Week 5

This previous week in class some of the group got to play the other games created in the class and one person stayed to show our game to the rest of the class. Miguel did a great job explaining our game to the rest of the class and getting feedback from the players. The feedback we got from our fellow classmates was very helpful in making the game better overall. For example, one student told us that the game was a little too slow and should be changed to make it more fast pace for everyone to be more involved. We were able to make this possible by giving each player two actions on each turn instead of just one. This allows the players to still make choices by picking two actions out of a possible three and the players are able to do more on every turn. But without the criticism given from one of our play-testers, we would have never noticed this problem. That is why a new set of eyes is so important in game design, to create true criticism from a different perspective. In class this upcoming week will be the first time we have outside people coming in to look at our games. I believe these people are acquaintances of Professor Parks and will play-test our game and give advice and criticism to help improve our game. Similar to what we did last week but this time it will be from a professional and experienced point of view from people in the field of game design like Professor Parks.

Week 4

This week was the first time we had someone from outside of our group play test our game and give us feedback. Professor Parks likes the concept of our game but brought to our attention that the game relied way too much on randomness. Our game lacked a strategy aspect because of how random each turn would be. As Professor Parks stated, "Either you have the card that you need or you don't." This posed a problem for us because we all knew that solving this problem would come with major changes to the game.

Though we could not all meet up as one whole group any one day this week because of conflicting class and exam schedules, we were able to work out new rules and make the new parts of our game. We were able to take a few mechanisms from other games we played to help fix our game. For example, we took the big "location" cards idea from Camelot Legends and incorporated it into our game. We made similar location cards, one for each Rutgers Campus, and each side of the card corresponds to the building area of each player. 

In the end, we fixed the game the best we could this week. Though we were not able to play test the game with all the new features, we hope that we will get good constructive criticism tomorrow when our classmates play test our game.

Week 3

                                                                        Almost Home

This week evolved a lot of clean-up work for all of the group members. As we continued to make improvements on the cards our group worked very well together as a whole. I feel that everyone’s voice was heard and every idea was taken into consideration. These things were very important for keeping ideas going such as when we needed new ideas for our action cards, also called “Scarlet Cards”. Throughout the process we also met in the library one day outside of class to make work on the look of the playing cards. Little things about the cards such as size, look, shape, color, etc. were all taken into thought while making some crucial decisions in the design of our playing cards.

While most of our time was spent of the cards, a good portion of our period was used to make the finishing touches on the rules and objectives of the game. There were still many nuts and bolts that needed to be tightened before we could leave the library feeling accomplished. Various different scenarios needed to be considered to make sure there were no flaws and that our card game would run smoothly. One of biggest concerns was the possibility of our card game having replay value, making sure the game didn’t feel like the same thing was happening every time played and that the players would not get bored easily. Although our game is not completely finished, our group knows that we are close to the end of the race and only need a few more tweaks before our product is complete and ready to wrap up.