Breakout

Overview

Breakout is a four-player competitive board game where each player is an inmate in a high-security prison. The aim of the game is to be the first person to enact their escape plan and be the first one to break out. Each player starts the game with a hidden escape plan which involves crafting a particular set of tools and an escape location. Roll the dice and visit the different rooms in the prison to collect the materials needed to craft the tools. Each tool also a gameplay benefit that can help you or hinder your opponents. Rolling doubles results in the player drawing an action card, these cards can be game-changing effects that each player will need to use at the right time to disrupt their opponents' game plan. Can you be the first to Breakout! 

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Breakout was a group project made for my second year of University of Portsmouth studying Computer Games Technology (BSc) for the prototyping and iterating game designs module.

 

Roles and Responsibilities

The project was very collaborative. We all pitched in with ideas to adjust the design as the project progressed. For this module, the first thing was make a rough design of the game's concept after researching and playing preexisting board games. The focus of the module was to get us to rapidly produce a playable version of the game so that we can experience the design as it was intended to be played. This gave us insight into the user experience of playing the game and seeing firsthand how does the game feel like to play, did the balance of the game feel fair and equal, did mechanics (like the action cards) feel fun and tactical. 

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I was primarily involved in creating and documenting the game's rule book, the design of the game's escape plans and resources, and the effects of the action cards. We had a lot of meetings and playtest sessions where I recorded notes and changes that we should make. A lot of changes were made during the project, such as the tools being given passive benefits during gameplay instead of just being necessary to win. Each of the tools needed to have effects that thematically made sense. I was in charge of creating these passive benefits and balancing their impact.

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I also organised some of the external playtesting sessions where we got useful feedback from players with a range ages and experience of board games.  

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Challenges

One of the major challenges that we discovered was trying to keep the game simple enough so that players didn't feel overwhelmed by the rules and effects that they needed to be aware of, but complex enough so that players felt like they were being tactical with their turns and effectively using their resources in a meaningful way. Likewise, we wanted enough interaction between players so it felt like they were playing with each other instead of everyone playing their own game individually. The action cards were a solution to this as they provided a way for players to plan ahead and sabotage their opponents plans. Players needed to take note of how the other players were playing so they could use their action cards to the greatest effect. 

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Outcome

We got an 84 for presenting our finished product. This was the most polished and updated version that included all of the changes that we made during development. We got good feedback about the