Approach:‍ ‍
-Use the affordances of current mechanics, shooting/foraging, as bounds for the behavior of the new items to limit complexity.

-Make the items easy to acquire, and their use cases close to the established play patterns

-Keep the crafting system minimal

Designed Items and Crafting System to Improve player engagement

Replace with older gameplay footage

Problem:
The gameplay for flashfire revolves around deducing where on the game board you enemies are hiding. Playtesting showed that the gameplay quickly became stale and was not engaging enough.

The root of the problem comes from players not having tools to actively figure out where enemy players are and are forced to wait for an opponent to make a mistake. Any attempts before that are essentially shots in the dark.

Goal:
Create a small set of items for the player to use during the game of flashfire that supplement the use of their primary fire.

The primary function of these items should be giving the user additional information about enemy players locations.

Result:
-Introduced new resources and give established resources an additional use case.

-Added 3 items for player

to craft using each unique combination of resources

Problem: Version 1 of Flashfire had players taking one of each available action on their turns Moving, Collecting Wood, Firing Weapons. Executing actions this way worked well for the structure of the game but was unsatisfying and limiting.

Cause:

It was important that once a player committed to shooting that they not be allowed to move afterwards. This is because when a player shoots their location is signaled to all other players, letting players move after this signal would render all information given obsolete. This lead to repetitive play patterns.

This alongside the addition of items forces a change to how players execute turns

Solution:

Attach executing actions to a bank of action points

Refine Action Economy

Item #1 Snare: Feather + Flax

Choose a tile on another player's board. That tile becomes "snared" for the rest of the

game. The first time a player would move onto that space (not through) they cannot take

the movement action next turn. A unique ‘snare’ sound is triggered for all players.

Item #2 Decoy: Wood + Flax

Choose a tile within your Campfire’s radius. During your next turn, any action

that/reveal that would make a player visible, is instead mapped to the Decoy’s location.

At the end of this turn, the Decoy’s location is revealed to all players and it’s tile is

greyed out.

Item #3 Arrow: Wood + Feather

Choose a tile on another player’s board. The Arrow is fired upon that tile in the same way as the regular rifle. It reports back to the firing Hunter with three response variations

enemy’s current relative position to where the Arrow landed.

• Wide Miss: The enemy Hunter is within 3 tiles of where the Arrow struck

• Near Miss: The enemy Hunter is within 1 tile of where the Arrow struck

• Nowhere Close: The enemy Hunter is beyond 3 tiles of where the Arrow

struck

Arrows do not affect Campfires and cannot remove a life from a Hunter on direct

contact. Direct contact results in a Near Miss response.

My Contributions:

• Design and Iterate Items/Crafting System

• Refine Action Economy

• Ensure Game Balance