December 10, 2022
Blog Post 6
Group 4
Project Name: Peak Until Dawn
Game Summary:
As a player you find yourself stuck in a high school during a zombie apocalypse and it is up to you and your partner to call for rescue before sunrise in order to make it out alive. You have 12 turns to survive fighting zombies and gathering resources before the helicopter comes to rescue you.
Target Audience:
Our game was directed and aimed for players who love the zombie horror genre. Initially we also designed our game to fit the role-playing aspect of it so that RPG gamers could be attracted to it as well. With that being said our specific target audience would have to be high schoolers age ranged 15-18. Particular player types who would enjoy playing our game would most likely be The Achiever, simply because we designed our game with a main objective that not all players will achieve before the game ends. The Storyteller will find our game interesting for the mere fact that we did implement a story that all players could find appealing. The Joker can be players that play our game for the intention of just simply having fun and not taking the game serious. For our Player interaction pattern our game would fit into the Cooperative play or AKA Co-op Play, for the reason that instead of making our game a player vs. player in which they would have competed against each other to see who survived. We decided to make it so that they both have to try and survive in order to make it out alive. This would cause them to work together to fight hordes of zombies and scavenge up resources together.
Issues Encountered:
During this unit's entire iteration process there were some minor bumps along the way, but thanks to these little issues I have learned new ways on how to resolve minor issues that could cause failure in our game design process. Some include just not being as prepared as we should have been going into our game design process, brainstorming a little too much and having some minor creative differences with my partner. Luckily, we were able to handle everything in a very professional way and our main focus was creating a game that our players would enjoy a lot.
Task Completion
Both my partner and I relied on one another to handle and take care of assigned work which divided equally after we got the main core elements done with for our game. My partner took care of prototyping and designing the map used for our game. Since we both drew mockups of the cards we planned on implementing, I personally handled the finish design of all the cards for our game. Afterwards we reconvened and made sure we liked what we had in front of us. Other than that, we really stayed on top of everything and always made sure we liked what our game was beginning to look like.
Changes for the future
Some stuff I would like to change for my own personal development process's going forward would be to definitely scale down a bit and focus on what is actually important to the game design and not necessarily jump the gun on everything. Like I mentioned earlier I definitely learned from this whole experience, and I plan on taking different approaches next time I work on a game with someone else and consider both sides respectively. Another thing would be to be well prepared before heading into a playtest as this was a bump we hit during this unit, and it definitely made me reevaluate the state of our game. At the end it all worked out and I definitely learned a lot from that experience.
November 20, 2022
Blog Post 5
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.
October 30, 2022
Blog Post 4
Group 9
Game Summary
Our game is called Morendo and it consists of 2 players who have a battle using songs, potions and magic items. Their goal is to defeat their opponent by destroying their sacred instruments and main weapon.
Morendo
Target Audience
For our target audience we had college students so initially we thought about creating our game around some thought and critical thinking. Particularly to a level where they would have to strategically think about their moves they would be making
Player types
- The Achiever: A player who plays to achieve victory
- The Joker: This player plays more in the sense of having fun
- The Competitor: This player plays to win/compete
- Player Vs player: Our game (Morendo) is strictly a player vs player for the reason that it is only playable by 2 players which both play against each other.
Mistakes/Errors
A couple of things where we went wrong in our entire iteration process could have been easily caught on time and before we further progressed in the design process of our game. Nevertheless we can look back at these mistakes and use them for future reference so that we can see where we went wrong. One thing were we messed up was overlooking the core game design idea we had initially came up with for our game. We had completely lost ourselves in the imagination of what other key elements we were coming up with and how they can make our game better. What we should have done was stuck with our original idea and decided whether to scrap it from the beginning or keep it afloat. Another thing that went wrong for us was that we couldn't decide whether to keep the design of our cards or whether to scrap it and go with a different idea we had. We kept playtesting our game by ourselves but never really nailed it down to how we wanted to present the game to our players. When we simply did nothing about it, it definitely confused some our play testers. If we would have addressed this issue sooner it would have clarified any confusion whatsoever.
Task Completion
Overall, for our Iteration process we really were on top of handling things. We would meet up weekly to work out some kinks and tweaks we thought could potentially make our game cleaner and better. Tasks were divided and shared equally among my partner and I and if we needed extra help on certain things, we could definitely count on each other to help one another. We definitely learned from this experience what and how much effort goes into designing a board game and it can definitely be of use for the next time we have to come up with ideas for our next board game.
October 16, 2022
Blog Post 3
CAGD170
Angel Suazo
List of games
For this unit I got to playtest the following games
- Hex Jump
- Memorized by Space
- Cooking Ninja
- Sliders
- # 2
- Playstyles
- The Competitor: Plays to best the other player
- The Joker: Doesn’t take the game seriously, plays for the fun of playing; there’s a potential for jokers to annoy serious players,
- The Achiever: Plays to reach the end of the game in a victorious way
- The goal of this game is to beat your opponent to the finish line before they do. Using abilities, you can try to slow them down and there are events that can either help or hurt you on the race to the end
- Players must roll a D6 in order to move.
- Players must wait for opponent to finish their turn before they can roll
- Each player must follow the phases in order. (Item, Movement, Interaction) phases
- Players can only move up down left and right, the amount of value they rolled
- When a player has a counter card to their opponent's ability, they can play it.
- Landing on Witch's hat grants another ability.
- Landing on a Hex symbol means they are in an event and have to pick up an event card
- Event cards have to be played immediately
- Each event card and ability card can only be used once and after they go into the discard pile
- Game board
- 2 D6 dice
- Player Avatars
- Ability Cards
- Event Cards
- Magic Missile
- Hold Person
- Mushroom
- Shield
- Teleport
- Spikes
- Lasso
- Confusion
- Counter Spell
- The game board's grid/playing field
- The battle between both players in their race to the finish line.
- Each player uses abilities that can affect the other player in a negative way, like pulling them backwards when they are close to the finish line.
- Or they can use their abilities to grant them the upper hand on their opponent
- Only one player can be victorious.
- Whoever reaches the finish line first
September 25, 2022
Group 3
Blog Post 2
For this post I will be sharing information about how our whole Iteration process for our group went. Along with some key details we came across in our game design process and some damage control. I will begin with a little summary of our game and what we were tasked to do for this Unit's assignment.
Summary
For our game we were tasked with modifying the classic game solitaire. So, in our case we decided to do something that would not make the game derivative of its natural form and made sure that its core fundamentals were still there. We landed on making a change revolving around the sequences in which the cards are stacked at the very end, with a twist that you could also potentially use Queens, and Jacks for starting a pile wherever you had a blank or empty spot on the table. These were our core modifications.
Target Audience
Moving on from the point of creating our game modifications we had create an experience for our players by knowing who our game was going to be played by. Once we knew what kind of players we were more or less focusing on. We could potentially alter our game so that it could have the aspect of flow in it. For example, if we created our modifications that would completely take away from the core of classic Solitaire, we could have made the game quite confusing or frustrating for a person who either has never played solitaire before or who knows the game by heart. On the contrary if we took the game solitaire and only did some minor changes or modifications to it, it would cause for a player to easily get bored and loose interest. Having said that we knew that mainly our target audience for our game would be people who were already familiar with the classic game solitaire. So, we decided to create some changes that would cause players to have a similar but different objective in the game so that we could have a different take on solitaire. Subsequently while we thought everything was running smoothly, we did manage to reach some areas in our game design process where we might have gone wrong and perhaps needed some more looking at. These however were crucial moments in our game design process that would amount to making a huge difference at the end of the whole process.
Problems Encountered
One the main issues we encountered was perhaps during our playtest in class itself. We found ourselves sitting there explaining to the other group that was playtesting our game how to playtest our game. Initially we let them try and figure it out but then we started noticing that the more and more they read our rule sheet the harder it was for them to understand. That isn't to say their playtest of our game went horribly wrong it just slowed things down at first and resulted in us having to verbally tell them our objective of the game. Seeing this happen in our playtest also allowed us to see where we went wrong in our Rule Sheet. We could have easily spotted that our rule sheet was missing crucial information that would have resulted in a much more influential way to our players. Something so small but it did manage to recall our attention to it. With this we had some damage control to take care of
Overall
The whole process of game design for Unit 1 went fairly well. All my group partners including myself had fun exploring the game development process. We found ways to form ideas into a creative way to express them through our game. Established responsibilities on who would work on what and where. Gave creative feedback on differences we had and overall achieved success by working as a team.
Blog Post 1
For our first group assignment we were tasked with modifying the classic game solitaire. As classic as the game can be I'll be honest I had never played the game prior to this group project. One thing I can tell you for sure is that I came with good knowledge and understood the basic elements (Card values, Suits) of the game as I am a huge Blackjack and Poker player. Anyways our Iteration process began there with my other group member and I first getting a glance at the quick gameplay of the actual game at first so we could fully understand what we were dealing with. The expertise of our 3rd partner came naturally to him as he had already known what the game was and had played it before. So, we had help with that concept.
Getting Started
Once everyone was brought up to speed we got to experiment with different types of ideas. We were getting curious on how we could integrate a new factor into the game that would not get rid of the games level of challenge but that however bring a new objective playable within the core value of the game. It was challenging for us to come up with such an idea so we needed to brainstorm deeper. Having a deck of cards handy helped our minds visualize our ideas much better which led us to come up with our final modifications to the game.
Brainstorming Furthermore
When we had jotted down some fun and crazy ideas, we had to go through of course the process of a playtest in order to fully see if our modifications could even be possible to integrate into the game. We got our deck of cards out and proceeded to play the game with our newly invented rules so that we could see what players could expect. During our playtest we were able to see where we went wrong and what could have been a problem if someone were to try and play our version of solitaire, but it was in this same session where we could also discover ways to refine our ideas and shape them into a better, clearer idea.
Problem solving
When we decided that our main change to the game was going to be that towards the end of the game when you are putting the cards in the right order and suit that perhaps instead of the cards going from Ace low to King high, they go in the order they are intended as you were playing poker meaning that Ace is the original HIGH card and then proceeds to King and Queen and so on. The order in which the cards would have to be stacked were now (A, K, Q, J,10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2). However, during our playtest, we ran into some issues that we found we needed to fix such as that when we would try to start stacking the cards, we noticed that we would have no more possible moves anymore due to the king being the only card that could be placed in an empty spot of the 7 columns available.
We then realized that if we applied this special power to the Queen and Jack, we could then potentially have a smoother gameplay. It resulted that by making this new change we could indeed have a game where we got an acceptable outcome.
Overall
We ended our notes and planning when we saw that our new contributions were peace sailing into the game. One thing that might have helped us with our iteration process was being familiar with the game we were working with.
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