Devlog 7

This week we began our Card game project centered around a theme of traveling. My group came up with a relatively simple game that we are working to add complexity to in order to make it feel like a fully fleshed out card game. We don’t exactly have a title for it, but it takes place on a tour bus visiting various landmarks and sights in which players imagine they have candid cameras with limited amounts of film. The goal is to take pictures and score points, making sure to use all of their film by the end of the tour to ensure they don’t suffer any point penalties. We started at first by flipping a number card 1-10 over at random and players who choose to take a picture at that location gain that number of points. However on Thursday we decided to revise this into a simpler system with smaller numbers. To summarize it, locations and film cards are now assigned a suit, players want to play film cards that match the suit of the location card to gain one point. In addition we shrunk the 1-10 number card pile to 1-5 and to include all suits in this one. This pile still works similarly, all players who take a picture at this location gain that number of points from the 1-5 pile. There are also power-up cards as we’ve been calling them, we are deciding if players should start with only 1 or 2. These basically have certain boosts, like +1 or “save your film”, that the player can apply to their picture as well as reductions, like -1, that can be played against others. We are currently still experimenting with this system, with talks of adding a “Gift Shop” location where players can exchange a film card from their hand for a random power up card, or exchange a power up card for another film card. This Gift Shop would only appear once per game. There are currently about 10 locations, and once all locations have been visited, the game ends and players tally up their points to see who has the most. 

Our biggest point of feedback was to figure out how to give players more of a sense of agency throughout play. In this case Agency refers to the degree in which players can make decisions that affect the state of the game (Hiwiller Decision-Making). The Gift Shop and the power up cards were one of our main adjustments to this, also changing the point cards to 1-5 as well. The 1-5 cards help to add agency by ensuring that players who do not have a film card that matches the suit of the location card can still attempt to gain points and not feel hindered purely by luck. This way we are trying to make sure that the player's decision to take pictures always makes changes to the game state and feels meaningful to the player (Hiwiller Decision-Making). Another point of feedback we received was to add more cards to the players’ hands to cement that this is a shedding style card game, where players play the game by decreasing that amount of cards they are holding. We adjusted to this by increasing the amount of film that players start with, initially it was 4 and now around 5 still with room to expand if needed. This is also addressed by the power up cards and players starting with 2, I am personally more in favor of about 3 or 4 but I haven’t really bounced this off the group yet. I believe that letting the players start with more power-up cards will cause them to feel more encouraged to play more of them and make the cards feel like a crucial component to the player’s agency and success. The only reason I haven’t brought this up to the group yet is because I am waiting to see through the “Anatomy of a Choice” here, in other words I want to see where the game is currently and see the “Before, Communication, Action, Consequences, and Feedback” that the game produces in its current state (Hiwiller Decision-Making). I think we definitely are on a path to find success with this card game project and I am having a blast interacting with my group members and hearing all the different ideas we could do with our game!