quality cards and boards, but putting out that much art was definitely difficult. Maintaining a style for everything was also a challenge. We also had to send of all kinds of prints, 3D and 2D, so working with their timeline (without weekends available) took some major coordinating.

What I Learned

I found it very difficult to delegate tasks to my team members to produce my vision during this game. I wanted to do everything, but I didn't have time to do all of it, so I had to give tasks to my teammates. It was encouraging that my teammates produced amazing work, and the lesson is that I have to trust that people will do a good job at what I task them. I definitely got a lot more comfortable directing people during this project, as well as workflow, as we consistently produced work over the four weeks. We were done with time to spare, and with a very polished product. Also, I asked a graphic designer (Daniel Pitt if you want to look at his other work) to assist with the player cards, so I got to experience the client side of that production process. It was great working with him and he definitely produced cards that made our game stand out visually. 

Next Time

I think we could have done with more playtesting time. We spent about 2 hours playtesting and Heagney didn't win either time, and then before the final playtest we had to buff Heagney, even though the cards were already printed. It is very complex game, so there was a lot of necessary playtesting. Also, I didn't buy enough wooden tokens, so I should have done my math more carefully, since they sold out of the ones I was using. Therefore, half of my item tokens are a different size. I also think having a nice instruction manual would have been cool, but we made a lot of last minute changes that would have made printing it difficult.