Hey there, welcome to my blog. I am in Group 6 with my partner Bryanna Melendez, and together we worked on the card game Battle-Plains. The game is a strategy based war game in which players try to outwit their opponents by using their card units to overpower the enemy. It consists of 5 basic classes which include swordsman, archers, cavalry, pike-men, and catapults, all of which have differing attributes and strengths. This game focuses more on the younger audience, around the ages 9-15 to get the full enjoyment of it.
During the game-testing phase, our group realized that though we may have understood the rules well, it took too long to understand for other player. This lead to a decrease in enjoyment for the audience. The procedure were also listed in a way that made it hard to follow, so seeing others try out our game really helped to gain perspective. We realized that having a sheet for our units abilities and stats took too much reading and time, and decided we should redo the cards in order to add stats to the cards for easy access. This change would have sped up the game and added more entertainment overall.
During the time we got to play test, we never actually got to get deep into a game. By the time that our group had finally understood the rules, we were already being told to move on. We did get to try out 1 game, but it was so unbalanced that only 1 person could actually win depending on what role you were assigned. Many of the games we tried had unlabeled elements, which led to confusion on my groups part as we were unsure of what to do with the items. The creators eventually had to stop the game and rearrange what we had in order to get us back on track. I think that seeing this made us realize just how hard it is to make simple and easy to follow rules and procedures.
Using things that we had learned from both playing and trying to understand rules, and from feedback on our games, my partner and I decided on changing how we presented the rules and procedures. A few solutions that we came up with was adding a system to keep track of health on the cards using a corner hp method, and adding the special bonuses to the bottom of the cards. Adding these bonuses would also make the cards seem more efficient and powerful, as players would no longer have to look back and forth between health and damage dealt.
During development, our group seemed to be on slightly differing pages, which lead to quite a bit of confusion in the development process. Something we could do to help that is to meet up and communicate more often and more clearly. These meeting actually really help in order to establish just what kind of game the other person is envisioning, and helps the game become more cohesive as it comes into a playable prototype. This would also help distribute the work load, because at times it seemed confusing as to who would do what parts. Overall though, I had a great time creating our game with my group partner, and look forward to working and learning with others too.
