Capstone Project - Prototyping and round 1 of playtesting
Card list -
To solidify how many client cards I will need to draw, I created names for all 6 clients and put together their layouts. I will use this to not only inform the final cards, but also help me build a physical prototype to test my game's mechanics.
Creating my prototype -
Here is a progress photo of the various cards within my game, there are:
6 clients
6 employees
12 action cards [some of which are duplicated to cut down on the amount of time i will have to spend drawing this specific asset]
there will also be 12 furniture cards, consisting of 3 groups of 4, the bedroom, lounge and miscellaneous.
Here is a rough setup of the board for two players. Each player has a card dictating their cave attributes [with another card on the side to track money, energy and resources as I forgot to bring in tokens on this day] as well as a client card. On the top [where the eraser is] is the day tracker, i think in the final game I will have each player have their own separate day tracker as this ties in with one of the action cards. I also think having each player have their own large cave card rather than a central board, this is for several reasons. 1, I think it will be much cheaper to produce it like this, and 2, it means players don't have to huddle around a small central board, people can sit back with their own card which makes for a more pleasant and relaxed game experience.
For this first round of playtesting, I played the game through with just one other person to see if my game would actually work before I try to break/change anything major. These were the questions I set out to answer:
- Does my game work?
- Is my game fun?
- Is it easy to pick up?
- Following on from this, would it be easy for a child to pick up?
- Have I got enough cards?
- Is the distribution of 10 energy and 10 money per player enough, or should I adjust the values
- How can I make my game better?
Playtesting -
Before playing I also put together a small manual to instruct my player on how to play the game. It went very well actually, the game surprisingly worked and the amount of energy and money was just enough to bring a sense of challenge and planning to the game. I actually lost the game when we played for the first time, which is great because if I had won I would have to consider if this was just a result of the game or if somehow it was unfairly balanced in my favour. I will of course need to play this game many more times in the future, especially finding ways to break my mechanics, but for the first playthrough I was really impressed with how well it actually went.
Below is all pages of the manual that I made [this may also serve as a paper maquette proving I can get all of the information onto 4 pages, this may change in the future as the game mechanics evolve].
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| Page 1 |
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| Page 2 and 3 |
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| Page 4 |
Moving onto improvements, we noticed that the furniture cards are not balanced, there arent many cards with the comfort additive to them so to fix this there is two options I can take. Option 1 is to look through all my furniture cards and compare them to the clients, adjusting the values to make them more fair, or option 2, increase the card count to 16, having 4 groups of 4 cards. This would give players more variety for stat multipliers however might add a little more time onto my overall production timeline for this project. As the furniture cards are quite simple, this shouldn't be too much of an issue, especially if I make my own template for all of the cards that way all I will have to do is change the text and the artwork, and I won't have to redraw the layouts. With this in mind, I think i could do a combination of option 1 and 2, rebalancing the cards whilst also making some new ones.
Gathering some feedback from my tutor about my project as a whole, he suggested to look into how much this will roughly cost to print. He recommended a company by the name of Hayman creative to estimate how much my assets will cost [they also offer a card template for InDesign which will prove extremely helpful to me for laying out the cards]. I will be doing some research into this in the near future as this will also help me decide what is/isnt needed for my game to refine my prototype further.
I will be implementing this feedback into a secondary prototype of this game of which I would like to test with both 2 players and also 4 players, to see how the rules change depending on the number of people at the table. As stated before, I would like to film the next playtest I do, which will involve me having to create some consent forms beforehand to make sure that all individuals consent to both being filmed and being added to my blog. I will only ask permission from individuals over the age of 18, and the individuals will reserve the right to ask me to remove the video at any point in time [ I won't be including faces but voices probably will be included in the clip just to explain what is happening].
Trello -
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/112wXJW27lFJjkPjQHZk7fCMT7VPCanDHE-cVP0tGDUM/edit?usp=sharing
I plan to implement the changes to my prototype and test again next Monday. I will also need to make some consent forms beforehand as stated in my earlier paragraph. In terms of research I will be looking into some manufacturers which will lead into both MLO1 and MLO3 and will help me calculate how I will make a physical product. I will also next Monday aim to get the two client cards I already have designed formatted correctly on InDesign to get more confident with the software.
I am feeling very confident with my project at this stage but as tasks are going to get a bit more complicated I might revisit my Gantt chart and put my remaining tasks on their [from now until the deadline] just to make it a little easier to understand what i need to do and when. This will be included in all blogposts from this post onward.
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