Trail in the Woods
A Singleplayer, Third-Person, Deck-building Game
Developed in Unity Engine 3D August 23rd-28th, 2022
Role: Systems & UI Designer Team Size: 4
Responsibilities: Documentation, Systems Design, Prototyping, UI Design, Balancing
Overview
Trail in the Woods is a single-player deck-building game
where the player manages a group of friends traveling
through a haunted forest. As the group moves, they will stop
and make one stop a day to eat and rest. During these stops,
the player can manage the group with resources based on the
character’s chosen skills. The player’s role is to manage their
health, hunger, and sanity as the group tries to make it as far
as possible. These resources are shown as cards and can be
allocated to characters to manage the group. Trail in the
Woods is a slow and strategic game where players make
hard decisions to lead their group to safety.
Development of the game took place remotely for the official 2022 Brackeys Game Jam. The jam took place over a week with the theme of You Are Not Alone. Our team’s interpretation of the theme was to make a game focused on managing a group of players with various skills that contribute to the player’s overall success.
My Responsibilities:
I was solely responsible for designing and balancing the game during its development. Since Trail in the Woods is a deck-building game, my primary goal was to design card effects, create rewards for player progress, and decide how cards get added to the player’s deck. After conceptualizing the game loop, I made a physical prototype of the game using flashcards and an excel document for playtesting. Finally, I assisted the team with card implementation and UI blockouts.
Features
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Four characters with new names in each game
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Seven Unique card types
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Thirty-five total cards
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Progression-based deck building
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Multiple Card Types with unique synergies
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A procedurally generated map for replayability
Design Problem: Deckbuilding
One of the main appeals of the deckbuilding genre is how players can form strategies and synergies using the cards available to them. The deck is created to create unique play styles and strategies but is always limited in how and when the cards are made available. One of the main draws of this genre is the delicate balance between player agency when forming the deck and the randomness of the computer when selecting cards from that deck. While working on Trail in the Woods, we found ourselves with a few problems. First, how do the cards function? Then, how does the player decide which cards they start with? And finally, how does the player add new cards to their deck?
Solution #1 - Cards Function & Card Types
Cards in Trail in the Woods are sorted into 7 different types that affect the characters in different ways. The card types include Hunter, Medic, Mystic, Forager, Chef, Navigator, and Event.
One of our main goals was to have a good balance of cards that directly affect characters and cards that create unique synergies. The synergistic cards allow players to form strategies for more emergent gameplay opportunities. These synergies range from enhancing other cards to adding multipliers to cards played in succession. Generally, the chef, forager, and event cards are the types that contain synergistic cards. Our limited development time caused us to be very intentional when adding unique card effects without increasing technical scope. My method was to make the non-synergistic cards as number-based as possible. With mostly number-based cards, we only had to design a few modifiers that interacted with all of our number cards.
Card Synergy Example
The simplicity of number-based cards and modifiers helps to add more synergies without increasing technical scope, but the player needs to have a reason to use their cards more creatively. This challenge facing the player is the event card. The player loses hunger and sanity each turn, but they can also draw a negative event card for an extra challenge. Event cards are in the deck from the start of the game till the end and represent random events that can happen on the character’s journey. Depending on the card, events can be positive or negative. Some can negatively modify other cards, while others increase health or form unique synergies.
Solution #2 - Character Upgrading
The player starts each game with four characters that can learn various skills using points gained throughout the game. All skill levels begin at zero and have a limit of five points per character. Each skill represents a corresponding card type with five unique cards per skill.
A new card is added when the player upgrades a skill. Old cards are not removed from the deck after upgrading.
A new card can be added to the deck when the player allocates a point toward a skill. Since the skill upgrades are character-specific, dying causes the removal of all cards attached to that character. Imagine there is a character that has three points towards the medic skill. Those skill points will translate to three medical cards added to the deck. Those three medic cards will remain in the deck until that character dies. The only case where the card will remain is if the card is currently in the player’s hand. In that case, removal of the card from the deck after its use. Characters can learn multiple skills meaning it is possible for duplicates of cards to appear within the deck.
The player acquires one skill point to the player per turn.
The player can choose to play cards or upgrade based
on the choices provided by the procedurally generated
map. On upgrade turns, the player can recover their
health by resting or gaining more cards by upgrading.
Only shows one character. In-game the deck
is an accumulation of all 4 characters
