My group tested a game called “Critical Error.” In this game, the players are boarded in their space ship and were forced down into the basement cell. Their objective is to escape from confinement and retake the ship from their hijackers.
My group when they played, seemed to like the concept and the gameplay. I set up camera’s that the crew would have used to watch that cell, but in this situation, it was used against them. They had to strategize their movement routes to avoid the camera's line of sight. They could also disable camera’s which they liked, they also liked having to strategize around the camera’s lines of sight, it gave them something to worry about along with the alien intruders. There were also chests in the map, these rewarded the players with one of 6 unique items you didn’t know what item you had until you rolled a die.
I had a few things that went wrong in this map when my group was traversing the map to escape, the cameras were an obstacle which you had to roll to disable…I made the number way too high for it to be fair. When they fail to disable a camera, a guard was alerted to their position, this caused frustration and a loss of time. One major problem was when my group made it to the start of my 2nd map, I realized that the map was taking too much time so I had to skip them straight to the boss to save time. I tried to make these items as strong as possible, because I made the boss really difficult because I made the items really good to offset this. The items weren’t enough for the boss fight, and since they were random, some of the items that I hoped they would have they actually didn’t. So, my group didn’t beat the boss that I set up and it was purely because of the difficulty scale. It’s like I designed a boss for experienced veterans, but the people actually fighting it are rookies.
I was given some great feedback from my group about what to improve for the next iteration. I was told to reduce the amount of camera’s, it just seemed a little too unrealistic and got repetitive over time. I was also told to lower the roll to disable the camera by a large margin because I made it way too high. I was also told to balance the boss better since it was very powerful. They almost killed it, but I made the attack really high with no real way to block it, besides one of the six items which negated the damage.
When my group fought the enemies in my level, they had a tough time but didn’t take damage so I believe that it was a stating problem on my end.
Players were taught the mechanics of the level before being thrown into it, like how to disable cameras and how to open chests among other actions.
I believe that I put appropriate challenges for the group as they progressed through the ship. The only thing that I will say again, is that I didn’t provide a really fair challenge for the final boss.
There were plenty of guards blocking the path to the next area so it made the flow of the game very slow paced and not enjoyable.
The critical path was very obvious to the players as they progressed through the map.
The map was mostly hallways and a few open rooms, so there was plenty of conflicts that happened in the tight corridors.
It was very obvious where my players were supposed to go because it was a linear spaceship. They went straight up to the elevator and then went back to the front of the ship to confront the big bad boss.
I wanted to balance the enemies in this map more, and that’s what I’m looking forward to doing with my group.
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