Devlog 8

This week we made the final wraps on our game designing and playtesting and actually began exploring other groups’ games and processes, as well as seeking out their feedback to things we hadn’t seen or thought about before. To start, we began to reach what we felt like was a presentable draft of our game, which we now deemed “The Grand Tour Bus.” On Tuesday, we wrapped up our processes of “Formal Looping,” which includes acknowledging running problems, brainstorming and picking solutions, and building new prototypes to fix final issues (Jesse Schell Ten Tips for Productive Prototyping). Here we basically just decided how we want to finalize the gift shop mechanic, how many power up cards we wanted to have, and how we wanted to finish art and material construction. The first group playtest right after this, I got to play another group’s game called “Billion-Air.” Their game was incredibly fun and I could tell that they did a lot of their own “Formal Looping” and I very much appreciated their “Paper Prototyping” (Jesse Schell Ten Tips for Productive Prototyping). What I mean by this is that they let us playtest with their most basic form of cards and rules, meaning that they anticipated for us to find things in their game that we thought could be improved upon, and really appreciated how they embraced their own potential for imperfection. Leading towards the final playtest on Thursday, we all got together over Microsoft Teams and worked together to respond to the feedback we had so far received as well as help finish the remaining art. I made revisions to the rules as suggested and helped to attach our Flavor Texts to our location cards to help players feel more emotionally engaged in the game. For Thursday, we spent the whole day playing other groups’ games and hosting our game for others to check out. My favorite part was actually hosting and watching as people uncover some of the unrefined parts of our game that we didn’t even notice. More specifically they uncovered sections in the rules that I definitely could have been more descriptive on, as well as suggestions on how to make the game last longer and changes to the point totaling system. Even though this project is coming to a close, we still came out of the group playtests on Thursday with many more things that we could reopen our “Formal Prototyping” processes to fix if we wanted to continue to develop and improve our game (Jesse Schell Ten Tips for Productive Prototyping). I learned a lot about card game designing and also about my own tendencies when it comes to game design through this project and I am very excited to move into the next projects!