Macchina

Board game Dungeon Crawler

The Board Game

Macchina is a Duengon-Crawler cooperative board game made in 5 months by 3 Game Designers and 4 Game Artists. This game was my first major school project, and the first time I worked on a board game. Our theme for this project was "Da Vinci Punk - Renaissance - Automate".

My Work on Macchina

For this project, I was Game and Level Designer and had the following responsabilities :

Create a strong narrative in the given historical context of the italian rennaissance
Design game mecanics and promote cooperative gameplay between players
Produce a level design consistent with the narrative and gameplay intentions

The Lore of Macchina

Macchina takes places in the XVI century, during the italian wars. At the time, the black plague was spreading in the north of Italy causing death of thousands of people.

In Macchina's alternative history, a great scientist, Giuseppe Mani, student of Leonardo Da Vinci, create the "Macchina" : a machine capable of producing a cure to the plague.

François 1er, king of France, decide to send his army to take the Sirmione Castel, in order to control the Macchina. Giuseppe does not have an other choice but to run away.

But in his flight, he hires 4 mercenaries to take back the Macchina.

Gameplay !

Once in, players have to explore and search for items to become stronger, in order to be able to fight French soldiers back. All that while being cautious of the black plague. Most importanly, they must work together.

Heroes

The 4 mercenaries are the heroes that players can embody. Each Hero has a playerboard which indicates to the player his special capacity, the items he's wearing, his movement speed and his heath points.

Each hero has his own Strenghts and weaknesses. Bonino for instance, is stronger with two-handed weapons, but he moves slowly. He's a good choice agaisnt close range enemies but not too much against the long range ones.

Narcisse is a DPS, Tonio is a support that can repaire broken weapons, and Nicolas can heal his allies. Narcisse and Bonino are combat-oriented heroes, when Nicolas and Tonio are teamplay-oriented heroes. Thanks to that we allow players to test different gameplay and help them to adopt a cooperative startegy in order to win.

Cards

Macchina is a card based-system. This system allowed us to propose replayability and controlled randomness.

There are 4 types of card, the purple ones represent players' objectives, the brown ones indicate how ennemies are supposed to move (IA-like system which changes every game), the blue ones indicate ennemies' statistics and the green ones are items.

Level Design

Macchina's level design was one of the main difficulties during the production of the game.

We were two game designers working on it together for 3 months and we produced more than 40 variations of it, until we found an iteration that was corresponding to the expectations we had.

The level design had to encourage players to work together, alow them to experiment new strategies and to offer replayability.

Conclusion

Production & Results

Macchina's production was chaotic. We took a lot of time to propose a good concept during pre-production and the communication between game designers and game artists was terrible. We were given the worst grade for the proof of concept at the end of pre-production. Fortunately, we didn't give up. When other groups started production of their concept, we came back into pre-production and worked until we had a good concept. We manage to establish a good production pipeline and we finnaly did a comeback at the end of the projet, wich allowed us to have the best final grade, but more importantly to be proud of our work.

What did I learned ?

With this project I improved my game design and level design skills, but most importantly I learned teamwork and crisis managment.

In fact Macchina was a complicated project mainly because of bad communication and teamwork, and we finally succed by fixing those. It has been a huge learning experience that I have been using in every project ever since.