Personal Game Idea

So, it dawned on me that perhaps I was experiencing such a block in fixing the Little Monster's game play because I was too frustrated and needed to take a breather and think of something else.

I ended up coming up with a whole new random idea for a very different board game. This game would be highly adult and not in any way ever suited for children, but for adults who like to play games and drink it may very well work.

The game is called Atrocity.


A really fucked up game.

Build your own bridge of atrocities across the system and see if you have what it takes to be the most fucked up universal dictator the cosmos has ever seen!

The universe board is laid out like a race and the very end earns the winner the label of 'universe's most atrocious dictator'

Each player begins at the start of the (political) race by first figuring out if they even can achieve being in the running. There are goal points set along the way. Random words or situations will be selected from a pile. The goal is to collect the most fucked up set of things to do in order to achieve having that word or doing/stopping that situation.

Answers are subjective, voted on by other players, and winners of that round earn fucked up stars.
It is highly encouraged to drink while playing this game. The worse the ways you can do things - the closer you become to being the 'universe's most atrocious dictator'

For example: your first task is to make a universal taco day for all planets.

So the players would have to combine their cards to make a bridge of the worst possible ways they could make that happen

I started coming up with several ideas for this and showed them to my friends who loved the idea. I'm not exactly sure whether or not that means I know the only people in the world who would like this game or that it may not be a terrible game idea.

Either way, it was a good break to think of something else and I think I may continue working on this idea for the future.

Play test 2

Unfortunately, the pictures I took of this play test for some reason I cannot find on my phone. I do have a picture of the board that was used

During this playtest we asked some people from the student lobby to play our game. They kindly agreed.

We had this board, with a grid underneath, many buttons that represented humans, jewels that represented Courage, rough draft item cards, battle 50/50 dice, and a pet spinner.

It took a while to explain the rules and point system, so there was some confusion. It is clear that even though I printed the game play -- I need a clearer more concise way of explaining the rules without it being a lecture.

After bumbling through that, the game began and there was much dice rolling. There was a lot of pausing and referring to the game play to answer questions and also to have to clarify what was written on the item cards.

Finally, at the end the observations that were made were ---

1. Be consistent with the item card wording

2. Use 12 sided dice

3. The board is very large, so it's difficult to battle other players. Try to incorporate pets of item cards that make it possible to teleport, move quicker, or have battles from a distance

Original Game Prototype Opportunities

In my opinion, both of the initial game prototype ideas that I mentioned previously have a better basis and possibility for entertaining game play that the game play that we have ended up with. But since they did not seem to make the cut, I can at least explore the opportunities for challenge and play here.

Restaurant Madness:

The Challenge --- to grow your restaurant to be a shining star that can please the notorious Food Critic and run all your competition into the ground (just to make sure)!
The player would have to collect the right chefs (or level them up), the correct dishes for their theme, have the appropriate amount of tables, be able to pay for all the costs of a restaurant, avoid sabotage from others, but still be able to have a high enough combined level of things once the Food Critic appears to judge all of the restaurants.

Players can express themselves through variety of choice. They can choose their restaurant theme, their chef, their dishes, their design, their business abilities, and their morality.
 

Humans VS. Monsters:

The Challenge ----  Being the last to survive. Picking the best path, collecting items to defend your Courage, trapping opponents, or using your opponents as a shield. It would be a fine line of strategy and luck.

Players can express themselves in how they choose to play. What choices they make that affect the other players.
 

Mini Play Test 1

So, after changing the game play over and over each time we met, we also did not have a real board to play on.

I created a makeshift board out of jenga blocks for a mini-playtest to try and see just how the game could flow:

Of course, there were no squares, so we had to use our imagination. It was not the best way to try and conduct a mini-play test.

At this point, the game had changed to becoming more of a 'collecting' type board game and less of a survival game. The goal was changed from ' out-living everyone' as a human to being 'collecting all of the humans' as a monster.

So, essentially the game was the opposite from the original. In the picture, the ponies and animals represented the humans while I played the tiny Budda statue and he played the Dark Vader head.

We found that it was pretty slow to just walk around the board trying to collect humans. We had gotten rid of the initial item cards and monster cards because they no longer worked in this game, so what I learned most from this was that it was crucial to make a new and better item card deck to try and diminish the slowness of the game. So that was my next task.

Brainstorming process

The initial brainstorming process for the board game involved a lot of thought. One side of the group wanted to do a board game like our card game while the other wanted nothing to do with a game like the old one, so I had to sit down and do a lot of thinking to try and come up with an idea that wouldn't be rejected immediately.

Originally, I came up with the idea of a Restaurant style board game. The board would be divided into four sections and each section would represent a different player's restaurant. The goal of the game would be to be the most successful restaurant while driving all the other restaurants out of business and taking over their areas to expand. There would be sabotage, chef duels, a realistic money aspect, leveling up, and trying to desperately please the Food Critic.

While this idea was well met initially by one group member - and we were already working on a game design document, the whole idea was dashed the moment our group dynamic changed and the idea did not appeal to the other two group members.

It was very difficult to find a compromise between the group since everyone had very different likes and dislikes. To try and pacify the group and appeal to everyone, I then proposed the idea of a Monster Vs. Human game.

Where the basis would be that humans were trapped inside of a haunted mansion with ghosts/monsters and the entire goal would be to out-last everyone else on the board.

The idea was to have courage points as health and to try and escape being terrified by the monsters in the game while also trying to trap the other players so that they get their courage taken away instead of you.

There was a big discussion whether monsters would stay present on the board or if they would be chance card encounters. I suggested that perhaps we could do a compromise and have chance card encounters as well as have some cards be permanent manifestations onto the board and have more debilitating long term effects.

The idea was to have more and more ghosts/monsters such as that manifest on the board so that the longer the game goes on - the harder it is to keep all of your courage.

This was the initial game brainstorming process that I took notes on in my notebook.

Here are some pictures I took of that:

As you can see the 'board' is small, has limited rooms for more close-range activity. There are Item Squares as well as Monster squares.

Items can help you survive against monsters and monster cards are chance monster encounters that may or may not be bad and try to take your Courage.


The little ghost picture above is the idea of a monster/ghost manifesting onto the board during the game. It would be unable to move off of the square, but I proposed that it affect players who are caught in its line of sight. The ghost would have direction arrows (not shown) and each player's move it would turn clockwise (or counter-clockwise depending on what is described on its monster card).




Although these ideas were completely changed in favor of other ideas, these were the initial first brainstorming processes.

Playtesting

Exercise 9.3

Set up a time to meet with playtesters and group member. Playtesters ranged in their twenties. One playtester had a lot of gaming experience and works professionally to test user experience. The other had little gaming experience and is a college student.

Exercise 9.4

Introduction:

Hello, thank you so much for coming out today! My name is Steph. I'm a Game Art and Design student and today I am hoping to conduct a test on a new game that I have been working on. Just relax, have fun, and feel free to say whatever you think about the game. Be it positive or negative or even chaotic neutral - we really would appreciate your feedback since it will help us improve our game! We promise it won't hurt our feelings - we really want to know!

Warm Up Discussion:

So, speaking of gaming - do you play games often?
What sorts of games do you generally play?
Why do you play them/What attracts you the most about these games?
Do you play card games?
Why or why not?
What makes you decide to play/or not to play card games?

Play Session:

Alright everyone! Now that we are all friends, let's play! So the first thing I must stress is that this game is still very much in the test phase, so there are still lots of bugs and issues that we are working out - hopefully with your wonderful help. So, if something is frustrating or confusing - please tell us so that we can fix this problem and make things easier!
So, here are the card decks. You can pick the one you like.
Could you tell me why you chose that particular deck?
Now that you have your decks, you can look through them for awhile. Any questions?
How would you tell the level of the cards?
Any confusions in the card layout?
-Gameplay explanation-
-playtest-

Discussion of Game Experience:
Well, that's the end of that game! Well done! So, overall -- how would you say that went?
Did you enjoy the game?
What was enjoyable?
What was not?
Was it easy to understand?
Anything you thought was annoying/boring/silly/confusing?
Would you play it again?

Wrap Up:
Honestly, thank you so much for coming and taking time out of your day to play this game. Have a lovely day and take these homemade cookies home as a thank you~ 


Exercise 9.5

These are the notes I took while our playtesters were playing, talking, eating cookies, and commenting on the gameplay. All of these notes are directly taken from the suggestions and commentary of the playtesters:


During the first playtest with people other than members of the group playing the game - these were the points, problems, and questions that arose.

The game description was received well by the players, but immediately upon explaining the rules - the players became confused about the purpose of the hero card in battle.

The question was posed as to whether the hero card actually participated in battle or was in fact just being used as an avatar with little to no effect otherwise.Since the hero card changes to a higher health point (morale?) level when it is being used as a hero card and rarely would ever have the opportunity to fight (and would not be able to use any spell or trip) - the solution was to pull the hero card idea and instead let the players become the hero.

On the pieces of paper I had created in order to record the hero's health points, I added at the top an area for the player to name themselves as the hero, so that they could see that the points on that sheet were their health during the battle.
One player chose the name "Princess Sparklebutt" and the other chose "Bunny Warrior Princess"

Once this was fixed, the game proceeded onwards and the confusion over the hero card dissipated.

The idea of having three different ways to play the card at first was a little difficult to explain due to the wording choices we at first used (aka. 'unit card'), so we began calling the 'unit card' the 'attacker' and the rules of how to play the three different uses of the card were easier for the players to grasp.

The game started off slowly (as the players were looking over cards to understand their effects and abilities). We decided to change the 2 moves per turn idea into using a 6-sided dice. This turned out to work well for the rest of the game and the pace picked up.

Problems that had to be clarified throughout the game were primarily about:

1. clarifying spells/abilities -- when they can be used, how they are used, who it affects, how long they can be used, and when to discard.

So we came up with some basic simple rules:

- Spells placed on field are immediately active and do not need another move in order to activate.
- Spells are used as a bonus/buffer to an attacking card.
- Spells affect either only the card it is attached to or they are specified in the description who is affected. Cards must be specific in this area to avoid confusion.
- Spells that do not have a time limit can only be used once, otherwise -- on the card it should specify how many turns the spell is allowed to be active. Players must keep track of how long the spell is on the field (they can use their hero paper).
- Spells are discarded/sent to graveyard after their time limit (once or the specified amount of turns)


After creating these rules about spells, the gameplay proceeded more smoothly.

2. We introduced the idea of combo attacks to the players, which they liked immensely. We explained that:

Combo attacks can be used by attacking cards that are on the field and require moves in order to be performed. For example, if a player wishes to combine the attacks of two attackers, they would be required to use two moves in order to do so. Three card combos require 3 moves and so forth.

Discussion about some handicaps on it perhaps need to happen, but in the case of this particular game -- the trips and spells used stopped this from becoming too overpowered.

3. The players needed more cards in their hands, so we changed the rules to be that players could use a move to pick up a card during their turn and were able to draw cards at the end of their turn so that they always had 5 cards in their hand.


4. The last issue we faced were cards that were too overpowered and had an unfair advantage with attacking points (ect.)

- a team meeting will need to be held to go over everyone's cards in order to make sure they are more equal

First Game Journal Assignment - Your Life as a Game

The assignment this week is to list five areas of my life that could be related to gaming and to describe shortly how they could be structured into play.


Let's see...
First I'll start with an experience I just had not thirty minutes prior to writing this:

my cats: Noona and Sora

1. Washing the cat
- For this game, the screen shows your hands, the cat, soap, and a bathtub. The object of the game is to wash the cat for the time limit without getting scratches on your hands. The player must dodge the cat scratches and anticipate by the cat's growls when it is getting ready to lunge. Additional soap may be necessary to keep up the scrubbing action. A player can get a perfect win by not getting any scratches and attain objects like gloves and better soap. If a player gets more than three scratches, the screen bleeds red and the game has to start over~



2. Mighty Bug Killer

Since my roommate and I are terrified of bugs...we have devised a system of combat to fight them...

- This is game where the player can select from three different playable characters to fight off different bugs that come into each level. Each character has a different look and fighting style and when the player selects one, the other two still assist (to the best of their ability) in battle.
Short-range character: holds the bug spray and rolled up newspaper
Long-range character: holds broom
Defensive character: holds trash can lid

The biggest issue is the panic meter. The more bugs that pour out of the ceiling vents in the room, the more panic your team will experience. The player will have to calm their team while fighting off bugs. If the player manages to initiate a team combo with the other two characters, a herd of cats will come and eat any bugs in their way~


3. Impromtu Fashion Show

When you are late and pick the first clean clothing pieces you find... (it happens, right?)

- This is a fashion game based on the player's ability to dress their model with the random selections they are given. The player chooses three to five random cards out of a deck and using those selections, has to create an outfit. The judge (your roommate) will evaluate you and if you pass with a title -- then she lets you leave the apartment. If she fails you - then you will be unable to leave and be late (therefore losing the game).
Various titles that could be achieved would be things like Fashionista, Eclectic, and Sci-fi Princess ect. Each title receives it's own special skit with how it is received where your destination is.


4. That Texan Sun

For those sad human beings who burn when only outside for five minutes - this game is for you.

-The premise is to avoid the sun. The player can choose between two characters: both of whom must get from point A to point B without the sun turning their skin red~
The player must time themselves and find hidden areas and items to combat the rays of the intense sunlight. For instance, they could stumble upon a parasol or some sunscreen. (The sun's rays would burn them up after too long, so they have a shelf life). In order to keep up stamina, the player must find items such as water, ice or Popsicles.



5. Midnight Snack

We all get the munchies, but do we all have to share?

- The player's mission is to create an awesome midnight snack without their roommate catching them and asking to eat half of it. They have to find the correct ingredients while keeping quiet and sneaking around in the kitchen in order to finally enjoy the perfect midnight snack.