Designing and Playtesting

Oct 1, 2010 by JohnnyJohnJohns    1 Comment     Posted under: Uncategorized

On Wednesday we had another Ludology class where we had some new constraints in the boardgames we were designing. One of which was that the game required at least 3 players which is a great way to change things up, for me it was a challenge compared to last week but eventually I came up with an idea that allowed for a scalable number of players. I had never considered this as a major factor but in fact the number of players has a big effect on the design of the game. For digital games I think it’s an important to criteria to establish early in the process as certain games suit certain player numbers and the number of players will, I imagine, affect development time.

The game I made was called Around the World and it involved moving your piece around a circular board in order to get to the end of the game. A given card was required to move to the next tile and there were two special cards. In the playtest I think I had the card quantities completely wrong and a few rules needed tuning, the special cards were far too common and had abilities that required a very specific and rare set of events to be of use. As a group we decided not to develop my game and I think that was the right decision as Owens elemental card game has a lot of potential for a unique game. If I was to develop my game further it would be aimed at families using simple interactions and a more balanced deck. For now however I think I can do better so I’ll not dwell on it.

The other games in the group were the elemental card game which we all felt had a lot of potential and decided to develop further. There was a cool game about flicking a ball over a ramp and into a ring which was good fun and very different to the standard boardgame. The final game was a cool mix of board/card game with some player embarrassment elements which was a cool way to implement some metagame features and was entertaining.

I think we’ll be doing some puzzle stuff next week which I’m looking forward to as I wouldn’t be very familiar with puzzles.

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