Week 7: How People Interact

This week, we began brainstorming ideas for our travel "shedding" card game. We listed out multiple ideas and came together to collaborate on a few ideas. Our game is based on survival throughout various biomes. We plan to have different levels that represent biomes. The first level is the easiest biome to survive in. Material cards will allow players to collect multiple and trade them in for resources. In each level, there will be specific tasks. You must build resources to complete the tasks. When combining materials into resources, you are shedding your deck of cards. The first person who survives all four biomes and sheds all their cards wins the game.  When learning about the "Bartok" game, the author wrote, "After each playtest, it's important to ask the right questions, and each game will require slightly different questions." He lists a few guidelines for questions that could be asked. When constructing our game, we had to consider the difficulty of the game. We didn't want it to be too difficult, but we didn't want people to get through each level quickly. We made gathering materials more difficult by limiting the number of trades during each person's round. In Players Making Decisions, Chapter 10, Hiwiller writes, "One of the other surefire ways to make a decision more interesting is to offer options with less certainty and higher payoffs pitted against options of high certainty and low payoff. This is more commonly called a risk–reward choice." We have added this decision-making style into our game by leaving the materials up to chance. The player knows they must use specific resources to complete each task, but they must choose to swap a material they may need to make a resource in the next round or save it and miss out on trading for another. Similar to if you needed to survive but only had a limited amount of space to carry resources, you would have to consider which ones to keep and those to leave behind. In Games, Design and Play: A Detailed Approach to Iterative Game Design, Chapter 11,  Macklin says, "As a designer, anytime a question arises about the game's design, a playtest should help find a suitable answer. Even with prototypes investigating aspects of the art, sound, code, or interface, there is still room for playtesting." Our game will need lots of prototyping to get it just how we want. Our ideas are so big, and adding every little detail could be helpful or distracting to the game's true intentions. I think it will be interesting to test out our game. It seems like it will work very well, but I predict we will have to add another challenge element somewhere. I'm excited to put everything together. I hope it goes well. This game could be fun for science teachers to teach elementary or middle school kids about different biomes and survival.