Week 07 - How People Interact

Week 7 has brought us to begin developing and playtesting a card game based on travel. Our team has decided to go with a game that's based on a tour bus, where you use film to take photos of landmarks and earn points along the way.

In chapter 11 of Macklin and Sharp's "Games, Design and Play: A Detailed Approach to Iterative Game Design", they discuss game developer playtests, where people who understand the game design process are playing the game. This can be done at any time and proves to be very effective if looking to make any specific changes to an aspect of the game that players feel are lacking in some criteria. After my return to class, I proposed the idea of introducing suits into our card game, where if you matched the suit of your film to the suit of the landmark, you would receive an extra point. To also minimize how many points a player has to keep track of, the "point" card pulled along with the landmark card also lost its point value and contributed to only one extra point if you matched that suit. 

Being that all the suit assignments with the film and landmarks are random, it felt unfair for some when they received an abundance of the same color/suit. The maximum number of points that one was able to acquire with only film was 10, and it purely relied on a lucky hand of film and obvious decisions. 

Zach Hiwiller explains obvious decisions in chapter 10 of "Players Making Decisions". Put simply, it is a decision "where every rational player would only ever choose one option." The only rational option that a player would make with our game is to only use film on a landmark with the same suit as the film, as that's what any rational person trying to win the game would do. With this in mind, we went back to the drawing board and deducted that the point system that we removed initially needed to come back and be revamped. Our final product consisted of:

- Suited film

- Suited landmarks (+1 point if matching)

- Bonus points per landmark (Not suited, 1-5 extra points)

Going back to chapter 11 of Macklin and Sharp's book, we had to "change one thing at a time" to find out what best impacted the game in a positive way. The groundwork of our game seemed fine to all of us and we had to do "live coding" with the point system, this is where one manipulates the game and immediately sees the changes of the games dynamics. This final point system along with our string of power-up cards finally gave us the balanced gameplay that we were looking for within our travel game.