A big part of the designing for this game was in the form of meetings. During the spring after release we held weekly meetings with the team where the goal was to nail down the design of the rework. I played the role of a counter weight or a devils advocate trying to steer the project towards a more cleaner and simpler design. A lot of the issues that the first release had was the lack of Battle in this game. The initial solutions we attempted was the adding of a lot of player mechanics and different types of player interaction, but I drafted a proposal of focusing more so on changing the "sorting" mechanic of the game into a single drop zone approach, and introducing more complexity with the arenas to keep the game less repetitive.

As we landed on changing the game from the player scoring using multiple "drop zones" or areas where the player can score by dropping the associated type of object into it., into a single drop zone, I had to rethink how would the scoring work. 

First idea was to associate the player with a given item type, meaning the player would have to scope out their items in a sea of items. However, this would bring up the issue of having to ensure no player is ever at a disadvantage. It also went against our core principles of being at a claw machine not necessarily having to stick to a "type." Most importantly the whole reason of making the game have one drop zone was to create scarcity of options forcing the players to interact and fight amongst each other, by making every player have their own item type they get to effectively play the game on their own disregarding all of the other players (short of having to dodge each other on the way to the drop zone). 

What followed the first iteration was an item type "roulette". A part of the arena that would determine which item types would be scoring for this moment. Every 15 seconds or so the roulette would spin and land on an item type that would score. 

The roulette answered a few problems:

• By making only one type score, the players HAVE to fight over the limited item pool.

• The roulette spinning gave the players a good sense of suspense to keep them engaged.

• The other "non-scoring" type objects became obstacles blocking the player from picking up the desired object, making taking items from other players sometimes the easier option, further favoring combat. 

As our time and team was stretched thin, we didn't have a lot of resources to work on the second part of making the game feel more fresh and combative, the arenas. The main targets were to keep the game feel fresh on new rounds within the same play session, and encouraging player encounters. As the mechanical elements already implemented in the game were limited I took a simple approach to create a list of arenas to be added to the game. 

I simply created and explained a few arenas the players could enjoy, keeping in mind how the restructuring would influence the availability of objects and their access (the the snake arena on the right, the drop zone moving makes it harder to score while shuffling the content of the floor, making it even more advantageous to fight players for their pickups). After I had a list of arena mock-ups I sorted them by priority, from 0 (has to be included as part of the MVP) to 9 (pipe-dream feature, backlogged). Priority was given based on this criteria: how hard it was to implement, how much it would add to the game and how much more overhead was needed to be added to the game. 

Here is the whole design document available to view here through Google Docs. 

Sections made and managed by me are:

• Arenas

• Arena Components

• Scoring

• Collectable Items