Freya Guntrip
Welcome to my portfolio!
This'll slowly be getting bigger and bigger, feel free to click on the buttons below to learn more about my projects! <3
Domina
The original concept of Domina was spawned out of a desire to make a card game which could hold a lot of strategic depth, but wasn't so complex that my family, who are notoriously not fans of card games, could pick up and have fun with.
Core Mechanics
At its core, Domina is a deckbuilding game, where players come to face each other with decks that they have made on a battlefield. To make this more unique than some other card games on the market, however, I created two core mechanics from which the rest of the game would be based on:
The Battlefield and Environments.
The Battlefield
The Battlefield is a tile grid on which players would deploy common units represented by tokens called Troops as well as their unique champion, their Paragon. This was done in order to evoke the idea of the players being tacticians on a battlefield commanding their armies to victory against their opponents.
The original Battlefield from Domina v0.1
Environments
Environments are optional rules which modify how the game is played. This was done in order to add new ways to play the game to keep it exciting as well as synergize with certain types of decks.As of this point, I haven't developed many Environments as I wanted to focus on making sure that the core rules of the game would be fun before modifying it.
The First Playtest
My initial round of playtesting showed me a lot of the issues of Domina. The biggest issues were the core gameplay, the general weakness of Paragon abilities in regards to their costs, and a problem that my playtesters lovingly called "The Cask of Amontillado," which became the working name for that issue.
Stamina and Flow, Revised
To put it simply, people enjoyed the ideas behind Stamina and Flow, but the execution was very poorly done. In order to fix this, I made Stamina a constant number and allowed for players to steadily generate Flow over time, though the most efficient way to gain Flow is still by taking out other Troops. This was done in order to encourage spending Flow more as well. However, I introduced other mechanics to encourage Flow spending as well.
Classes and Developments
The Class system in v0.1, while interesting, ultimately made the game much more complex than it had to be. So, I decided to scrap it in exchange for Developments. Developments were meant to provide more interesting things that a player could do with their Flow besides spells and Paragon abilities. This also allowed a lot more customization options and strategy elements for the game.Additionally, this change removed the to-hit die, DEF as a stat, and removed the requirement to have Troops as cards in your deck, instead replacing them with tokens. In short, this one change almost completely overhauled the gameplay of Domina.
The Cask of Amontillado
The Cask of Amontillado was the culmination of many issues with the game, with the biggest shortcomings being the size of the battlefield and how attacks worked.In order to fix this, I increased the size of the battlefield and updated the rules such that attacks could come from any direction and also made Troop summoning much more of an intentional decision rather than it being a one-turn cost.
Additions and Removals
For the next and most recent version of the game, a lot of modifications were made.The primary additions were changing Spells to Ideas in order to better fit the names of the cards in with the world which Domina takes place in, Iskashi, making new Ideas, and changing the name of the game from Paragon to Domina.The primary removals were a lot of the Spells from v0.1 as well as two of the Paragons from v0.1 so I could focus on making the core gameplay good rather than having to balance it with the other Paragons as well.
Ley'oRk
Ley'Ork is a setting for the world of Cahyali as part of the Fantasy Club at Purdue University. It was written to be a satirical take on the current state of the United States of America while also presenting an interesting setting for tabletop players to create characters and stories in.
Working in a Shared World
The setting of Cahyali is a shared collaborative world created by many individuals, and has had many games run in the setting since its creation. As such, it is important that when making the setting, all of the parts being contributed by all of the collaborators fit together.Ley'Ork as a setting was built to be an antagonistic force in Cahyali, and as such has many ties to the other nations in the setting. However, it was also important that Ley'Ork had its own strong identity as a setting to ensure that players would want to use the setting and add their own parts to the setting.
Creating the Setting
To describe Ley'Ork suscinctly, it is a steampunk take on 1920's America, but the prohibition is on magic.