week 6 readings

For this week in class we set out finally building our first real and big games. For us a card game all about traveling on a tour bus. And for me, one of the first times i've really interacted with a card game other than uno or texas hold em. Which is funny, but it is true, card games are like this vast unexplored world for me and so it's fun to have some of my new experiences in creating them! For us we got our project up and running quite fast, we each fell in love with the theme and the core idea of the game and so we ran with it quickly. This meant early on we got to do quite a bit of regular old playtesting. We also are all learning developers so these game tests started happening pretty quickly, we decided early that instead of talking over a lot of ideas it might be better to just try them out. In macklin we l;earned this type of playtest is called a “Game Dev Test” i know right pretty self explanatory but it involves “people who understand the game design process.” I think it's important to recognize this distinction however because if all we do is game dev playtest it will create problems when people unfamiliar with the games interact with it. Something I'd really like to do would be a “Target Audience playtest” because I want to see how someone who's never heard of our game would pick it up and try it out. I was talking with Dustin in my group about really paying attention to how we write our rules, because what the problem is we already know what they are, if we explain them too ourselves we'll under explain it in a way that someone new would never understand. But if we over explain people might get bored while reading and decide on something else or get confused. I think rules are maybe the most important part of the game making progress, not only because they “dictate play” but also because they set up the audience's interaction with the game from then on. I think about being a really young kid never quite knowing how to actually play pokemon because all i cared about were the shiny cards, and i don't want something like that to happen to our game. Another thing we really are wrestling with in our game is Macklin’s idea of player agency. Our game is very very random, and I think personally my goal is to make it both a game of chance, but also one with skill and agency so that players feel they hold some sort of control over the game. It's a tough line to walk though and one I struggle with balancing for.