Pivorow

• Refined the core mechanics of a board game concept I created, to turn it into an abstract strategy genre version.

• Playtested and iterated on the new core mechanics.

• Developed the app along with another developer, in Unity C#.

• Designed and developed a tutorial for the game.

• Worked on art assets together with experienced game artist.

• Refined the game rules for balance based on an AI version of the game created by the other developer, which could calculate dominant strategies.

• Released the complete alpha version on the Google Play Store.

Project goals

My goal was to create a simplified, abstract strategy version of a board game prototype I made. That game was Get Six, which was a lot like this one but featured many more crazy cards and a randomized way to get them. The concept that came out of that sparked passion in people close to me, and together we formed a team whose goal it was to create a polished alpha that we could release on the Play Store.

Design & development process

Playtesters of Get Six enjoyed the core mechanics of the game but felt the game was unfair, and I noticed that wins were most often decided by who pulled rare strong cards first. So in Pivorow I got rid of the random cards mechanic and instead chose for the player to be able to gain cards through gameplay. Placing pieces in certain patterns of 4 gives the player another card of chosen type. The first is a 2x2 block, chosen mainly for it's simplicty (to remember and to achieve in game). The other is 4 pieces diagonally, chosen to incentivize a diagonal strategy which often requires more cards than a regular line win.

I also chose to only include two card types, the turn and remove card, which were most enjoyed by testers and were experienced to have the most strategic potential with the. For balancing the rules, Thomas had created an AI, console app version of pivorow that gave us insight into what dominant strategies were. With it we gathered that players didn't have to try to get cards when they started with a lot of cards, so we chose 2 of each card type to start with. We also found that the player that started always had a slight advantage when both players started with 2 of each card, so we gave the player that places second one extra card with type of choice (inspired by a similar systems in games like Hearthstone).

Project conclusion

We made a MOSCOW list of the game's features and had regular meetings about design, development and art decisions. We used Trello to plan tasks and divide them between team members who worked on the game alone or together whenever our schedules had an opening. After about a year of on-and-off work and we managed to get a working alpha version released on the Play Store with a tutorial, sound, music and even some nifty game settings. 

In 2024 though, I was very busy with my education and other game projects and decided to take down the game instead of continually updating it further, which would have been necessary to keep it on the Play Store. In the future though I would like to improve upon it, like by adding online support which I learned to implement in the Yaikomon project.