Marshmallow Fight Club Postmortem

 Game Information

• Group 1

• Marshmallow Fight Club is a card game about character creation and fighting. Players create their own unique characters using a selection of gear items, and then those characters fight using their special gear abilities to turn the battle to their advantage!

• Target Audience: Ages 6-12, Competitors, Storytellers, and Artists seeking a fast-paced, highly replayable Player vs Player experience

When we got assigned the project

Going into this project, I was very excited because this time we’d be creating a completely original idea for a board game! Albeit with a few constraints. Our group was assigned to make a fighting game with a theme of marshmallows! I thought that this combo was super exciting! However, I was also worried, because when I heard the term “fighting game” I pictured games like street fighter or tekken or smash brothers. But how do you translate a game like that to a board game??

My own First Ideas

I was utterly stumped at how me and my group partner were supposed to translate the fast-paced moment-to-moment gameplay of a fighting game into a board game, and so I decided to conduct my own research into how other board games “do fighting” pretty much.I found a super interesting video by a board game channel that covered a wide variety of combat systems across multiple games. There were many interesting systems, but all of them used dice or some form of turn-taking the conclusion I came to was that real-time combat seen in traditional fighting video games would be difficult, and for time’s sake it was best to go for turn-based fighting instead.

Our first meeting + First Iteration (V1)

Later that week, I met with my partner for the first time! Together, we straight away got to work on the first iteration on our project. We came up with a game that my partner said was inspired by Risk: a game where two players take turns moving marshmallow characters around a grid, and can fight each other when adjacent by rolling dice. We weren’t satisfied with just this idea, but the grid-based movement set a good foundation for what was to come next. We drafted a simple rule sheet together and submitted it as our V1 assignment.

Character Customizer Idea

One evening, a couple days later, the issue of making the marshmallow game interesting was still plaguing me. Thinking about marshmallows in the shower, an idea came to me! I thought of when I was little and I’d get assigned projects like building the strongest bridge out of just marshmallows and toothpicks, and I thought that it would be fun if we used real marshmallows as pieces, and made small accessories, eyes, and other features that we could attach to thumb tacks and stick inside the marshmallow as a sort of character creator! This idea had me very excited, and after I dried off I got to work immediately on sketching concepts and ideas for different pieces!

(me deciding how to draw a marshmallow)

Integrating Character Customization w Gameplay/ Enter V2

Now I had this cool character creator of sorts, but not really any actual game or reason to make these characters. Working together with my partner we decided that we could merge this character customization by rewarding pieces for defeating enemies around the board. However, this radically expanded what we had to do for the game. Not only did we need to design our board, deciding what the perfect amount of enemy spaces is and where to place them, but we also now needed to create enemies, combat, stats, gear, and of course balance everything against everything else.

Suffice to say we had a lot of concept generating to do! At our next meeting, my partner and I came up with concepts for different gear items and enemies, and we were able to get a decent amount of gear and a handful of enemies! 

Difficulties with V2

Unfortunately for us, with a much bigger scope our game became harder to manage. And not just that, but certain fundamental systems of the game just didn’t fit together very well. While our system of moving around the overworld and defeating enemies was very cool, it would lead to our players barely directly interacting with each other. And our fun character customization became a game of numbers and stat bonuses, draining the creativity it was originally meant to draw out of players. We had a cool game and cool ideas, but we weren’t providing the fun and silly experience we had hoped for. My excitement about working on the game had dwindled, and the work began to feel like a chore.

An Answer to V2 / The Beginning of V3

Thinking about how we could solve our problems of scope and balance and player interaction, I thought about which parts of our game were fun and which ones weren’t. Making characters out of marshmallows and accessory pieces was very fun, but walking around the overworld and playing against enemies that essentially boiled down to skill checks wasn’t very fun. So I decided to get rid of the enemies and the board and the stat bonuses and start from scratch with just combat and character creation!

After some brainstorming, I was able to come up with a way to fit these two systems together quite nicely! I ditched the board and enemies, and my brand new idea was that players would be presented with the full selection of gear items to choose from right from the get go! Players would create characters with a unique combination of a hat, eyes, and weapon. Then they would fight by rolling dice and using 3 castable abilities with unique effects on their dice! This idea led to a satisfying back and forth dialogue between the two systems of combat and character creation. Players would have fun making silly characters, battle each other using those characters, and then go back to character creation to build different combinations of abilities for the next round!

Playtesting / V3 Takes Shape

The night I had the idea, I immediately got to work on a paper prototype that I could play with my roommates. I quickly made character sheets to draw characters in place of real marshmallows, and I made nine small gear cards (three of each type) that displayed the gear and abilities on them! 

My first test subject was one of my roommates who I was very lucky to find awake so late. After playing some I found that a Best of Three Rounds format was the sweet spot for letting players experiment with different combos, but not fatiguing them by the end. I also decided that making each card usable only once was fine because games usually only lasted 3-4 turns anyway.

The next day I was able to playtest with yet another roommate and some more friends, and players were having a lot of fun with my prototype! One rule that ended up doing loads for the game was that players would start with an extra point of HP if they named their fighter and introduced them to their opponent. Players were even more engaged with character creation, creating characters with backstories and motivations. Some stories and character development even emerged from the game as characters won or lost fights!

The last major thing I was able to work out with playtesting was sudden death. Players in Marshmallow Fight Club take their turns and apply damage at the same time. (this also leads to faster and more engaging gameplay by eliminating the waiting period between turns) But that means that sometimes, both players are KO’d at the same time. An on-the-fly idea I had when this happened with me and a playtester was that players would be able to use all their gear cards again, and they would try to roll the highest damage possible in one sudden death turn. The player with the highest number wins!

Final Revisions / V4

After the playtesting with V3, we finally had a solid and playable game to show for our weeks of hard work, and most of the criticisms and feedback from our forum post were just suggestions on clarifications for the rule sheet, and higher quality game art. So for the final week of the project I cleaned up the rule sheet and made nicer, digital versions of the game materials!

One change I did make to make the HP easier to display on the character sheets was to add an HP bar. Players cut slits in the horizontal lines so that they can fold each tab of the bar to accurately represent their current health! This model also accommodates restoring HP to the bar since the game has healing items.

What Would I Do Differently?

I think that this development process went very very well, however there is always room for improvement. This time around taught me the importance of playtesting and early prototyping. For the first two weeks our game was kind of this abstract concept we both had in our heads, but not really anything concrete that we could actually play and modify to our liking. As soon as I made those first cards and had that first playtest with my roommate though, immediately my concept took its first leaps towards a completely playable game as I was able to make up rules as I went along and test them right away. Next time my top priority is to begin playtesting even sooner, and have a prototype that we can play with as soon as humanly possible.

Final Thoughts

Having completed the project now, I can say that I’m very happy with my group’s game! I worked hard on this project and had to make a lot of drastic cuts and changes, but I believe that these setbacks and changes led to an even better final product! Now we have a game that’s simple, but still very fun and replayable, and I personally enjoy playing it with my friends and family. I’m very excited to start our Unit 3 Project and pitch some of my own original ideas!