"It has been 12 years since Paul Muad'dib Atreides ascended to the throne of the Imperium and the holy war began. The crusades fought in his name encompass hundreds of planets and wreak absolute destruction upon any who dare to oppose them.
As the war finally draws to a close, the lingering powers of the old Imperium conspire against the Holy Emperor."
Dune: Imperium - Ascendancy is an unofficial, fan-made addition to Dire Wolf’s deckbuilder board game, adding in new strategic options for card acquisition through the devotion of your followers, a more intel and risk-based combat system with prescience, and a special class of Tleilaxu sabotage cards to inflict on other players' decks.
Ascendancy includes a completely overhauled game board, 24 new Imperium cards, 16 new Intrigue cards, 26 special Tleilaxu cards, 16 new Conflict cards, and 8 new leaders. Players have access to a variety of new options and paths to victory from new cards and mechanics based on the characters and story of Dune: Messiah. It is my most ambitious solo game development project yet, and has been extremely helpful for studying the design and balance of game economies and resources.
Board Economy Balancing
With how deeply interconnected the various systems of Dune: Imperium already are in the base game, designing and balancing the economy was the most important, but also the most difficult part of development. To do this, I broke the game's economy down into a list of 24 resources that could be earned or spent on board spaces. This included concrete resources, like water, spice and troops, but also more abstract ones, like turn actions or the opportunity to enter a conflict, that were harder to quantify but still an important component of the system.
For each resource, I used the ratio of sources and sinks and the possible exchanges offered by the board spaces in the base game to determine the rough value of each resource relative to the others.
When adding in my modified spaces and new resources, I used these values as guidelines to make sure that the changes I was making to the economy didn't over or under-value any particular resource, or make certain board spaces objectively better or worse.
Card Balancing
Another major balancing element was the game's card and deckbuilding systems. Like with the board spaces, I started by compiling a list of all the cards in the base game, their effects, costs, and board spaces they allowed access to.
When designing new cards, in addition to drawing inspiration from the books for characters and events, I also tried to maintain a similar balance of board space access so as to not skew player movement options too much one way or the other, and stick as close to the original game's card cost curve as possible to ensure a good flow and pace of play.
Card Design
I used Component Studio to recreate the format and design of the original game, setting up templates and programming behaviors for different card components. I was then able to connect the template to a spreadsheet containing the names, text fields, and icons for the various cards to automatically display the card information in the correct format. I set up systems to scale text boxes, toggle overlays, and rearrange and reorder icons based on cell values. The hardest components to make work were those requiring different numbers of lines on different halves of the text field, for which I set up a delimiter to separate the in and out halves of the exchange and space them out evenly.
I plan on commissioning artists at some point in the future when I have a more firmly decided asset list, but for this stage of the project, I've been sketching my own art in MS Paint, with varying degrees of success.