Planning and Documentation

Inception

After participating in a Game Design Workshop at GDC 2022, I wanted to design a board game to practice and develop practical design skills. To begin, I decided to consider board games I enjoy and to breakdown their various elements. Eventually I landed on Stratego, a strategy game wherein players control an army of 40 pieces and lay them out on the battlefield. There are 12 types of pieces within each army, each with its own unique attributes that allow them to behave in different ways. The goal of the game is to capture the opponent’s flag piece, or capture all of their movable pieces. The additional twist on the game is that all pieces are hidden to their opponent, each player reveals their pieces as they attempt to capture them. The use of hidden information in this game led me to think of the base concept for OUT-MAZE!

My personal copy of Stratego

I wanted to reduce the amount of hidden information and change how it was implemented in a game. After some consideration I landed on the “terrain” or layout of the board being the hidden information. The remainder of the game ended up being designed around this single concept. If the terrain was what is hidden, then that would be something laid out by the players, so the next choice revolved around how this would be meaningful, and how I would execute it.

A board that has a hidden layout is akin to a maze, and so I developed the tiles as components to a maze. Tiles would be premade in different sizes with 20 for each player and contain different types of obstacles on them. At this time I had decided that the goal of the game would be a race to the end of a maze made by each player’s opponents, meaning each player would have 20 tiles to build a maze with, and 1 pawn piece to solve another. Given the end-goal of the game the obstacles revolve around slowing a player’s movement.

I created two prototype boards out of 1” graph paper to test different sizes and two sets of 20 tiles made from dry erase cue cards. This method for the tiles would make it easy to iterate on tile layouts and allowed me to change their layouts on the fly during testing.

As the design progressed I wrote out the details in a design document to outline all aspects of the game and updated it as the design needed to change. Notable updates include phrasing on a rule stating the effect of the SLOW obstacle and an update to the movement system.