CAGD 170

The group I partnered up with for our Unit 3 Playtest made a game called Gold Rush, which was the first one I play-tested with my partner. It was a pretty fun game to playtest, and we were able to get it moving pretty quickly once we started playing.

When reviewing it to give them feedback, one of the first things I did was run some probabilities. In the game you receive amounts of gold by rolling dice, and I was really struggling to get anything. However, upon doing the math, it seemed to be about a 50/50 chance every time you roll, so I was just getting unlucky. However, there were upgrades to assist with this issue, but all of them costed more gold than I was getting. As my partner realized, with his luckier rolls he didn't really have a need for them. So through our testing of the emergent properties of the game, we found that the pretty narrow price range for their shop was too steep a price for struggling players to have access too, but for well off players it was more worth it to just save your money for the win condition of getting 200 gold. However, I praised a lot of the upgrade designs, with some good variety as well as good limits and breakers (for example, increasing your storage space per mining trip to allow players to possibly return with more gold each time to catch up).

• For the players of the game, it's two-player and player-versus-player. 
• The objective is to get 200 gold. 
• The procedures are rolling dice and using a spinner to return gold, as well as buying items from a shop. 
• The rules determine how much gold is given based on each roll and the utilities of the shop items. 
• The resources are gold and shop items. 
• The conflict is that the game is a race between players, as well as being able to buy items that sabotage the other player. 
• The boundaries are fairly abstract, but mainly encompass the two actions you can do as well as the limit on how much gold you can make per turn.
•  The outcome is based on which player wins by completing the race first.

Another game I checked out was called Traveler. I really liked its formal elements of progressing along a board with random encounters, and I really liked a lot of the random encounter cards, with lots of interesting mechanics and variety. The major criticisms I had of it was mostly consistency in its terms and definitions. For example, it used the term curse to refer to a couple different mechanics and didn't really define how it worked as far as I could tell. It also had characters choose one of three classes at the beginning of the game but didn't explain how this changed gameplay. I also assumed players moved along one space at a time, but it's possible there was a different mechanism; however it wasn't immediately obvious on the rule sheet like basic mechanics should be. I still enjoyed reading through everything and think the game has a lot of potential for our next two revisions.

One last game I checked out was called Fury, a player-versus-player fighting game where players can choose to attack or protect specific points of their body. The premise for this game is really cool to me, as well as the main mechanics of allocating different points (distributed by drawing cards) to different limbs or organs to defend yours or attack your opponents. Overall I really liked this one, with my only criticism being some specific organization on the rule sheet.

CAGD 170 Unit 2 Postmortem

For Unit 2, I was part of Group 5. For our project, we had to create a two-player board game themed around fast food in the rhythm genre, aiming at a target age range of 30-40 year olds. We made our game, "Corporate Chaos" as a player-versus-player board game in which players attempt to capture their opponents pieces under a restrictive time limit. Players can combine their own pieces to make 15 unique combinations to choose from, as well as pick up to 6 pieces to add to the board over the course of the game. Our timing system is a playlist of 90s music (to hit the 30 to 40 demographic) of at least 7 songs, in which players can add a new piece at the start of each new song, and the winner is the player with the most points awarded for capturing pieces at the end of the playlist. 

When it came to designing the game, we only encountered one major problem. That was playtesting, which was really hard in an online environment. One of the reasons we were inspired by chess is the way that people used to play it across great distances through letters; because every spot on the grid can be expressed by a letter and a number, if two people each set up their own board, it's super easy to communicate your moves to the other person (ex: Knight to E5) and have them understand and replicate what you're doing. We were able to get in a few viable playtests in this way. However, it was still substantially more difficult and less than we would've been able to do in an in-person class. Online, we had lots of limiting factors like printer access, physical desk space, and especially time. 

Despite that, I think we were able to create an effectively designed game. We focused on making a game that's easy to understand, and that stayed throughout. Our rule sheet is only two pages, and the setup and playing of the main game is described in only 5 paragraphs. We increased the complexity with each version, I think to the benefit of the game. The early versions, however, weren't nearly as interesting or unique because of this. We tried to focus on only a few mechanics that are versatile enough to make up a whole experience. 

The development process was pretty easy for us, considering that we kept in mind that we wanted to keep it straightforward and focus on only a few central mechanics. By the final version, this ended up being: adding elements as the timer progresses, and combining pieces. We both knew that giving players meaningful choices makes for a fun game, so we made these elements as customizable as possible. Players get to pick one of 3 unique pieces with 2 copies each to place anywhere in the back row of the board. That's already 24 possibilities. With combination pieces, we originally only had the Pizza Hut and Taco Bell pieces combinable. However, we realized for the final version that the game would be more interesting if the players could combine any two pieces. This results in 15 different possible combined pieces (although some may be better than others). Either way, the player has a lot of choice in how they set up their pieces. 

On our first playtest, we found that the game was too slow, and we were nowhere near done by the time the playlist was up. So we replaced the original objective of capturing the king with a "most points wins" objective instead. We then assigned each piece point values. We did this to encourage players to be more aggressive and make riskier plays, making the game more exciting and frantic and improving its pace.