Level and Game Designer

Felix Faeh

System Out

Genre: Multiplayer Board Game

Type: Family-Friendly Free-For-All

State: Released

Dev Span: Fall 2018 - Winter 2018

Team Size: 6

My Responsibilities: Game Design, QA-Testing

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Introduction

System Out is a free for all family friendly board game, in which four hackers descend into the undertow of a dystopian city, in search for the rumored secret code, an algorithm that can access everything and becoming the next binary god in the process. However on this treasure hunt in this derelict and abandoned cityscape below, they are always watched by Janu5, the binary god, an ancient machine, that holds the ultimate code. Janu5 revels in seeing these hackers fight one another in a battle, from which only one may escape the cityscape in the end.

Through displacing other competitors or trapping them in grid zones, each player has to collect 5 pieces of the code, in order to gain the godlike status, which gives them extraordinary playing capabilities, at which point their last remaining goal is to escape the undertow, however keeping in mind, that they might have the three other players pivoted against them in that final instance.

Each player controls their own figure and has a set of cards available to get ahead, picking up a new card each round. System Out is turn based.

Design

System Out was heavily influenced by the concept of "Everything is imbalanced, therefore all is balanced." Many board games we played tended to lean towards a zero-sum game principle, which is why we wanted our design to be more bold. System Out is a competitive free for all game, where your cards are used as single targeted ability, but through buffing it ingame or finding the right position on the board, the true devastation of a card could be unleashed, allowing one player to toy with multiple, if not all other players at once.

The Map starts empty with most resource tiles faced down. These resource tiles give the player an advantage. The players then have step on, to reveal each tile, and through hacking later on, can also fully block a map tile, thus trapping other players in a grid zone.

We were inspired by Dota 2's design, which had a similar philosophy in its game balancing, that gave a wide array of options, that could disproportionately scale, but also had disproportional powerful counter play.

This was because each card possessed a second state, the could be powered up with a resource they would gather and depending on the card, the effects were wide ranging and could easily turn a disadvantage to an advantage, allowing for crazy dynamics to come into play.

Development

Since the art was still in the making, we started off our development with a paper prototype, simulating the board, player pieces and game pieces that we wanted to go for. The paper prototype helped us iterate rapidly on design. We went through a multitude of iterations, always emphasizing on always taking in fresh faces, who had never played our game to test it. It was actually very simple to get people excited to try out our game and the information we collected was invaluable to help improve on our designs, knowing what we needed to keep and expand upon and what needed to go. As the final art came together with the finished iterated designs, System Out took its full form and was released.