WEEK 11 | Game Design Progress

Everyone presented their finished prototype tasks set by the group last week.  

Nathan:  Did an awesome job on the round counter, using a flip calender.  He used coffee stained paper as the flip pages, which has now set the theme/aesthetics for the rest of the prototype.  It gives it a rough, scavengy feel to it.

Leonie:  Made a game board, using coffee stained and burned cardboard, with drawn on tiles using crayon.  The character stats have been stuck onto the board using brown paper, in keeping with Nathan's rustic theme.  I also made some game pieces, three for each player, all with holes in them for carrying rations.

Michael:  Came up with the War Event cards, complete with stories for the actions.  He also designed some new ration counter wheels, which we may end up scrapping unfortunately.   We all really liked how the new game pieces simplified keeping track of the rations (by actually putting them on the pieces themselves) and how they gave a really good immediate visual representation of the players currently carried resources.  We would like to have a similar setup for each of the players bases, where they can stick all their collected resources into the top of their base, instead of using a wheel to record the number of rations.  We found the simple additional of a visual representation of resources added so much to the feel of the game, and has greatly aided the task of keeping track of resources.  Perhaps this may have fixed the resource tracking problem we were experiencing in our original game design.  Oh well, too late in the game to go back to that now.

This week, we drew a few flowcharts of the game, which helped us discover some outcomes that we had not encountered during our play testing eg. What happens when there is no more food on the game board but plenty of rounds left to play?? What if the game ends on two players having the same amount of food?

We wrote down all the rules and started to flesh out the final story.  Tonight, Nathan is going to play test the game with his family who have not played it before, using the rules that we completed today.  This will also allow us to see if our written rules are understandable or could be improved.  

The group is going to meet on Saturday to work on the Design Document.  Tasks for people during the week:

• Digital copy of flowchart
• House pieces with holes drilled in them to store rations
• Ideas for the final story