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.