Kevin Kincaid
Game Designer & 3D Artist
October 2022 -
November 2022
2-4 Players | Competitive | Board Game
4 Person team - role: Team lead & game designer
Scourge Control is a turn-based competitive board game for two to four people. Players are exterminators working at Scourge Control, the “premiere infestation fighting force in the galaxy.” Players move their characters across a tile-based map, drawing new room tiles from a stack. Tiles may contain upgrades, healing stations, or alien creatures. Players compete to defeat the most enemies and earn the largest paycheck.
Scourge Control was created for the Ludic Methodology Class at Savannah College of Art & Design. This group project was created with Nathan Ernst, Qiduo Yuan, and Katie DeJarlais. I was the project leader and created the initial concept. Nathan was my co-designer, and Qiduo and Katie created the artwork. All members assisted in game development and playtesting. I am happy to answer any questions about the game development responsibilities.
Scourge Control Sizzle Reel
Development Process
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The game concept is inspired by Super Metroid, copyright of Nintendo. We make no claim of ownership to any copyright of Super Metroid, and this project is intended for purposes of education.
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Game Development
This was my first team lead on a project and I did my best to rise to the occasion. The team voted for the idea, and we were all excited to develop a physical project.
After I constructed a quick physical prototype, we began to examine how the game plays. The first series of changes that occurred was in developing the boss fights. After early discussions, we decided bosses should each get a specific board and draw from a deck of cards to decide their actions. We settled on three boss concepts to build.
Our second idea was how characters should receive upgrades. We decided that monsters are worth coins, and players can purchase upgrades using this currency.
As we began playtesting the project, we decided that the game needed a better system of progression. Upgrades helped the players, but it was less clear how to balance the map in order to increase difficulty as the game unfolds. We decided that the game should have separate decks of tiles. Each deck is more difficult and is added to the game over time. This allowed us to guarantee that all the healing or upgrade tiles are not grouped on the bottom of the deck.
One problem was the length of the game. The game took a while to explain, but players liked the game once they got the rhythm of combat. Because of the game length, later sections of the game were not as well evaluated as earlier sections. One boss had been fought a few times while the others sat on the sidelines. We also had ongoing discussions of how players interact. After back and forth based on the playstyles of different groups, we decided that the goal was to encourage players to compete with each other indirectly by fighting monsters to obtain the most coins.
Finished Version
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The main changes at this point were related to efficiency and power balancing. We cut the number of bosses to two, and decided on the cost of upgrades, and the strength of enemies. Meanwhile, the art team developed the artwork that we printed off and assembled. We choose not to print at the professional level as we are unsure about the finality of this project and may revise it in the future.
One of the final decisions was on the theme. We developed the theme while writing the pitch for the sizzle reel video. We decided to make it humorous and themed it as a company with minimal safety concerns advertising its services. We reflected this in the rule book.
Scourge Control Game Demonstration
Overall, I am happy with how this project turned out. It is possible we will return to this in the future and make another iteration to improve upon it, but I think this is a strong project. The whole team worked very well and I would happily recommend them and their skills.