Concept 5
In the light of all of this, we made a decision to scrap all progress we made in create a game. I believe this was a good decision and our previous concepts had a lot of baggage and all of us just did not want anything to do with them any longer. To help in the brainstorming process, we decided to list out why we felt that previous board game that we played felt like they were so much fun. We also agreed to stay away from the previous mechanics we used like simultaneous selection and player elimination. We used Carcasonne, King of Tokyo and others as examples and found four reasons why we thought that these games were fun. First, there was always a way to win. Second, there was strategy involved. Third, taking risks had equal rewards and lastly, we always had decisions to make. Checking back with our previous game concepts, we realized that none of them fulfilled any of our requirements. Hence, we decided to scrap the game concepts we made before and started anew. So, after a fresh start, Ryan suggested we look through a list of board game mechanics and pick up one each and see if we could make some core gameplay functions out of it. We discussed back and forth and I suggested a game involving a student vs teacher setting. Based of the setting, we sat down and discussed what core gameplay mechanics we wanted to implement. Eventually, we decided to use a card game to simulate a ‘cheating in a test’ situation. The cards were all inspired by what all of us would imagine someone cheating would try and do so we decided to create cards to simulate this. We also balanced the points based on how risky a plan would be in real life. The game would run for 6 rounds. The first 4 would be pre-test and the last 2 would be test rounds. The points gained from flipping cards would differ based on the phase. We got inspiration to implement this mechanic as some things you do before a test may not be acceptable during a test. On the Student phase, they would work together to create conditions to cheat. They would then place 3 cards face down and the Teacher would flip them. For flipping cards, Ryan and I decided to create a energy for teachers to use their cards,So, when they flipped cards, the teacher would gain suspicion, which could be used to use his own power cards. This was to give the teachers some strategic choice instead of just flipping cards. This concept also faced some problems. For our initial version, the Teacher only had one flip per turn and if he had a flip that did not give him much information in the first few rounds, he would not have enough information to be able to deduce the plans of the students. So, to counteract this, we decided to have two flips in the first round followed by two flips only if the Teacher gained points from the first flip. Other problems we faced included the Teacher winning by points even if the Student managed to get a condition or the Student being unable to set a condition by the time the test phase started. Conversely, the Students could somehow win even without any conditions just because the Teacher flipped too many safe cards. I encountered this while play-testing as the Teacher, so I gave some suggestions to try to make both parties satisfied. Eventually, to counteract both of these, we made it so if cards such as Phone or Notes made it through undetected by the Teacher during the test phase, the Student would gain points. If not, the Teacher would gain points. The point of this feature was to make it so that there would also be a way to win, which was one of our criteria for what made a game feel fun. We also had to balance some of the Teacher cards as the Confiscate cards were initially only 2 suspicion to play as I found while playing as the Teacher that as certain cards are of higher quantity, this naturally makes it more worth it to use it on that. So, we decided to change the cost based on the number of cards in the deck to make it a larger commitment to remove the higher quantity cards in the deck. Conclusion Using our 4 requirements as a guideline to conceptualize and balance the game was a great help towards creating the game. Admittedly, improvements still can be made to the game such as making the early game more complex as currently it is just a matter of flipping the card and getting the information to make the actual strategic decisions. As time goes on, hopefully I will remember all the concepts I learned and implemented in this assignment for future projects.
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August 2018
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