You jump in the air to whack a floating multicolored ball, knowing that if you hit it, you will be able to grievously hurt your enemies. Your sword (or fist) connects with the ball, it bursts, and you start to glow. As you enact the power of the Final Smash, a character specific animation pops up on screen, showing your opponents that doom is coming. Then you swing your sword or fire your weapon, causing your opponent to fly off the battlefield, losing a precious life and bringing you one step closer to victory.
The Final Smash is an awesome power up in Super Smash Bros. that takes the form of a glowing smash ball floating across the battle field. When a player hits that ball, they gain the ability to make a single super powerful attack, which can greatly influence the course of the game. The smash ball gives players a secondary objective that will help them, but it has it’s costs. The smash ball goes all over the map, so you often have to jump off platforms to get it. But by jumping off a platform, you risk falling to your death. Also, you’re giving your opponents the opportunity to charge up powerful attacks or make cheap shots at you.
Ever since I created Battle Bash, adding something akin to the Final Smash into the game has been sitting at the back of my mind. But I haven’t put too much time into coming up with actual mechanics for that until recently. In my last post, I identified lack of player choice as one of the major problems in the current version of my game. One of my ideas to add player choice was side quests. And one of the best ways to make players want to take side quests is to make them have a significant impact on the main goal of the game. However, my game board is tiny, and I don’t want to add very many side quest specific components or make the board bigger. One mechanic I’m testing is adding power ups that you can get simply by going places on the main board. I believe these could add a lot of player choice to my game. . . if I do them right.
I’ve come up with a power up system for my game and have play tested it twice. The system centers around a square in the middle of the game board. When a player moves on that square, they can choose one of five power ups. However, if they have 3 or more hearts, they must sacrifice a heart, removing it from play. If a player has less than three hearts, they can take a power up with no cost. For players with a lot of hearts, power ups have a penalty, but like the Final Smash, the costs are intended to nearly always be worth it.
Penalizing those with more than 3 hearts is a way of leveling the playing field and making it easier for losing players to make a comeback. Players start the game with 3 hearts each, and gain more by taking them from each other. Therefore, if you have 3+ hearts, you’re doing as good, or better than average, but if you have less than 3, you’re losing.
The 5 power ups have a variety of uses. One of them makes you better at battles while another one damages everyone around you. A third one heals you back to 3 health, while a fourth damages your opponents the next time you die. The fifth power up makes you faster so you can battle more people, and is especially useful to the assassin, who depends on being the attacker
I designed this system hoping that it would add more choice to the game, but from my two play tests, I can’t be sure. There are a couple reasons for this. First, one play test is never enough to figure out all the implications of a mechanic. Second, it’s been a while since I tested the game without power ups, so I need to test . Third, the Vicious Aggression power up was extremely overpowered(OP), and over shadowed everything else in the game.
Vicious Aggression gave a +2 bonus to rolls during battle while it was possessed. If you obtained the power up, you got that bonus every battle until you were defeated. For reference, the character powers in Battle Bash are balanced around a +1 bonus to rolls during battle. In the first play test, the player that got this power up won battle after battle until she was defeated by the assassin, which can win a battle on a certain roll no matter what its enemy gets. The assassin then got that power up due to a rule that you get the power ups possessed by people you defeat. He was unstoppable, and ended up winning the game. The power up system as a whole did seem to make players think more about the game (mostly about what power ups they wanted to get) instead of just attacking nearly at random.
After the first play test I decided to have power ups return to the power up supply when the player that possessed them is defeated so there always has to be a sacrifice to obtain one. I changed Vicious Aggression to a +1 bonus, hoping that it didn’t over shadow everything else. But in the second play test, it was still by far the best. The only time anyone chose a different power up was when they were at one heart and healed themselves with Healing Surge. To balance the system, I’ll probably have to increase the power of the other power ups. I might also try making only one or two power ups available at a time so you can’t always chose the best one.
I’ll have to do quite a few more play tests to determine if the power up mechanic is worth keeping in my game, but it shows some promise, and with a bit more refinement, I think it could add that player choice that my game was lacking before. I’ll keep you updated on how play testing goes and the changes I make to this mechanic.
Thanks for reading!!!
