Designing Card Drop Distribution with Machinations - Lethal Deal Development Log 5

With a 12 week development cycle, often times as a designer I will try to limit as much iteration that we will need so we can work on implementing more features and polishing old ones. Machinations is a great tool to prototype systems and how they are going to function in game, especially when those systems use percentage chances. 

One feature that I want to implement is a card economy and rarity system into the card drop system and pack system that we have in the game. I feel like this is important because it allows us to lean more onto the TCG flavour of Lethal Deal.

​Check out below how the system is prototyped to work in a "pack" format. Press play to see it in action.

Especially as we are creating a vertical slice for Games Republic, we are aware that any potential judges may only spend 5-10 minutes with our project. So, having a more forgiving rarity system just to show off the variation is important. It will hopefully still give off the same affect of pulling a super rare card, even if the card isn't that rare in reality.

The way that it works is that half of the pack is always going to be common, and then there is a descending chance of rarity in the card pulls from thereafter. 

​​Check out below how the system is prototyped to work in a "card drop" format. Press play to see it in action.

Card drops occur occasionally and only when you kill an enemy. The tricky aspect with this one is that there is only a pool of two cards for distribution. This means that the control that I have over the experience that the player gets is very limited. An example of this, which I am sure you have seen if you have hit play, is that you could get four common x2 in a row, and then all of a sudden get an ultra rare x2 drop. There is potential for even distribution, but it is as unlikely if not more unlikely as uneven distribution. 

Due to this fact, playtesting will be required to determine whether this system of percentage chance is a good solution. Alternatively, increasing the card drop pool to three cards per drop might allow for slightly more control and even distribution of player experiences. 

​I will update this blog in a few weeks with findings from user tests specifically regarding packs and card drops.