The Shadow of Dracula

You didn’t come this far to stop

What is this?

I worked with a team of 3 other individuals to create a professional Euro-style board game for a Game Design class. The only real constraint for this project was that it had to be a Euro-style game, and the game had to take about an hour to complete.

Ideation

I pitched the idea for the Shadow of Dracula. I really like deck building games and I had an idea for a game taking inspration from the video game V Rising. The main aspects from V Rising that inspired me was, the theme of Vampires, traveling around a region, and fighting regional bosses.

To the right are my actual notes for potential game mechanics for game. We didn't end up using most of these which I feel like is pretty normal.

My Ideation Notes

You are a vampire lord trying to vie for control of the region. You must create thrall, and vampire spawn to take control of the land. Be careful because you don’t want to be caught out in the daytime. You can create a thrill of different monsters and characters with the goal of gaining enough influence and power to overthrow the church.
Light Deck building
Managing suspicion, influence, and power
If when suspicion gets high monster hunters start patrolling
Then finally a witch hunt starts
Travel from city to city
Day/night cycle?
Influence allows you to travel to bigger cities, for more influence
Power is the strength of your army.
At the end of the game, the total power and influence is added to see the final score. Or players work together?
Each Vampire might have a personal agenda, they can complete for extra points.
They are working together to take over but each really wants more power.
Each vampire lord has powers

Our approach for the game was to work out what the core was going to be and then from there figure out what other mechanics fit without making the game too cluttered. The core for our game is you have a basic deck of cards. Your character travels around the board to tiles and buys the cards represented on the tile with the cards in your had. Use then add those cards to your deck to be used later to help buy more cards and so on.

Paper Prototype

Art and Playtesting

Out of the 4 people in our group, me and one other person were the only real artist. So, created the art for all the monster cards, the back of the cards, the board, and the tiles.

I created all of the character art traditionally, with a brush and ink. The board was the only only elaberate art that I did digitally, mostly because it was going to be too big and take up too much time to do traditionally.

This are my actual notes for my planning of the game. I knew the concept was going to be tenticules coming out of the dark. So I broke down into a list of tasks to implement.