This is long overdue, again, but let us tell you, and show you, what's happening with Exemplar. This dev log has shown a lot of the "original" design for Exemplar. My last update linked to a post detailing the reasons behind the redesign, what we are calling v3, but not much on what the difference is. So let's take a closer look.
The new design, among other things, has a big advantage for us. It has a much neater vertical slice. The original design had a broad design, it had procedural cards, card playing, an interactive map, and a procedurally generated narrative and comic. It was a lot of systems. And we got a fair way through. We have the procedural cards working, with a basic hero class, agents, male and female and you can see that in the Card Generation Demo that you can download from this devlog. But the map was a long way off working, and the comic, arguably the most complicated aspect, hadn't even been started. So after months of work, we had a long way to go before we had a closed loop that was "playable".
v3 is much more concentric. It has a tight core nugget of interaction that has layers of mechanics on top of that. v3 moves the entire game to the pages of the comic. The comic is the whole thing. The core game is beating a boss. A boss is represented as a panel on the page. They start in the bottom right. Each boss has a "deck" of panels. These panels represent their assets and actions. Maybe one is a crooked cop for example. Or the robbery of a tech facility. After the boss panel is placed, the rest of the double page spread is filled with random panels from the boss's deck.
Eventually players will assign heroes to a boss similar to the v1 concept of the map. Each hero will come with it's own powers and equipment though we'll get into that in a future update. Our first vertical slice will have the heroes generated for the player. For this to work, the number of "attributes" in play will be limited. The design has many (such as strength, intelligence, agility etc) but the point is to limit the scope as much as possible to get to playable as fast as possible.
Now to beat the boss, you need to get his "health" down to 0. You do that by controlling panels on the page. So at the start, the boss owns all the panels. The player then plays powers/equipment or the heroes themselves at the "mission" panels. A power/equipment panel has an attribute and a value. These indicate which missions they can be played on and the number of dice to roll. The missions have an attribute and a difficulty rating, which is the target to reach.
If your power wins, the mission is removed, your power takes it's place and the boss takes a hit.
But if you fail, the power is removed and an injury is played on the mission. An injury blocks you from being able to attempt the mission again.
Again, in a future slice, injuries will be able to be healed with powers (imagine taking a "support" hero on a mission with buffs and healing powers). But remaining injuries on the board after beating the boss are dealt into the heroes "deck" and distributed to the board at the beginning of the next Boss that hero fights. So healing them is important. On top of that, once you have two injuries on a hero, you start having to roll the death dice for each future injury.
As you can see from the gifs, we're a fair way along this playable loop. We still have some win/loss conditions to get in and we need to bring across the art technology from v1 to replace this placeholder stuff. But we feel this new design gives a much tighter strategy loop. We still have to talk about panels of different sizes, hero and base building and combos, all of which are layers on this first slice.
We hope you found that interesting.
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