CAGD-270 - Level Design

 CAGD-270 - Level Design

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Post #8: Game 3 Postmortem

 Game 3 Postmortem

Gentlemen’s Dash

Group 7

Game Summary

Gentlemen's Dash is a racing card game about balancing speed for style. In this game you play as a scientist racing against an opponent scientist to get first in line for the money grant offered by your local academy. However, being first does not guarantee you the grant, you must still conduct yourself as a proper gentleman in order to earn their favor. Go too fast and you risk losing to your opponent building up more points than you, go too slow and you risk missing out on the large finish line bonus. 

Target Audience

Player Types: Casual Players, Strategists, and Competitors

Player Interaction Pattern: Player vs. Player

Age Range: 5+

Appeal: This game really only requires the ability to do basic arithmetic, or simple counting, and can be played anywhere where it is feasible to lay out cards and maybe have a scrap of paper to help keep score. The game takes very little preparation, and requires few resources, most of which are extremely common. Finally, it is never perfectly clear what the best strategy is. Now that the game includes the optional Playing with Style rule, players can pull ahead when they are far behind just by playing with a bit of foresight. 

Problems Encounters

As with all the games I’ve been working on, the biggest issues were clearly and concisely conveying the rules. I wanted to make sure that our players had all the most important rules front-loaded and easy to find, but make sure that any rule could be located easily. If I were to bring this game into a more professional context, I would be redesigning the rulesheet into a small rule booklet, and arranging the graphics so that as many could fit on the page while the rules were readable. 

The other big issue is that we really didn’t get to see as much player feedback as I would have liked. It is also especially hard to get meaningful feedback when people are forced to play my game, and when they are tired and overburdened by school. This was just not the best environment to get the critical feedback that our game needs to be fully refined. However, given the circumstances, I like to think that we made the most of it, and so far we have received very little negative critiques on the actual fun-factor of the game. 

Task Completion

I feel that me and my partner were good about sharing the workload. I will confess that since I conceived of the game, I probably took a greater share of the work simply out of passion, but I was aware of this and made sure that I did not leave him out. He not only provided helpful assistance in designing the game, but also made many valuable contributions which made the game as compelling and strategic as it is. He also provided many of the examples used to ensure players had a good idea of what they needed to do. I have been very lucky to have such a responsible partner. 

Design Solutions

Our game was already working pretty well, but in the beginning crossing the finish line was simply a matter of getting 50 meters or more. My partner suggested that we make it so the players had to get exactly 50 meters, and it was only the first to do so that got the finish line bonus. This was a major improvement as it gave more value to the slower meter-value cards. My initial concern was that the faster cards would always be better, so in addition to this rule I also included an optional rule called, “Playing with Style.” This allowed players to receive additional bonus points if they played certain cards in a row. These little opportunities could be chained together to give a player just enough of an edge where they could beat someone who got to the finish line first. My only concern now that there is still an edge case I have not tested where the players tie, then tie again, and don’t have any rules that explicitly resolve the final tie. Despite that, our game has proven to work how it was intended to. Most of the games we witnessed result in the players being neck-and-neck, where there is not much more than a 3 point difference. This encourages players to try again, now that they understand the game a bit better. 

Game Development Going Forward

While there are plenty of areas of my game design and game development process that I could improve on, I can think of two major ones that stand out. The first is incorporating more visuals into the rulesheet. This would be even better if I used tools specifically designed to make stylish presentations, so that I could include more graphic and word content on a page without overcrowding things. The second is to seek out bigger groups of playtesters who will be able to provide more realistic criticism for my games; giving me more data points to help improve it. 

Post #7: Playtesters 2

Playtesters 2

Playtested Games

• Maze Crawler (Group 3)

• InuVasion (Group 5)

• Deckeria (Group 8)

• Spellcasters (Group 9)

Preamble

    Of the games playtested this week I chose to play the game InuVasion. I felt that it had the most developed gameplay, with most interesting set of decision making opportunities. This game was produced by group 5, and all the art, in and out of screenshots, belongs to them.

Game's Premise

    "The year is 2075. The city of San Francisco has been in a state of Cold War with

the evil Dog Spirits for twelve long years, but the silence has been broken. The King of

the Dark Spirits, Echo, has begun his next strike on the city that he loathes. However,

Echo’s sister, Angel, the Queen of the Good Spirits, has chosen to bestow her power

unto two young heroes in an effort to ward off her evil counterpart. Now, Kuro and Ishi

must build up their strength and enlist the help of their companions in order to defeat

Echo." ~Extracted from Group 5's rulesheet

InuVasion (Group 5)

Liked

I like how I can choose which direction I want to travel in after I roll my dice, and how my movement continues along a wall if my character would run into one. This allowed for many interesting movement opportunities, and really lent itself to the game’s significant player choices.

Disliked

There’s a lot of inconsistency in the language, and I’m sorry to say that the dramatic elements felt like they were cluttering the rules more than enhancing them. There would often be a moment when I was asking what a dark dog was, and why it wasn’t explained until much later. 

Improvement

The more information that the players can gleam from the player board the less they will have to keep referring back to the rules, so I would suggest adding even more info onto the board. Everything from simple parenthesis that say how much max strength you can have, to loot roll tables, feel like they could fit nicely on the board. 

Formal Elements of InuVasion (Group 5)

Players

• Who is Playing: 2 players

• Types: Cooperators, roleplayers, Mid-Maxers, Achievers, and maybe some Collectors.

• Interaction Pattern: Players vs Game

Objective

• Two players cooperate to defeat the boss. 

Rules

• Player’s choose characters which have different stats, different items they can equip, and different secondary objectives. 

• Characters move horizontally and vertically on the board, moving along walls if their movement would put them past it. 

• Tiles represent different events and can contribute both to their obstacles and their resources. 

• They must complete certain tasks before facing the boss.

Procedures

• Movement is determined by die rolls and the individualized player board for each character. 

• Items, stats, and tasks are tracked on the player boards. 

• A deck of cards is used to determine final boss health. 

Resources

• Offense: how good you are at defeating encounters.

• Defense: how good you are at surviving encounters. 

• Strength: used in calculating offense and defense.

• Items: provide offense and defense.

• Movement: gained from dice rolls. 

• Tasks: required to complete before progressing to the boss. 

Boundaries

• The player boards bound the players to a grid of tiles.

• Dice and deck of cards bound the player to six-sided dice and 52 standard playing cards. 

Conflict

• Characters must survive a number of encounters before going up against the boss in order to win. Encounter success is based on dice roll and the character’s stats. 

• Each character has at least one task they must complete before they are allowed to fight the boss. 

Outcome

• Either both players win, or both players lose. (Zero Sum Game)

Post #6: Gentleman's Dash - Version 1

Gentlemen's Dash

Version 1 to 2

Group: 7 (The No Name Guys)

Game Title: Gentlemen's Dash

Game Summary

    Gentlemen's Dash is a game about balancing speed for style. In this game you play as a scientist racing other scientists to get in line first for the money grant offered by your local academy. However, being first does not guarantee you the grant, you must still conduct yourself as a proper gentleman in order to earn their favor. Go too fast and you risk losing to your opponent building up more points than you, go too slow and you risk missing out on the large finish line bonus. 

Version 1

    With my previous experiences in creating board/card games I found that our group would regularly come up with too many features or we would leave too much room for future features, so I pushed for a game that was extremely simple, but that could achieve a decent level of depth. My aim was a game that could be played with nothing more than a couple decks of cards and maybe some paper and pencil to keep track of things. I chose a standard deck of playing cards because of how likely people were to have one. Same with coins. I wanted the whole game to be something that spectators could look at and think, “Oh I think I get it” or, “that looks simple enough.” I might like to present our playtesters with two different rule sheets. One sheet would be our more detailed version that we currently have, and the other would not be as thorough, but would be much more condensed. I wonder if we are underestimating our future players or overestimating them. I also thought it would be nice to have a single card that has all the information you need to play the game without constantly referring back to the rule sheet. Can it be done? Just how much information is truly needed to play this game? How wide a gap can I make in a logical leap where the average person can work it out? I have seen games with almost no rules and have thought that those systems were the most elegant and pleasant to absorb. Can our game do the same? I think it helps that this game is done so quickly and that the point values are relatively easy to remember, but I could think that simply because I originally conceived of most of it. I am happy that my partner has been able to go along with it and “pick up what I was putting down.” He has been a big help in getting the game to where it currently is, and I am enjoying our collaboration.

Version 2

    We did not do too many big changes to version 2, most of it was tweaks with little to no new features added. I think that is the best way to iterate on our design as we still have not received much feedback on it from playtests. Most of what we did was lower the bonus received from crossing the finish line, and make the really high movement cards worth no points to make the lower movement cards more worthwhile. Because our finish line is represented simply as a distance in meters, my partner came up with the idea that the players had to reach that distance exactly in order to get the finish line bonus. This automatically placed more value on the lower movement cards, which was what I wanted all along! Very clever idea, and now the game feels really strategic, without feeling overly complicating or lacking depth. 

Overview

    I am really enjoying the result of this game, and I think it is something that once we dress it up with some more visuals, it could pass as a rather pleasant game. My only concern is that keeping score in real time is a bit tedious, as you are keeping track of two different numbers for yourself, and the two different numbers for your opponent. Using Excel is great for this, but for an actual card game it would certainly be better if the players had less to keep track of. I would also like to add more dramatical elements, but I don’t want to sacrifice the simplicity nor the clarity that the game currently provides. We will need to tread carefully with how to change our rule sheets, but I think we will know more once we’ve received a decent number of critiques. 

[Post #5] Rat Pie - Post Mortem

• Rat Pie - Post Mortem

  by Weston Campbell

  
  

  Group: 11 (The Rat Pack)

  
  

  Game Summary

  Rat Pie is a game about running rats through several routes in order to bring back food. The challenge is to make it through the route without being spotted by the head chef, and bring back more food than your opponent. The player with the most food at the end of ten rounds wins the game!

  
  

  Target Audience

  • Player Types: Competitors, Jokers, and Achievers

  • Player Interaction Pattern: Player vs Player

  • Age Range: 18-30 (College Students)

  • Appeal

  • Playing anthropomorphized rats as they scramble for food in a kitchen encompasses a lot of elements that many generations enjoy. Playing as animals is almost always a crowd favorite, and food is heavily ingrained in our culture’s values. There is a bit of strategy involved as you must make the choice of which rat to use, which route to run, and whether you want to move the rat this turn, or attempt to sabotage your opponent. 

  
  

  Obstacles Encountered in the Design

  
  
  Our game was originally meant to be a stealth, baking game for college students, which turned out to be trickier than we had first imagined. The first major challenge was keeping everything to individual player boards, as opposed to having a shared game board. In the end, we still felt that players would need to synchronize their player boards in order to simulate a shared space. Then came the issue of stealth. Stealth with player boards was very unusual, and it was very difficult to find any other games employing that kind of stealth that was also a fun mechanic. Our final result was just a gambling mechanic reflecting the likelihood of a rat getting caught by the head chef. We also included an awareness system which was supposed to go up whenever a player attempted a sabotage, however our playtesters never used our sabotage mechanic, and it felt like they didn’t think it was worth it. 
  
  

  One of the other surprising effects of developing a game in this environment was how few people made an effort to play our game. We suspect that it was a combination of the rules not quite being simple enough, and there not being enough visuals to help reinforce said rules. While I would much prefer to hammer down the mechanics before getting too into the visuals, it seems like next time we need to get those graphics out sooner to attach more playtesters.

  
  

  Task Completion

  My team was very on top of it. We met regularly, at least three times a week to work on the game, and each of us worked on an equal share of the work. I was fortunate enough to be paired with two talent artists who made the graphical design work look easy. Given the amount of time we had to work on the project, and many of the limitations thanks to the COVID-19 virus, we were only able to go so far with this project, but I think we all did a great job outputting the work that needed to be done every week. 

  
  

  My Role in the Group

  I ended up becoming the team leader merely because I was a little more organized. I would post Google Doc links up plenty of time before we needed to get started on the next task, and I would help nail down our next meetup season. I really didn’t mind the role, and I hope I made a good impression on them. 

  
  

  Future Projects

  Going forward it is clear that we need to heavily appeal to our playtesters if we want to get any valuable feedback. This means more visuals, less words, and quicker play times. I think that the next game I work on I would like to see how far one can get without words, and whether we can capture a number of time-tested mechanics that can be employed quickly and easily. I would essentially like to make a spring-loaded game that takes almost nothing to set up, and looks simple enough to start playing even if the players haven’t read all the rules yet. 

Final Rule Sheet: Rat Pie Final Version

[Post #4] The Rat Pack v2 to v3

Group: 11

Game Summary

        Our game is based on a Stealth-based Baking theme game, aimed at college students. In this game you play as a squadron of rats in a bakery trying to gather as much food as you can without being caught by the head chef. Each player has access to a number of routes, and a number of different rats to choose to send out to gather food. The player with the most food by the end of the game wins.

Version 2 to 3

With version one out of the way and some external playtesting with version 2, we were ready to make a number of important corrections. With this edition, we put in extra effort to clarify rules that were too easily being skipped by our playtesters. There was not a lot of time for our playtesters to read through all the rules, so they did a lot of skimming, which resulted in some thinking that certain mechanics had no effect on the game. We added in a few images to help guide the player back to these mechanics and further emphasize their importance. In the future, once we have done enough playtesting, we would like to make use of more icons to indicate importance. It would also be nice to include some of the rules embedded on the individual player boards so that referencing said rules would be more succinct. 

Rule wording has been our bane since the very beginning of this project. Our game doesn’t resemble very many mainstream games, so we don’t have as much to draw from. Without painstakingly searching hundreds of form posts or somehow playing a variety of exotic games, it’s hard to find a good example to base our rules off of. Even something as simple as explaining that a rat’s Load is the maximum amount of food they can bring back on a single run, poses quite a challenge. We also wanted to be very consistent with our keywords, so we combed through our rulesheet and made sure all our keywords were bold and capitalized. Ideally adding an icon next to a keyword would make for a nice way of tying the mechanics to a visual that we can place on the board, but those icons take work to create and format, so we had to leave that on the chopping block for now.

Playtester’s Feedback

The feedback we received on the game was pretty minimal, but one thing is clear, our playtesters do not want to read through all our rules to get started playing. This was the same problem I encountered with my Solitaire mod. Given that most of our playtesters are not in much of a position to dedicate a lot of time and effort to critiquing our work, it’s clear that the more we can do to relieve the burden of absorbing a complex rule system, the better. Most of the people who have or will playtest our game are not likely to play it more than once, so it’s best if we can make that one experience as stress free as possible. We also learned that not everyone understands our terminology, so it is important to include a visual to help clarify our intentions.

How to Proceed

Personally I would like to move most of the rules to the player board. I want to have any math-based rules there, as well as the actions one can take each turn. I think that the rulesheet is a good place for exceptions, side remarks, and other pieces of information that are a bit wordy, but that the board, or a rule card, would have a nice and concise summary of standard play. If we have the time to do something like this, I think it would greatly improve the readability and speed at which people are able to get up and play our game. That is how I would like to proceed from here. 

Week #2: The Jump from Version 0.1 to 0.2

 Week #2: The Jump from Version 0.1 to 0.2

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Group: 8

Game Summary

Our game is based on the Klondike version of Solitaire, but with a twist. We aimed for a game that gives you more chances to beat ordinarily unwinnable games. In our modification of the game we allow two uses of a card searching mechanic to retrieve a card in the Talon or Stock that would otherwise be inaccessible, as well as a pair of Joker cards that act like wild cards in other games.

Update v0.1:

It's week #2 working on our Solitaire Mod for CAGD-170 Video Game Design class and we have made many major strides from the very inception of the project, to today.

In version 0.1 we focused on a minimal design that included pictures. We wanted to present our players with just enough information to understand the game, but not overwhelm them. We were also determined to rewrite the official rules using our own language in order to distinguish ourselves from it.

We found that our minimalist approach left out too many details. There were so many rules of Solitaire that we had never had to explain on paper that we were bound to miss a few. Eventually settling on a more expanded and thorough design, we wrote out the rules in such detail that it could have been used to author a digital version of the game.

We actually went through three or four iterations on version 0.1. Wording was very important, as well as how we formatted our terms. Did we capitalize Aces and Kings? Should we always capitalize the names we gave to the various areas of the board? What terms should we use for those areas? The ones the official rules use, or ones we make up? We also found ourselves concerned with the images we were using. My partner took pictures of her deck which included a bunch of fun graphics on it. Unfortunately that caused the visual to be more confusing and busy. She was able to find a deck that was a bit more consistent on the back-facing design, and she photographed using a dark mat to help increase the contrast. This really helped our rulebook look a lot more professional. Ideally we would use illustrations, but that's a time consuming task which is much too demanding for where we are in the design and prototyping phase.

Originally, we had the Tableau as the Gameplay Stacks, the Foundations as the Winning Stacks, the Stock as the Deck, and the Talon as the Draw Pile. There wasn’t anything terribly bad about these except that when we went to explain how cards/stacks were moved around the Gameplay Stacks, things quickly became confusing. Eventually we went back to the official rule terms. At least this way if people look up rules for the original game, they will already be familiar with these terms.

Update v0.2:

In version 0.2 we discovered that our players had to read all the rules before they could even begin to play. With nearly three pages of rules, we felt that was going a bit far. We wrote up a section using very casual language to step our players through gameplay, while mentioning any outlier rules. We included a more concise gameplay loop after just in case someone wants more of a checklist.

Overview

Our game is looking a lot better. I like the direction we are going that allows users to pick up and play quicker. I also like using more relaxed, casual language that makes it sound like the rulebook is having a conversation with the player. Solitaire is a game about passing the time and keeping yourself busy when you really don’t have anything better to do, or you simply don’t want to strain your mind on other tasks. There is still a lot of work to do. Our document’s formatting got a bit messed up and we just can’t sit by idly knowing that it needs a tune-up.

We’re looking forward to any feedback our players can provide! Don’t hold back! Every data point brings us closer and closer to the perfect Solitaire mod!

I have included a link below to a PDF of the current rulebook. It's messy, but please feel free to try it out!

Antidepressant Solitaire Rulebook V0.2