Devlog 5 - Playtests and Card Games

On Tuesday we playtested each other's sports games. I was able to playtest a board game version of Shuffleboard called "Skrewball".  This was a fun experience because I've never playtested a game and it was interesting to examine a game and break it down to the basics. As I was playtesting, while I was having fun playing the game, I found myself thinking about the game from a design standpoint and trying to figure out what made it fun and what needed to be changed to enhance the player experience. The whole experience of taking an existing sport and translating it into an analog game made me better understand the iterative design processes as detailed in Chapter 5 of Macklin and Sharp. I especially enjoyed trying to work backwards and figure out the thought process of the group whose game I playtested. I could understand how they took the initial concept of shuffleboard and translated it into a competitive game that could be played with 4 people on a tabletop.

I also enjoyed working with a group during this process. As an art major, a lot of my classes are project-based but almost all of them are projects made independently. With this project, we didn't really have defined roles like was laid out in  Macklin and Sharp Chapter 8.  All of us were focused on mainly game design and testing. Because of this, our team was more aligned than autonomous. The only time we worked separately was some playtesting outside of class and writing the rules. This worked for such a small project because we didn't really have a goal aside from 'turn Bo-Taoshi into a card game' so we were able to bounce any idea that came to mind off of each other. This worked for a small project like this, but for a bigger one, I'm sure we would need to have more of an action plan before we started. 

I really enjoyed learning about the history of playing cards and how they act as a platform in The Playing Card Platform by Nathan Altice. It made me think about how we used Uno cards in our Bo-Taoshi game. They share similarities to a regular playing card deck. They are planar, uniform, mainly ordinal (with the exception of specialty cards such as draw, wild, reverse, and skip cards), spatial, and textual. The game that we played in class, Sushi-Go!, also shared most of these features. In this game, it was really important that all the cards were uniform because you didn't want people to know what cards were in all of the hands and what card you'd picked. They also need to be textual to allow the player to easily pull the card they want from their deck and place cards that they've played on top of one another. In the game, you have to pass your hand to another player, and if the cards were an awkward shape this would be extremely difficult.