Advanced Game design II – First Game

The theme for the first week games were “Every finger in the room is pointing at you” and we were asked to make a game based on this theme.  We had 20 hours/person for this assignment.

The game we made in my group was a board game inspired by the classic mix & match games, where you have different parts of characters and you try to match them together to create a complete character.

My thoughts about this theme was that either the people are pointing at you because you want them to or because you are different/bullied. So for our game we decided to go for both of these. We made a game about beauty surgery where the players try to get an operation for each part of their body first, while stopping the other players from finishing their operations.

The players start with 7 cards each and deal these cards between each other. The players try to collect cards of the same type and if they have three of the same at the turns end they can try to make an operation for that body part.

The player with 3 of the same bodycard then roll a dice to see how succesful the operation was. (1-2 = 1 point, 3-4 = 2 points, 5-6 = 3 points) If the player has collected a “Perfect operation card”, this will add 1 point to the result, unless the player haven’t already reched the maximum result (3 points). Other players, that have collected a “failed operation card” may use this on another player and this will instead reduce the result by 1 point. If the player roll 1 point and another player used this, the operation truly is failed and the player recives no bodypart.

(Cards made by Simon Öqvist)

The finished version of the body, once a player have all of the body parts including: large lips, big breasts, shiny blond hair, six pack, looong legs and strong arms. Finishing the game with an absurd looking creature.)

Once any of the players have operated all their body parts the game ends and the player with the most succesful body winns.

It was a interesting concept to work with, but if we had had more time, I would have added more different bodyparts. So that the points weren’t only a number, but visible on the different parts. Som if a player had a 1 point leg operation or 3 point leg operation, it would be visible on the body chart.

Playtesting

We play tested our game on two different groups. Since our prototype cogwheels were made out of cardboard and tape, they didn’t work as well as we had hoped they would. Since the spinning didn’t work properly, the players who tested our game had to make a lot of thinking just to understand the basic concept of spinning the different cogwheels and how this correlates. Once the players understood the system, they thought it was quite interesting and saw potential for it to work, but we really need to improve the cogwheels.

They also said that we should add more flexibility in the movement. This was something we had thought of before, but we had decided that we just wanted to tryout the basic movement system this time; to make sure that it could work. We’ll probably add another component to the game play such as cards, so that the players get the chance to use different tactics.

Second board game meeting

I had another meeting with my board game group today. The earlier idea about a candy store was dumped and instead we tried to come up with a good mechanic to build our game around.

We got stuck at first since we found it quite difficult to come up with a system before the aesthetics. We tried to think of different puzzle games since we wanted to keep it simpel. We decided that we should prioritise to find a core mechanic that feels important and well executed.

After a while I proposed that it would be interesting to use cogwheels in someway. The rest of the group thought that this was a interesting idea and we brainstormed around that. What we came up with was a board on which you were able to place different cogwheels. If two or more cogwheels were placed next to eachother and a player rotated one of the wheels, all of the  cogwheels would rotate. (In the same way that real cogwheels works, wow!!)

Our beautiful first version of the board.

We still have to decide exactly how many cogs each cogwheel should have and how big our board should be. We will meet again tomorrow and try to decide a design that we can use when we have our first playtest this thursday.

Board game concept

Today I had a meeting with my group about the board game that we’ve been tasked to develop. We have to come up with a idea for a board game and then make it from scratch. Other groups will try out our games and give us feedback throughout the process and we’ll also try their games.

We started of by brainstorming for different ideas. We asked ourself what kind of theme we wanted for our game, but we got stuck. Instead we decided that everyone should tell us random words and ideas without over thinking it. We wrote down all the words and after a while we checked the list for interesting themes.

You can see the whole list here.

Some of the words that stuck was

• Brandman (Firefighter)
• Rädda skogen (Save the forest)
• Godis butik (Candy store)

We had also made a system earlier in the course with a game board that had different parts that could rotate. We really liked this system so we thought of maybe using a moveable game board again.

After further brainstorming we had two ideas.

One was a game about pirates traveling to the center of a circular map to grab treasures. They would have to move back and forth since they couldn’t carry to many treasures at a time. This board would be moveable and hopefully add some interesting strategy systems to the game.

The other idea was set in a candy store and the players would steal candy from the store without beeing noticed by the shopkeeper. The candy would be more valuable the further in the player advanced in to the store, but it would also be a higher risk to be noticed by the shopkeeper.

Right now we are more interested in making the second idea and we’ll continue to work on the concept this monday!