Devlog 10

This week we actually began working on our BattleBattle projects and my group decided on our classroom idea. Initially we were going to have the setting be within a college class and stage the professor to be really tough, requiring the students, the players to work together to pass the class. Once we got this idea down and began thinking of some of the different student archetypes that players could be, Dr. S came and gave us great feedback, to be specific about exactly where the players are, what stage of life they are to imagine they are at, and to breathe life into the creation of the characters. So we revised our game to take place in a high school English class, where the class is incredibly rambunctious and the teacher is trying to gain control of the class. The players’ goal then turned into withstanding the teacher’s attempts to gain control and ultimately win by causing the teacher to quit. We then began creating rough schematics for our game on index cards, which Macklin and Sharp describe as as the part of the game design process that involves creating “detailed descriptions of the design and images to help visualize the design” so that all players understand exactly what is being created (Macklin and Sharp Game Design Documentation). These schematic index cards helped tremendously by allowing us to actually see what we are thinking and know how different parts of the game will work with each other. Our archetypes became the Gamers, the Emo Couple, the Pothead, the Class Clown, and the Diva (aka the Hot Cheeto Girl). We organized our game as follows, the Teacher, Mr. Crocker, starts first by assigning a task (Next class we will finalize flavor texts for these tasks like Playing a Movie) that the students must complete or “Disrupt” by working together to apply their attribute points. Each student type has the same three attributes, those being Noise, Distraction, and Disrespect, though the different types start with different amounts of each. The students have limited rounds to commit enough attribute points to the task to successfully Disrupt it and progress to the next. Mr. Crocker eventually advances to a second phase where he is dishing out more tasks at one time. Each student also has a unique ability ranging from sacrificing their grade (health) for extra attributes, healing their classmates’ grades, etc. Our game initially felt too easy and too long, so we had to rebalance it by increasing the difficulty of some of the tasks, decreasing the grade that students start with from 100 to a smaller, individualized amount for each type, and adjusting the effectiveness of some of the unique character abilities. 

We wanted to take a big stance on minimizing randomness in our game as much as possible as it relates to the players’ actions, while still maintaining that they have a chance of winning no matter how many times they have played before. Zach Hiwiller describes this as making sure the game has a level of fairness, where yes our game is relatively skill based, but has enough randomness so that it is winnable even if the players lack a high level of skill (Hiwiller Randomness). Our randomness occurs in two places: at the beginning of each player’s turn, they draw from a pile of attribute cards that tell them how many of which attributes to add to their total, and in Mr. Crocker’s assigning of tasks as a die is rolled to determine the difficulty of the task, 1 & 2 being an easy task, 3 & 4 being medium, and 5 & 6 being hard.

Moving forward, we are to finish playtesting, rule writing, and art making over the weekend so that we come to class on Tuesday with about 90% of the game completed so we can finish revising and turn it in at the end of class. I really like how our group split up each specific part of these tasks by creating a “Tracking Spreadsheet” of sorts, even though there isn’t a literal spreadsheet, where we specifically agreed on who does what to make sure things get done correctly, nothing gets done twice, and most importantly that things actually get done (Macklin and Sharp Game Design Documentation). I think we are set for great success as we move forward in concluding our BattleBattle Project.