Week 6

            Our group has been making significant progress to our game: Stop N Go. We all met up Tuesday, October 8^th 2013 to finalize our rules and reference guides for play testing the next morning in class.  While play testing, Cindy stayed behind at our original table while Christina and I play tested our peers’ games. Ashley wasn’t feeling well due to her illness and therefore couldn’t make it to class. We received lots of noteworthy remarks on our game, as well as constructive criticism. We were commended on the flow of our game and how smoothly it runs. Our peers also enjoyed using the red and yellow traffic cards because it sabotaged other players. Many of the special cards were said to be really fun to use such as Detour, which had the purpose of having all players pick up cards, and EZPass to counteract, a yellow or red card that gets placed on you. Many of the constructive criticism we received included the game being too simple, not having enough strategy, and the green card not having a purpose.
            At the end of class, Cindy stated she had spoke to Dr. Parks and they went over many possible changes that can be made to our game while taking into account what our peers felt we should change as well. The changes that we all agreed on establishing to progress our game include the following: When one plays the EZpass card he or she can discard 2 cards instead of just 1 because before when the rule was to only discard 1 card, the EZpass and The Green traffic light card basically had the same function. Next when one plays the red traffic light card he or she can choose the person adjacent to him or her just like before but now one needs to pick up both a destination card and traffic card. The purpose of the yellow card is to just skip the next person in the rotation, just as it was before. These changes were made because before the Red traffic light card and yellow traffic light card seemed too similar, however now they have different purposes. Next a big change we concluded on having was that the destination cards don’t need to be in any special or specific order. The objective now is to collect at least 5 destination cards before one can discard all his or her cards because a problem we ran into was that a peer tester could discard all his or her cards, without accumulating any destination cards and win for all other people on the table didn’t receive the chance to discard any cards or obtain destination cards. Another significant change was that instead of only picking up or only discarding cards when its one’s turn, one now has the option to do both or nothing at all. We all believed this added many more strategic elements to our game.  Lastly, when played, the Triple A lasts only for 1 round and the player who places it down is not affected towards a yellow or red traffic card.
            We concluded on making these changes and play tested it a few times in the library and it ran much smoother. I felt everyone was less retrained after we changed the rule of having the decision of both picking up cards and discarding cards during their turn. We also finalized all of our card designs. All that is left to be done is the print and lamination portion. We are planning on meeting up one last time, Tuesday the 15th before our final card game design is due the next day, Wednesday 10/16/2013.

            

Week 5!

Our group seems to be working well. Christina, Sunny, Ashley, and I all met up last week to make our playable prototype cards. Since then we played our first prototype in class and we found some problems concerning the strategies that were available to players. Our game seemed to be too luck-based, which in turn created too many trivial decisions for players. After playing with Dr. Parks, we all listened to his suggestions as he applauded us on our play-ability of the game. However, there were several problems including the limitation of luck-based strategy and everything was based on trivial decisions. Dr. Parks suggested we make our destination cards in a certain order in which we receive them. Then we can later stack up points if the destination cards matched our car cards and the destination cards were in a row when we flipped them over. He also suggested we make two piles to our game, one for destinations and one for traffic or special cards. If one were to pick up a destination card, one would also have to pick-up a traffic card. Then the players would be restricted to only picking up or putting down during their turn. After playing one round with the new version of rules, we all collected more points, but the rounds took much longer. Christina thought about making a card that gave a person the ability to peek at another players cards and we all agreed that could work. We still have work to do on our game, but as a group I believe we are also guilty of groupthink. When someone suggests something we tend to agree with them immediately.

 Ashley was very outspoken about how she did not want the game to change into something too complicated. We all originally agreed on her idea for the game which seemed simple and fun. I pointed that out to the group how trivial decisions can be made often and that I was afraid of not meeting Dr. Parks standards. So we all agreed that we needed time to think about the issue separately. Since our last class session, Christina decided to create the final mock-ups of our cards through Microsoft word. We are planning to meet tonight, Tuesday, October 8, 2013 to finalize our issues. Hopefully, we can make a lot of improvements by the time we are finished with our card game.


~Cindy

Week 3

For our third class our group sorted through the core mechanics of the game we chose to create. I was the leader of the day. Our first major change was to add new cards to make the game more in-depth and create a fulfilling player experience, advice that Professor Parks gave us. Cindy came up with the idea to have specific car-based cars, like SUV’s, mini-vans, and sports cars. Sunny bounced off her idea and said that instead of using the car cards as our main supply of cars, they could be special identity cards. We decided to have 3 types of car cards, with two in each category. I thought this would let players compete with one another if they happen to have the same car identities, adding to the player experience. So far, they are minivans, sports cars, and sedans.

Another change we made involved a new game design where the goal is to get to your destination instead of discarding the cards from your hand. We were trying to move our game away from the concept of Uno. To reach your destination, you need to have four cards that are associated with your car identity. So far, we decided on grocery stores, business meetings, and schools as our destinations. I thought we could have a separate pile for using special cards to have an element of choice, but we handled it in a different way. Instead, the main choice a player makes will be collecting your own destination cards or preventing another player from reaching their goal.

During class we also talked about meeting up at least once a week to discuss and add to our game. We want to start making prototypes as soon as possible so that we can play the game between ourselves first and work out the kinks. We figured that spending time outside of class will give us the opportunity to make our game better. We like where our game is headed, and we didn't have any problems deciding anything. Our decisions were made by the group because we agreed on all the new ideas.

Last week our group seemed to kick-off with a great start. We had two new members that joined our group and 3 games to choose from. Christina, Ashley, and I had games to review but Sunny did not have a game due to him just joining our class he was not informed we needed a game idea already. Christina created a game called "Jungle" that initiated game-play much like Uno except everything was Jungle based. The object of the game was to get rid of all of your cards first to be called the winner. Ashley created a game called Stop and Go which had red, yellow, green, ez-pass, and AAA cards. Each card specifically had its own purpose and the mechanics of the game seemed to fit pretty well. The object of Stop and Go was to get rid of all of your cards before anyone else. My game was called Fitness Fanatic which required two teams to play against each other and by the roll of dice people would have to pick up a certain amount of cards and complete all the exercises on each card within the time of a 2 minute hourglass. We had a nice selection of games and we all agreed that Stop and Go seemed fairly easy to understand for everyone. So we settled on Stop and Go for the next few weeks. Our game seems to be pretty simplistic, however, I am not too sure how much we can add to it? 

Overall our team worked well, to be honest we did not argue get angry with one another. I believe it is because we as a group did not have terribly conflicting views.

 

Last week my groups members and I came to class prepared to share our original cards games. However, our one group member Sunny was new to the class, therefore he didn't have a card game to present to the rest of us. Sunny was the leader of our group for the week, which gave him the responsibility to choose what card game we will continue to work on and perfect for the next few weeks. Although Sunny was the group leader, we all gave our opinions and insights helping him choose what game we would adopt. Cindy and Christina both shared how they liked the theme and mechanics to my game Stop N Go. To my surprise my game was chosen. Walking into class I had no idea that mine would be chosen because I never thought I was creative enough to make a game that could successfully be played.
After the group had chosen my game, I decided to establish the parameters of the game that I wished to stay the same during our development progress. I concluded that the goal of discarding all the five cards must not be changed. I also decided that I wanted the general mechanics of each traffic color card to remain the same. Immediately after I set the parameters, my group and I began brainstorming on new changes to make to the game. We all agreed that another special card should be added to the deck. I came up with the idea of having a detour card which causes every player to pick up a card from the deck. Cindy also came up with the idea of increasing the amount of cards you pick up when the red card is discarded, however we haven't decided on the actual amount. In the upcoming weeks we will continue to brainstorm and communicate our ideas to successfully accomplish my original goal; create a strategic game that friends can play with just enough rules to enjoy themselves and have fun.