Development Process (Group 4)


Game Summary: It is a simple game of solitaire, with the added mod that you roll a six-sided die to determine how many cards end up in each column. As usual, you sort cards into the Foundation by suit and you must place cards to the columns in descending number order and alternating color order.


Target Audience: It is a single player game, for all ages. Since solitaire is a fairly simple game to learn, it can easily appeal to anyone who decides to give it a look. It’s quick and you can get the win or loss after playing for about 10 minutes.



The development process was fairly simple. My teammate made up the idea because he just happened to have a die near him (and also he was playing solitaire physically for the past hour). At first, our card game mod was that the die would be used to roll for the cards in the columns and also how many cards you’d draw from the Talon deck. But unfortunately, we had to scrap the “roll to draw from the Talon” rule because it made the game longer.


Luck is something that’s dangerous to work with in a game, because a player always wants to be in control of the situation. With luck, you remove some of that control. The first time we playtested, my teammate was constantly rolling high numbers. He went through the deck really quickly, but wasn’t really able to place any cards on to the columns. In the end of that game, he was in an unwinnable situation all along. And then the second time we playtested, he finished the game extremely quickly because of all the low rolls.


And from that, the rule sheet process was easy as well. My teammate wrote the words and I made the pictures. I spent a lot of time on those pictures. Everyone in the class seemed to really like our rulesheet! A common part of everyone’s reviews was that our rulesheet was ready to go! As someone who cared a lot about visuals, I was very proud of our rulesheet. Nice and pristine.


The playtesting process was a little more difficult because it was kind of hard to decipher how the other group felt. They didn’t really say much. I can understand that solitaire wasn’t really their thing, because they weren’t very familiar with it. Although, they said that the rulesheet was very good at explaining the rules. Reading the reviews from the forum threads were much more helpful to us.



Overall, the management of the project was fairly easy. My teammate and I were very on top of things. We got along well too. There were essentially no problems in communication. We didn’t really take that much time out of our day to stress on the project. Our mod was extremely simple though, so it makes sense. Honestly, it was probably a little too simple. Tasks were delegated equally, and we took turns turning in the assignments. It was about as equal as can be, I’d say.


For the postmortem video, we just recorded the lines that we assigned ourselves to read and then I edited them (very amateurly) in Adobe Premiere. It was easier than taking time out of our day to read them together. I like doing this kind of thing. Surprisingly it was a really easy edit. I thought it would take several hours but it only took two (or less). My webcam is of horrible quality, so my parts are kind of ugly (They’re only 17 frames per second for some reason!!!).

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Aftershock Simulator - Sprint 16

Image
  On sprint 16 in Aftershock Simulator, I assigned the team 87 points and 51 points were finished. We’re beginning to pick up now that we have a plan on what to do. In this sprint, our team started on the tutorial levels and the objectives system. And of course, there was some extra work to do for the UI in the game as well.   As a producer, I still find it difficult to gauge the difficulty of a task, especially when it comes to programming. I still end up needing to change the point values of some cards because they end up more difficult than expected. For example, I had figured that creating the basis for the objectives system wouldn’t have been too difficult, but not necessarily. A few of the objectives require you to click certain UI elements on the screen, and the things that would “listen” to those UI elements are all each in their own separate scripts, so now there’s the added work of finding them and knowing where to put the code. I always end up asking people if t...
Read more

2D MegaMan Level 2 Feedback (10/27/21)

     Making a late-game type level is incredibly difficult. I had my idea of making the player climb up, but I wasn’t really able to implement that. I couldn’t really think of a layout for a room that wasn’t having the player zigzag up the room. Although, according to my playtesters, what was in the level was pretty good. At least I was able to avoid the “no clear way to the exit” problem I had with my tutorial level. It was a simple “gather the keys to unlock the exit” type level, and unlike my tutorial level, there was actually a point to it.      Players generally praised the way I set up my keys, as you need two keys to unlock the exit, but there are 3 in total. You can get the first key through an easy or hard route, and then you have to get the second key by passing through some enemies. When getting the second key, I put in a weapon deleter that takes out the Nado so you have to jump through a bunch of enemies to get to the top of the room. There’s a...
Read more

Chicken Scramble - Sprint 1

Image
  To start off, this first sprint was kind of disorderly. Since we’re using a completely new project management tool with no prior experience, it took some time to get used to (and still getting used to it). I suppose for my other teammates it wasn’t a big deal but it was an added pound of stress to my shoulders as the producer. To add to that, there was some confusion between me and the designer as to what the whole game idea and aesthetic was. My original idea for the game was a multiplayer maze in which the goal was for two players to compete to get to the other side of the maze. We could have ways for the players to mess around with each other, like using door switches to open and close doors. To clear up the confusion on what we were building, we set up a meeting to talk about it. To prepare, I made a design map of what I thought it should look like. (In the picture, the blue dots are door switches, yellow dots are checkpoints, and the red dot is where the enemy spawns. Bl...
Read more