WEEK 9 | Ass2 Game Design Progress

We are kind of tearing our hair out at the moment.  We have identified some problems with the original game that we would like to change or improve.  The biggest one being the complexity of keeping track of all a players food (resources):

•  how much of that food they have used to move around the board
•  how much food they collect on each move
•  how much food is allocated to them at the end of each round
•  how much food they use to feed their family after each turn

We could also argue that the original idea works, but we feel would be more suitable as a digital game, and the resource management system would be taken care automatically by the computer.  

On our play through,  it was noticed that most players were experiencing frustration with keeping track of everything, resulting in gameplay that was not fun.  We also found that we were fairly limited with what we could do by using the 'survival' genre.

The group decided to scrap the whole game and start anew.  We attempted changing the genre to race to the end and a quest.  We came up with a few redesigned game boards and many different mechanics.

This all resulted in us realising that we all really loved the idea of having to keep family members alive.  We all felt that this added to the emotion of the game and we struggled to incorporate this into the new styles of our game.  We also struggled to keep the storyline.  

After todays session, we set each member the task of coming up with game ideas over the recess week.  Nathan really wants to keep with the original game idea, but improve the resource management side of things. I don't know what I want, but will work on new game ideas that incorporate the family system.  Michael seems interested in a new game altogether.  

After the holidays, hopefully we can exchange ideas and come up with either an improved design on the original game idea, or a completely new game.  Fingers crossed!!