Collapsi Devlog - The End of the Jam

The week has certainly ended with a bang.  We were on our way to my parents' house, and our card broke down.  Coming out of the Chick-fil-A, our car stopped wanting to move forward, and it began spewing some sort of noxious smoke out the rear.   Road trip canceled.  Even though there will not be a demonstration and review of the game from my family, nor will there be a multiplayer play test today, I did make some good progress on the two player game over the last few days of the jam.

Ultimately, we landed on a 6x8 grid composed of 46 number cards and two jokers.  There are eight of each number 1-5, and then we included six 6's.  This proved to be a good size board, with good number variety, and not too many 6's choking up the board.  We also tested playing this board with no items by removing the special abilities from the 6's.  This proved to be just as fun.  I had a hunch, however, that we may have been trying to incorporate too many different powers into the game.  I suggested we try one power: make all 6's tunnel cards.  After landing on one, you may either hop to any other 6 on the table, or you may move 6 spaces.  IF there are no other 6's on the table, you must move 6 spaces on your next turn.  This was the perfect balance, and it added nicely to the theme of mini-molemen digging and tunneling around the board.  

At this point, there are two questions I would still like to answer.

• What if we allow players to finish their movement on a card that is already occupied by an opponent?
  • Normally, you can only pass through an occupied card as part of the number you must travel.
  • Last night I was able to trap my opponent by occupying the only card she was able to move onto.  
• What if we stick with a 5x5 board?
  • I still feel that a board bigger than 5x5 is unnecessary.  
  • I would use the 46 card deck as described above, but I would pull 23 cards from it at random and shuffle the jokers into for the game grid.
    • This would allow for some real variety in the board makeup.  
    • Really players could make the board any size and shape that they please.

Solo Mode
I have been working on a solo mode of this game, and I think I have settled on basic rules.  The objective is different.  It actually turns the game more into a puzzle to be solved.  I might also be able to create a solver tool that will help me generate routine puzzles for people who want to play.  With the solver, I will know the best path and top score possible for each puzzle.  More on this to come in a separate post.

Conclusion
This has been an awesome weeklong jam.  My next steps for the two player game include answering the questions I stated above as well as beginning to make some art assets exploring the theme and style of the game.  I would love for people to be able to play this game with a standard deck of cards and some tokens from around the house, but I think it deserves to be fully developed into a proprietary tile game.  I also think it would be a great digital game (especially the solo mode... PICO-8!?). I think Collapsi is an arcade style game, and I would like to explore that as thoroughly as possible.