Rascals is our newest project. What it will become, if anything at all, is very much up in the air. The basic idea is that of a board game where pieces are moved along a path towards a goal, where opposing players' pieces may be delayed through passing a variety of physics based skill checks. Like all our games it is designed for Virtual Reality, and given the nature of the gameplay it will necessarily stay VR only.
The board is made up of 10x10 cm squares seen from above in room scale, so the player can walk around and interact with game objects through tracked motion controllers. Action Points are scored on a die once per turn, and can be spent on moving pieces around the board (1 square = 1 AP), drawing cards at 1 AP apiece, or performing physics interactions. At any point during his turn, the player can select one of his pieces to control it in first person. This changes the play space from board view to tile view, where the square occupied by the piece in question is 2x2m.
In first person view, the player can walk freely around the current square, and attempt to stun other players' pieces in order to delay them. For example, this can be done by throwing rocks, which costs 1 AP to do and will result in +1 stun on a direct hit to the head. A variety of other means will be introduced, such as shooting guns, throwing grenades and shooting with a bow and arrow. Stunned pieces cannot be interacted with, neither in board view nor first person, and the stun counter reduces by one for each round. If a piece is stunned beyond a certain limit, it is killed and re-set to start.
The card system exists to introduce a level of randomness to the powerup distribution, and to extend the strategic decision making. Powerups are distributed around the board as a level design element, in such a way that powerful weapons etc require the player to make a significant detour from the shortest path to Goal. Thus, drawing a powerful card, for example a gun, can have game changing ramifications, especially if done early. This requires the player to balance several strategies to strike a good balance between rushing pieces to goal, taking high ground, and drawing cards to hopefully gain an early advantage.
We are currently at the early prototype stage, where important concepts are in a state of rapid change. This is the most fun part of game design, where you can let your ideas run free and literally try anything that drops into your head without paying too much attention to downstream consequences. For example, we recently made a radical change to the shape, size and physics properties of the player pieces, in order to solve an unforeseen play space issue. As the project continues to evolve, it will transit towards a more permanent state where the major considerations are shifted towards the grit of reaching an acceptable level of polish, which for a game like this is very high indeed.
We look forward to sharing the process in the upcoming dev blog, and will be announcing a semi closed Beta once we reach a playable product.
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