Battle Mascots — The Crown for College Football Fans
Project Date: May 2023 — April 2024
Project Role: Solo Developer
Have you ever found yourself at a college gameday party with nothing to do before the game begins? Maybe a game would pass the time — except, you realize, that your options are very limited. Who wants to play a shoddy Monopoly re-theme or branded Tic-Tac-Toe? Or, worse — go outside and throw beanbags on the ground, all while you’re waiting out a set of mind-numbing commercials?
That’s where Battle Mascots comes in. Battle Mascots is a brand-new blending of board and card gaming gameplay to create a competitive experience tailor made for college football fans. Up to four players choose a mascot to represent, and duke it out on a large board in a battle for the last man — or, rather, animal — standing, with the winner being crowned the mascot of the up and coming University of College Football.
Prototyped in Tabletop Simulator, a Unity-based engine for board games, Battle Mascots aims to fill a strangely open void in the entertainment market. Many of the ways that fans have to connect with their favorite sport are shallow at best, be it cheap merchandise or poor entertainment — a game built from the ground up like Battle Mascots has no such issue. With the game’s heavy focus on replayability, it aims to cement itself as a party tradition for both college friends and football-loving families alike.
Choosing a Project
Battle Mascots is a rather nontraditional Capstone project, for the primary reason that going in, I wanted to ensure that I was working on something I was passionate about. With my primary interest being game design, I wanted to make something that both tapped into that passion and challenged me to further my skills. However, with this being a solo project, and my skills being limited, I knew I had to choose something that I could viably complete by myself.
And so, what I came up with was to make a combination board and card game. This was an avenue of game design I had hardly explored yet, on top of being something that required more graphic design skills rather than outright artistry. I quickly realized I could host my game idea in Tabletop Simulator, a flexible Unity-based engine practically made for digital board games — and with that, I had a plan.
To tie the idea together, I needed a theme. Going in, I wanted the theme of the project to have a wide target audience — a large motivator with this was wanting to make something that my own family could enjoy. Thus, I settled on college football as the overarching theme, and with fan culture surrounding my life, the idea of mascots competing against each other immediately came to mind.
Initial Hurdles
Making the game a competitive affair brought several inspirations — primarily Mario Party and the City Trial mode from Kirby Air Ride, both games famed for their fun, chaotic multiplayer. I knew that I wanted to capture this energy, so I channeled City Trial and fashioned Battle Mascots as a resource-gathering competitive game with a set end point. Many of the mechanics poured in after — interestingly, a lot of the design work was deciding what not to include to prevent clutter, rather than coming up with features in the first place.
I tossed around a handful of ideas and collected them all in a Design Document that I submitted as a deliverable. This document ended up as the basis for the Capstone as a whole and continued to evolve throughout the semesters as the central hub for the Capstone’s content. Personalization quickly became a major theme — for the mascots to be a valuable part of the game, players would need to get attached to them, so the game had to be constructed such that each mascot felt unique every time you played the game. As such, many elements of randomness were introduced.
I didn’t nail everything immediately, however. I started the project with a much narrower theme than the final result — inspired by UGA’s own line of bulldog mascots, the Uga family, I initially had my sights on solely theming the game after UGA, and hoping that for non-UGA fans the gameplay would carry it through anyways. To say this was short sighted would be an understatement — once I got past the initial planning phase, expanding the theme to college football in general was one of the first changes made.
Features
Battle Mascots is split into two distinct parts, “Gather Phase” and “Battle Phase”, that alternate in a pattern of 3 Gather and 1 Battle phase in a total of four cycles. In Gather Phase, each mascot rolls a dice and moves that many spaces on the board (+ their “Speed” stat), choosing one of many different branching paths. Depending on the space they land on, they’ll gain one of numerous benefits.
- They could land on a Bench space to upgrade their Spirit (health) or Power (damage) by one;
- A Gym, giving their leader a random Trait (passive benefit);
- A Library, giving their leader a random Ability (active, usable benefit with a specific effect);
- A Gift Bag, giving them a random Item to use at any time;
- A Tent, letting them recruit a random Unit;
and a handful more, as well. Once each player has gone three times, the game proceeds to Battle Phase, where most of these card types come into effect. Each Leader and the various Units everyone has played go one at a time, attacking each other and whittling away at Spirit values. The game then loops back to Gather Phase until twelve turns have passed, whereupon Sudden Death activates, putting the game into an continuous Gather Phase until each player makes their way to the final battlegrounds for one last Battle Phase to crown the winner.
In order to keep the game replayable, the different card types total up to a hundred, ensuring that no two games — or two mascots, even — will look the same. Tabletop Simulator gives an additional ease to the random elements — with built-in deck shuffling and dice rolling, it’s sure to save a few arguments. The mechanics, too, are built to enhance replayability — the dozens of different space and card types keep the players intrigued and wanting to come back to see what they missed.
Creating an Identity
A game can’t exist without a distinct visual identity — so once all features were laid out and an Alpha was put together, next on the docket was a brand style guide. Battle Mascots demands an energetic feel, one that goes well with its competitive spirit. I chose a saturated color palette of green, blue, and red — with green being the primary color thanks to the turf association. The secondary color palette contains some highlights and a yellow reserved for the crown used in the logo — a symbolic representation of the race to the top. The logo, too, carries the competitive spirit by focusing on the As, using lines to make them look like angry faces.
Battle Mascots also carries a friendly, encouraging demeanor in its brand voice — but nothing too cartoony. While the game is tongue-in-cheek and appropriate for children to play, there’s definitely a line that I don’t want to cross here. Lastly, the UI components needed to be created — this was a struggle, since as I mentioned before, I’m not exactly an artist. However, manipulation of stock images and a handful of doodles was enough to get by for most things.
The last step was creating the board and the card templates themselves — the former was largely busywork, and after a few hours I had a board with over 200 spaces on it, ensuring there’d be plenty of paths for players to choose from. The latter took a bit more time — but after messing around with different patterns and shapes, I ended up with the template above. This was by far the most valued part of my style guide, and I was pleased when it was the most well received aspect of it as well. Other aspects had some more tribulations — the color palette and logo had some odd oversights in the initial draft, and I was lacking in many guidelines as well, but this was nothing a round of feedback couldn’t patch up.
User Testing
Next was making sure that the game actually worked in practice. Planning and making cards is nice and all, but in the real world, everything could fall apart based on player actions. I recruited a small group of 6 people to start out and provided them with surveys to gauge what aspects of the game they were enjoying. As they played the game, I took notes and used a personal checklist of what percentage of players were engaging with the different mechanics.
The testing process was immediately revealing the second it began. Within my testing groups, we had to make several on-the-fly decisions to fix the game balance; one of the first major changes that was necessitated was the number of turns. In my original draft, Gather and Battle Phase alternated every turn, but that balance quickly proved to be disastrous in practice, as the players could constantly wail on each other and never have enough time to amass long-term resources. This change worked well, though it required noticeable rebalancing with several of the cards as they became overly powerful with the new mechanics.
Another change that had to be made was the rulebook. I initially used the notebook feature in Tabletop Simulator to contain all of the rules, but virtually all of my playtesters found it confusing and cluttered. Given that the notebook feature was annoying to work with in the first place, I decided to scrap everything and start over, creating a PDF rulebook instead.
This ended up being the far superior option, as the notebook feature was limited to text only; in a PDF, I could create visual aids to greatly streamline the process.
Fortunately, once we got past the initial hurdles, the primary focus of testing was a resounding success — since the entire game was designed around coming back to it and being different each time, I very much wanted to gauge replayability more than anything. In total, each of the testers rated their likelihood to return to the game at an average of 4.5 out of 5 stars, above my target goal of 4. With the rate of engagement for the mechanics also being high overall, and the various changes to the game working well, I left testing feeling good.
1.0 Launch
While testing was a boost, there was still quite a bit left to do for the 1.0 Launch. Beta testing was still done with a placeholder version of the board with many assets being simple doodles. For a while, I had convinced myself that I’d just be able to “figure something out” for the art assets, but now the time to do so was upon me.
What I decided on was to use a blend of stock images and the original doodles. For Units and Items, I used stock images, largely gathered from Unsplash, Adobe Stock, and iStock. For Abilities and Traits, I drew the icons myself — the former in a similar style to the example Trait that I made for my style guide, and the latter in a chalkboard-esque art style to make my stick figures a little more palpable and stylistic.
The player tokens were also an issue — I was initially sure I wanted them to be 3D models, ala Monopoly tokens, but was unable to find a way to pull this off; I ended up swapping them out for 2D tokens at the last second after a moment of clarity. Once all of the art assets were complete, and the testing feedback implemented, the 1.0 was virtually complete!
Lessons Learned
This project was surprisingly tough to develop and forced me to think critically about the decisions I was making — especially when this was a solo effort. With no team members to fall back on, I had to strategize how I could design my Capstone myself, which felt limiting and frustrating at times, but ultimately rewarding. Thanks to this Capstone, I have a lot more experience in game design prototyping; and I have a few more points of advice for anyone who wants to try something similar, as well.
- Don’t be afraid to scrap ideas. I had many more ideas at the start that I ultimately decided cluttered the game too much, and the final product was better off without them.
- Similarly, sometimes starting over is the best option. There were several points in this Capstone where I was fixated on a specific idea that just wasn’t working — and starting over or coming up with a different idea entirely was the much better option.
- Try to approach things with a mindset of what’s going to be the most useful to you. The Capstone professors are extremely helpful and flexible, and if an assignment feels like it doesn’t fit your Capstone very well, then chances are they’ll be able to help you refit it to suit your needs.
- Get other people involved early. This isn’t necessarily a statement of “you should have a partner”; rather, even just having a friend to bounce ideas off of can really help to get you out of a rut. It took me quite a while to ask friends for their thoughts on the game, and it was immediately eye opening as soon as I did.
Thanks for reading, and I hope you’re fired up to shoot for the crown — the Battle Mascots final version is now available on the EM Capstone website.
