About the Project

Summary

In one month, we redesigned a challenging cooperative board game that was dictated by chance into one where players’ decisions were much more impactful on the outcome of the game. Through an iterative process based on regular testing sessions, we were able to receive immediate feedback and tweak the mechanics until the gameplay experience for playtesters was both challenging and rewarding when they won.

Background

Hypoxia was created as the final project for Game Design Workshop, a class focused on making tabletop games. Over 4 weeks, I worked on a team with two others to design the game. Though my primary roles were project manager and rule writer, we worked closely as a group and each member contributed equally to the design decisions of the game.

Process

The prompt for this project was to use one of our midterm projects as a starting point, but we were free to take it in any direction we wanted. We chose the game Operation: Survive, a 4-player cooperative challenge where the odds were heavily stacked against the players.

Operation: Survive was set in a crash-landed spaceship on a distant alien planet. The objective was to fend off hostile invaders long enough to repair the spaceship. The main problem with the game was that it was too dependent on chance, and players didn’t have much agency. They were randomly assigned roles at the beginning of the game and could only take one of two chance-based actions. For Hypoxia, we wanted to keep the elements of cooperative play and high difficulty while still providing the opportunity to make impactful choices.

In Hypoxia, players are divers exploring the ruins of Atlantis. To fit this theme, we introduced oxygen as a resource required for all actions. This way, players were limited by their oxygen supply rather than randomly assigned roles. Each player only had enough oxygen to safely collect a quarter of the objectives required to win. Games could only be won if every player pulled their weight, making it a truly cooperative experience.

We also redesigned the board visually and mechanically so players had more options for movement. Instead of being limited by adjacent spaceship compartments, players were able to travel around Atlantis using the various paths afforded by branching nodes. The nodes offered faster but riskier paths to objectives, which allowed players to take calculated risks rather than relying on chance to determine the outcome of the game.

Operation: Survive game board

Hypoxia game board

Playtesting

Early on, we created a paper prototype by sketching the game board on pencil and paper. The main things we were looking for at this stage were difficulty and player agency. We still wanted to stack the odds against players, but we also wanted them to be able to make meaningful choices to win. The first round of playtests showed that the game was too easy because players had too much oxygen to freely move around, and verbal communication made it too easy to delegate tasks. This made us realize that we could increase the difficulty by greatly limiting players from talking to each other. As a result, we reduced the amount of oxygen each player started with and required them to expend oxygen in order to communicate with teammates.

From the playtest sessions of the next iteration, we were satisfied with the level of difficulty players were experiencing. However, endings felt anticlimactic because once players managed to successfully bring back the objectives to the submarine at the center of the board, the game would just end. We instead wanted endings to feel more suspenseful and rewarding. To do this, we included encrypted runes in the objectives that provided clues to a final puzzle. Once all the objectives had been retrieved, players had to use the clues to determine the correct combination the runes needed to be placed in. If the players were successful, they would win, but if they failed, their oxygen levels would drop significantly, potentially causing them to lose the game. We felt that this change still preserved the essence of the original game while elevating gameplay experience by increasing the stakes and tension.

Conclusion

This project was different from previous game projects I had worked on because the focus was not on coming up with a brand new concept, but rather fine tuning and redesigning an existing one. I learned that it can actually be more difficult than designing from scratch due to constraints. Since we chose to maintain the essence of the original game, our design choices had to reflect that. It was also rewarding to look back and compare the final product to the original game to see how the changes we made positively impacted players’ gameplay experiences.