Westward began life as a paper prototype card game. Although our vision for the game remained fairly consistent, the actual prototype went through a variety of iterations and formats. 

The player would track 'West' uncovering the playboard, turn by turn. The game was resource driven, and each act would consume food and or ammunition to progress.

We envisioned Westward to be a combination of a rogue-like card crawler combined with traditional RPG elements such as quests and collectables. 

The fundamental mechanic involved the player tracking 'West' by moving right to left on a 'playboard' uncovering a variety of event and enemy cards as they went.

The design went through many stages. Most of our initial testing was done via paper prototypes to identify how well the game flowed as a physical card game. Below is some of our earlier concept work.

I created a prototype in Unreal Engine 4 - this allowed us to test and iterate more efficiently, address balance and difficulty and more importantly provide a glimpse into the overall user experience.