CAGD 170 Project #2

Welcome back to my blog. I am now in Group 20 with my partner Alex Garst, and together we created the board game Farmer's Market. The game is played on a monopoly-style board with a huge focus in farming. Players buy and plant crops in order to sell them and pay of their debt before the other players. The board is full of events that can hinder, or help, players. The game is centered on the risk and reward game-play experience. Farmer's Market was made with older male players in mind, and focuses on the age range of 30-40 years old. 

My partner Alex holding our game-board

    During the game-testing phase, my group realized that the beginning of our game got off to a very slow start. This made the players feel like the game was repetitive until they started planting more crops. In order to prevent too slow of a start, we implemented new rules that would speed up how crops were planted on the first time around the board. We also went back through our game rules and procedures and clarified on points that players had a difficult time understanding. These improvements made the game much more appealing in the second playtest, and added more entertainment overall.

A closer look

During the play-test this time around, we were given a lot more time. The players had time to actually get into the games, and the reactions to it were all completely positive. The players were understanding the rules pretty quickly, and had almost no interaction with my partner and I while playing. Many of the games that we tried were really fun and goofy. Each game was very different because of the assigned topic, and that led to a very varied classroom of boards. 

During development, our group seemed to do very well while brainstorming and did very well working together when our schedules allowed us to actually meet up for extended periods of time. Meeting up more often probably would have been beneficial, but I am pretty pleased with how the players took our game. We each did a good amount of the work, and nobody was left with an unbearable load. My partner still has ideas that he'd love to test out with the game, and I'm excited by the prospect of working more on it. I had a great time creating the game with my group partner, and look forward to working with him again sometime.