Group 4
Game Summary
Players go around the zombie-infested school collecting resources to contact a helicopter to rescue them. Players will find themselves having to fight the undead, defend areas and even complete certain tasks before time runs out. One of them being, calling in a support helicopter to rescue them to safety. They will need to manage their time accordingly in order to make it to sunrise alive.
Iteration Process
For this unit I feel like we hit a couple of bumps on the road for the majority of our game design process and although we did our best to find ways to improve, I believe there was more things that could have been easily done to execute a more well-prepared game. Some include having more better brainstorming sessions, expanding on original ideas, self-playtesting and overall better planning.
Brainstorming
During our brainstorming sessions we were gathering as much ideas as we could that we wanted to implement to our board game that I feel might have actually damaged our game design process. For example, we would think of new ideas and continuously write them down on a piece of paper so we can work on them later but what we failed to do was think on how they would tie into our game without making it more complicated. It was all looking so good on paper, but it needed to be more well thought out to see if our core game mechanics would even mesh good with them. It's really easy to come up with a thousand ideas but not each and every one of them is going to properly work for your game. This was something I felt went wrong for us.
Self-Playtesting
For this unit we were unfortunately unable to have a proper self-playtest between my partner and I due to some scheduling conflicts on my partner's end and while at first, I was ok with just simply self-playtesting our game alone or with a family member instead, I do believe this impacted us greatly in a negative way. As game designers we have been taught you see to always playtest yourself before showing anyone else your game. Part of the reason why it's so important to do so, is because then you can catch some things that you perhaps might need to work on so that when you actually have other people playtest your game it is at least doesn't look so bad. Later on, we gathered as much feedback we could get from just self-playtesting by our own or with friends, but the turnout was not so great as it reflected poorly when we actually did a real playtest with another group in class. Thats not to say that the playtest went entirely horrible, it just resulted in my partner and I realizing that we could have easily layed out a more well thought out game.
The Bright sides
Although we did hit some bumps in the road like I mentioned earlier for this unit's board game project we also had some well executed parts that went well during our game design process. Some of the things include teamworking, brainstorming ideas and overall dividing work equally so that we could both provide an equal share of work. All of these things are what got us to come up with a really interesting game that we hope can be refined into a really awesome game for anyone who plays it. As for the negatives, we have since looked at the game from a play testers perspective and have gotten all the necessary feedback to now fix all the small issues our game has and properly address them so we can have a better experience for players to come.
