You can play with as many people as you like in essence, but so far we've only played with four as max, so it might be best to stick to a number like that. Each player can have four characters (but again, you could have more or you could have less, doesn't really matter, but so far four has worked the best). There are a few ways you can win. One is to accomplish what is on your "objective" card. We usually play with three of those, two hard ones and one easy one, depending on how long we intend to play (it goes about an hour per assignment, maybe one-and-a-half, also depending on how many players are playing). The other way to win is just to kill or trap all the other players. When you die you get sent to Other World, of course where your character can continue playing. You can also die in Other World, but that would be the total erasure of that character in the game. We've seldom let it come to that, though.
And of COURSE you get to collect the Dragon Balls. One of the objectives you can randomly pick for example is "Wish for Immortality", but... the beauty of the game is that you actually have the freedom to do whatever you want with your wishes. We've been very creative on occasion with this. For example at one point Namek was about to explode, as was the sun next to Earth. In a brilliant move to save all the characters I had that were on the Earth I swapped Earth and Namek in place and prevented destruction. Or what my brother once did was make a portal from a planet to Other World. Of course there are limitations, like wishing for something that instantly makes you win or something that immobilizes a player completely (like wishing them into the Dead Zone for example), but you are definitely allowed to wish for immortality even if that isn't your objective. Actually we just made a list of things you can't wish for and then let the rest up to the player :p
The game isn't really finished yet, though. Or well... it's VERY playable, but we're still having ideas that work to better the game. Just recently we thought "Damn, having a battle sure is a bit crap in this game, your character sort of automatically wins if he's stronger. That isn't really Dragon Ball-ish." So we invented classes. Elite (like Vegeta, who is designed for a lot of Ki attacks), Warrior (like Brolly, who is designed to just have a freakishly huge attack), Tank (like for example Nappa or Recoom, who is designed to take hit after hit after hit) and Tactician (along the lines of Krillin, who is designed for using Ki techniques that help him get the upper hand, but not with brute force). And battling was awesome!! But apart from that, we have a board that's still just a big sheet of paper with pencil drawings of the spaces you can walk to (with an Earth, Namek, Space and other World Map) and a huge set of item cards you can get, along with various objective cards. The cards however we have sort of worked out, but with the new changes (and some new ideas for awesome cards) we've decided to do the cards again. Though here's what they look like right now:
Also we don't know everything by heart so a handy help-sheet is in order for most things. It also has another side that tells the player where you can train and for how many points:
We're sort of using dub names (I hope to change that a bit or at least in fine print put the original Japanese or proper translation under the dub version) but don't think for a second that we don't know what true Dragon Ball is. I can't really speak for my brother, but I'm definitely fan of the original and of the better translation for Dragon Ball Kai. As you can see we've also taken influences from other media and screenshots from every source we thought would be awesome, for example from the Budokai 2 opening, the Terebikko game and the ending to "Heya! Son Goku and his friends return!". Apart from that we've taken some styling things from Hyper Dimension and you can see that he back of the cards is based on the logo from the Jump special. I'm really itching to put some Dragon Ball heroes and Dragon Ball online stuff in here though
Also we're including everything that was in the original manga as much as we can, but still making sure that it doesn't destroy the gameplay. For example a decision we made is to put a Fusion Earring in the Earth item stack and one in the Namek item stack. From an in-universe point of view this makes little sense, but from a gameplay point-of-view it works really good. Also we've included some movie-only tie-ins, for example Tapion's sword and the Music Box, as well as the Dead Zone and the Paragas' Control Bracelet. From the beginning, though, we decided not to make Dragon Ball GT part of the project. Though with Battle of Gods coming, there will most DEFINITELY be an update once we've seen that :p
Oh yeah! The reason why I'm posting this here, is of course to make everyone jealous about the game, but also that we're thinking of trying to make this in a more professional looking game with actually pieces and an actual proper board. But the problem is that we don't really know exactly how we can accomplish this. We're sort of thinking about a kickstarter page, but this completely is a fan thing. We would of course like to make money with this, or maybe just a little, but we also want to share it with as much people as possible. So with a kickstarter page we could stock on printable cards and/or boxes and pieces for on the board, and eventually send it overseas (we're in the Netherlands). Our game will probably never be able to be released in any official capacity as complicated as it is (but you'll get the hang of it quickly), so I don't think we'll be able to sell our idea to Toei Animation or whatever, so when we'd be making this it would be mostly underground and for the fans only. Does anyone know how we should... continue with this project with the goal of spreading it among fans?
