Our team landed on the idea of a pack-opening dinosaur battler within the first week of our concepting, in our Fall 2025 semester. However, we still had many questions left to answer about who our game was for and what would make it stand out! 

My original proposal for our direction was to create a multiplayer autobattler, where the player consistently upgrades their card packs! My original VDD was positively received by our team, but it was too intensive in some ways while lacking depth in others.

We decided front-loaded our game's design, and made sure that all additions were significant and impactful. This gave us plenty of time to polish our game as much as possible in our later sprints.

As a whole, Bonepile Studios was dedicated to making a strong, polished, fully finished game prototype. And to achieve this goal, we focused on implementing quality-of-life additions! I was in charge of our animated tutorial pop-ups, helping to introduce newly unlocked mechanics to the player, including our Bones currency and the Apex Meter!

As our project came to a close, we presented our game at Champlain College's Greenlight Show!

This project was an incredible labor of love for every team member, so it was honestly a stressful night, watching so many high-quality game presentations and knowing that some would have to be cut. But when the final decisions came in, we were elated to hear that Prehistoric Pack was greenlit for further development in our next semester!

With all projects, there came challenges! But by working with my team and communicating openly, we prevailed against our roadblocks!

A notable challenge I faced was maintaining level balance through development. As the dinosaur units were re-balanced, the level designs needed to be changed as well! I also had initially struggled to give honest, to-the-point feedback to my teammates. However, I communicated and worked with my team to ultimately make these past troubles "go extinct"! 

In the first rounds, the player is slowly introduced to the mechanics of the game. The player learns that they get a free card pack every round, offering passive power scaling!

By opening their first card pack, the player is given four common dinosaurs. Common rarity dinosaurs offer simpler abilities, helping players to understand the fundamentals before the rarity pool is expanded to rare and legendary dinosaurs in rounds 2 and 3!

By dragging dinosaurs from the Dino Pen to the Battle Deck, players can build their dinosaur army! Then, once ready, the player can stomp into battle! 

Each dinosaur has three distinct stats: Attack (Red), Health (Green), and Army Size (Blue). The player's army size is always capped at 24, so finding the most optimal strategy that fits within the allotted army size is imperative towards emerging victorious in battle!

In battles, dinosaurs automatically fight against one another! Positioning your dinosaur units thoughtfully before battle can be the difference between victory and defeat!

Most dinosaur abilities have effects that trigger in battle. Utilizing abilities that synergize with your army is what creates the adrenaline-spiking interactions within Prehistoric Pack! All stat increases are permanent, so there is a strong incentive to build up your dinosaur army in both phases of the game!

After battles, the player is granted 30 "Bones" and another free card pack! Bones can be used to upgrade packs, granting buffs and rarer dinosaurs!

The "Bones" currency helps to add strategy within our shop phase, allowing the player the opportunity to hunt down specific dinosaurs when opening card packs! As the rounds progress, the player will grow stronger while fighting against increasingly difficult waves of dinosaur enemies.

Losing a battle is no sweat, as the player still earns their end-of-round rewards and can fight against the same enemies with a stronger dino army!

However, losing three battles before defeating all five waves of enemies results in defeat. As this game snapshot is targeted towards a more casual audience, the average player is expected to lose a life or two on their first playthrough, but is still likely to win, so they can experience our full game loop!

We took the idea of an autobattler and upgradable card packs, adding thoughtful twists to incite more strategic depth within a single-player experience.

However, another crucial question still stood: were we making a strategy game for casual players, or more dedicated fans of the genre? Our team took three thoughtful weeks to answer this question, taking physical and digital prototypes to our Games Testing Lab. I managed testing for our level designs, working to discover the optimal board size on which our battles occurred. Ultimately, we found that a casual strategy experience with a smaller board size was best suited to our game's ethos and mechanics!