Minion Melee

Minion Melee was a project that I worked on with the team at Boss Knight Games as a System and Character Designer.

The goal of Minion Melee was to make a 2-5 player card game, with 4 players playing the titular “Minions” rebelling against a single boss monster. We wanted to make a game that was easy to approach and understand the surface-level rules of, but had enough smaller interactions to allow for a deeper level of strategy as players learned the ins and outs of their chosen Character. On top of that, we decided fairly quickly we wanted a “softer” art style with a little more cartoony-ness to the characters to help make it more approachable to players.

To start, we focused on making a shared deck of cards that could be used for all classes. These cards were the verbs we knew every character, Monster or Minion, would need to be able to take. Attack, defend, support, and rest(drawing new cards). By making a simple deck that we could give to each player we were able to immediately start playing, seeing how each player could interact and, even more importantly, seeing what sorts of interactions we felt players should have but we didn’t have rules for.

For this early prototyping stage we heavily leveraged Tabletop Simulator. This allowed us, as a distributed team, to do “paper” prototyping and we could make changes to the cards we had on the fly. For example, if a card felt particularly weak, we could adjust the numbers on the fly to make it feel like a viable action and see how our play would shift. This early system of constant and on-the-fly rules changing in pursuit of fun is something we continued to do through the entire project.

Once we felt we had reasonable shared actions created, we moved on to creating the unique Minion and Monster classes.

We had a few things we knew we wanted to try to include:

• Tank, Damage, and Support roles(The Holy Trinity) for Minions
• Each Character would have a unique mechanic to drive their identity, and
• We didn’t want supports to simply heal, since we felt that would contribute to an “attrition” style gameplay.

That last one led us to some interesting design spaces, and ultimately to what became the entire teams favorite character, the Chef, but we’ll get to them later.

So we knew this game needed to support 5 players, 4 Minions and 1 Monster, plus we all had a feeling the Support was going to be the hardest character to balance for. This led us to split up the work of designing the remaining 3 Minions and the Monster.

Our initial roster wound up being:

• The Dragon(Monster),
• The Haunted Armor(Tank),
• The Druid (Damage), and
• Berserker(Tank/Damage hybrid)

If you didn’t realize it before, we settled on 3 types of roles for 4 player-characters. We wanted to leave ourselves some flexibility in creating hybrid roles and playing with the design space between the Trinity to try and find things the game felt like it needed as we kept playing.

Ultimately, we felt we needed a damage character who could take as much as they could give out; it was too easy for the Monster to simply focus all their attacks on the Damage character with impunity in order to drastically weaken the Minions. This was a strategy we felt should be able to exist in the game, but not without consequence. So, I spearheaded the creation of The Berserker.

The Berserker, on the surface, was suppose to feel simple - maybe even dumb. You have a less health than the Haunted Armor, but more than the Druid. You deal more damage than the Haunted Armor, but less than the Druid. Almost every card in the deck deals damage.

But there are some twists.

The unique mechanic, Rage, lets you gain a token every time you deal damage. You can spend these tokens to deal more even more damage. If left unchecked, these tokens mean the Berserker can become a threat just by existing due to the ability to spend an unlimited number of them at any time.

But the Berserker can also spend Rage to activate unique abilities on most of their cards. These abilities often revolve around either the amount of HP the Berserker is missing or the amount of damage the Berserker just dealt.

The goal was to force the Monster to try to force the Berserker to spend Rage tokens as a defensive measure rather than an offensive one, limiting the ability of the Berserker to hit back in subsequent turns. But every time the Monster hit the Berserker, they were giving the Druid time to deal damage, and the Haunted Armor time to build up defenses and fortify the team.

This wound up working out of the gate! While the numbers needed to be adjusted, the goal of splitting the monsters attention worked beautifully, and it offered the other characters the time required to set up their more complex combos.