Dark Arts Defense

Role: Card Designer / Artist, Game Designer

Brief Description:

Dark Arts Defense is a prototype board game project. This is a 1-5 player co-operative game where you must fight and defend yourself from monsters. You work together to defeat monsters at each level, increasing the difficulty as you move forward. 

Players: 1-5

Duration: 15-30mins

Development Time: ~1 week

Team size: 4

Design & Art

Player Class Cards:

There are 5 classes you can choose from, each offering different gameplay and stats. Each class have their own action cards which includes attack and defense cards that corresponds to their stats. Additionally, there are one special skill card (SP), used to play a unique special move from the class. Players can increase their stats with points, keeping track of their stats with the stat-tracking sheet.

The mage was used as the base character for the basic stats. The other character's stats were changed based on this and were edited and tweeked a lot through playtesting to balance the classes against the monsters, as well as balancing them with different class combinations during gameplay. 

The art style is silly and takes on playful tropes of each class. I designed each class to have their own colour scheme. The front of the cards have the same base design which can be tweeked and edited for each class. I left space for text that can be easily edited when needed. 

After designing the characters, I took on their class traits and made class icons which was used for the back of the cards. I added more designs to the back, unique to the class. 

Monster Cards:

There are 5 levels players can beat. At each level, a new monster with different stats and skills appear. Monsters have thier own action deck. Levels are progressed by beating the monster and players gain points after defeating them. As the level progress, the following level's monster actions cards are added into the monster's deck. 

The monster card designs have the same base designs. The text are edited for each monster, with their special skill described on the cards. I decided for a red and brown colour scheme to the cards, indicating danger or enemy. The higher level monster designs are more mythical and legendary monsters. 

The monsters share the same monster icon and card back designs. To distinguish them apart, I put their level number on the back, which is also seen on the front of the card.

Action Cards:

Player action cards are shuffled and faced down during setup, players are allowed max 3 cards in their hand. Each player plays a card from their hand for the round, after a monster's action card is played. Players discard their played cards and fill their hand with cards from their deck, the next round begins. Every 5 rounds, the monster does their special skill, shown on the monster card. Player's special card is included in their action card deck. 

Action cards can be used to attack or defend. Each class also have their own special action card in their deck, for example, the healer have healing action cards. In addition, one special skill card is included in their deck. Player's attack and defense stats can be increased with the points from defeating monsters, allowing them to deal more damage or have higher durablity during.

Game Cards Print:

Reflection:

This was not our first initial idea for the game, but we scrapped our first idea as it was not working out and decided on this in the end. When designing this game, instead of having players compete against each other, we decided that players can work together to defeat the monsters which encourages teamwork and communication to defeat the game. 

There were a lot of balancing issues between classes and monsters. It was intially hard to get past level 1, so we adjusted the monster's health and further playtested to adjust more issues. We playtested, adjusted and balanced all the stats, and added double damage and double defense cards which made the difficulty of the game much better. With the time we developed this game, there are still tweaks and balancing to the gameplay that needs to be made and adjusted. 

As with the card designs, I designed every single card (around 30 designs) and I am quite proud of this work. Some things I would change would be the text style, changing the font style to fit the cards better and the colour of the text as the contrast seem too low on the class cards. Additionally, the icons could be cleaner by creating them as vector art instead of hand drawing them. Overall, tweaking the cards for better readablity and consistency.