Monday, April 13, 2009

Game revision Thoughts

Today we need to revise a game. And that brings me back to the worst game I've made to date, which was the one for the the business cards. I needed to establish enough rules to make it so that it's even playable. I was thinking of trying to establish some rules that can make the game have elements required to "kill" somebody as a zombie or a human. I was thinking that it might be fun to try to implement complicated speech rules such as a zombie must say a series of sentences that have the letters "Brains" in that order or something like that and it's the human's job to call them on it to kill them.

I intend to speak with my group in class about how I could make it better through some competition like that.

3 comments:

  1. I thought the zombie game was a good idea, but it was hard to implement with a solid ruleset, as you said.

    So long as there's spelling, maybe you could implement an investigator that asks people questions in an attempt to guess what they are. Or maybe the zombies could draw words that they need to spell. Just some thoughts.

    In its current state, the game seems massively multiplayer and hard to scale for 4-5 people.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Karl,

    I think we had a good design/playtest session. Be sure to copy your notes and observations from class!

    One potential flaw I saw was asking questions that had a known correct answer.

    I'm not sure how this might scale with a business card game though. One possible solution is to create a collection of stickers that you hand out along with the cards. These stickers would go on your name badge and indicate who is playing the game (as well as give something to show off). People like stickers, and that might help prompt them to play as well as also tell who is playing.

    At GDC, they have different alternate reality games that are played each conference. This year was 'lose this game' where each player was given a sheet of paper with the rules to a game on it. They had to play this game and get rid of their card. Nobody at the conference played it. I believe this system didn't work because people were more interested in networking than playing a game (plus, the rules were often vague). Previous GDCs had a large bulletin board with game progress illustrated. This was a central spot that players could go to. For a game that is not centralized, this is why I feel stickers might work.

    -Devin Monnens

    ReplyDelete
  3. This game was much better than the first time around! I really liked trying to ask certain questions and then get the answers and deciding if it was truth or a lie!

    It did make asking questions a little bit hard since we all know each other fairly well, turned out to be rather easy to tell if someone was lying or not.

    I think if it was in the environment that it was intended for, with just co-workers instead of friends, the play testing results would be much different and it would turn out to be a solid game!

    ReplyDelete