Leviathan

2014

Summary

Leviathan is a two player board game made to evoke the feeling of arena based mech combat.

What Went Well

• Mechanics for each attack are varried and interesting.
• The final iteration of Leviathan successfully captured the feeling of mech combat.

What Went Wrong

• Game was solvable and unfun until final iteration.
• The weeks spent iterating complex systems could've been spent fleshing out the systems I actually shipped with.
• Map is barren and uninteresting.

Process and Post Mortem

Leviathan started life as a one-on-one fight to the death on a hex grid. Players would attack different parts of their opponent's mech and cripple it in various ways. There were no die rolls and nothing on the map. This resulted in whoever moved in range of their opponent first losing. Attempts to mitigate this using changes to the map were attempted, but the system remained solvable.

During the final week I drastically altered the combat entirely. Gone was the ability to target specific parts of your opponent's mech, instead the player would have access to different attacks depending on how close they are to their opponent. This new system allowed for the development of distinct abilities that were more interesting than simply targeting and dealing damage. Attempting to emulate the complicated systems of popular mech board games like Battletech ultimately moved me further from my stated goal. Nevertheless, this was an important lesson to learn: pure simulation is not necessarily a path to the feeling you want to capture as a designer.