EPortfolio Post 4

We were a part of Group 1.

The game we designed was a two player fighting game with a marshmallow theme meant for elementary school kids.

This game allows for kids to design marshmallows that are able to have special abilities to be able to fight each other. A majority of this game is decided on dice rolls so the abilities allow the game to either be extended or be more even if one player was rolling really well or rolling really poorly. We had to make sure the game was simple yet interesting, so younger audiences would be able to play it without adult help or help from older players.

This game’s specific target demographic is elementary aged children, specifically children ages six to twelve. This is a two player game with the players playing against each other in the active rounds of the game after the marshmallows are designed and gear is selected. 

This game appeals to the target audience because it is simple and has a cutesy design while still allowing the players a lot of free choice to design the marshmallow to their tastes. The gear designs are easy enough for people to replicate if they don’t have a lot of experience drawing or are too young for refined detail. This game is more meant for fun then actual competition so everything is super low stake and uncomplicated.

I believe our design process went really well because once we refined it we had a super simple game so clarifying and refining rules was super easy and went super simply because our game had very little to change and clarify. The biggest struggle we had when it came to playing the game was making sure things did not become over complicated because we had such a young target audience and were play testing with college kids. The people who we got feedback from were unaware of our target audience until they were told so a majority of the advice we were given was how to make the game more complex and fun for kids our age to play. Once the playtesters were made aware of the target demographic they said the biggest thing to change was to work on clarifying the game’s rules.

I think all things considered task completion within the group was handled very well. Especially when real life got in the way as I spent the last week super sick and unable to work really. It was difficult meeting up in the library as I live off campus and need to walk to campus with my heavy laptop and health reasons prevent it from happening as often as we liked.

I think something I would change about the design process going forward is having a much clearer idea about what game we want to make from the beginning. We kept redesigning the game because we were unable to playtest it and see how it worked leading to the theoretical possibilities of the game not working and us being able to see if this would be too complicated for the kids. So I think having a very clear idea of the game we want to design and working on compromising with my game partner would make things much easier and make play testing go faster. Compromise would make it much easier to build and develop the game rather than just having to rebuild the game from the bottom up. By compromising and taking through hypothetical games more things could’ve been a lot clearer from the start and more things and features could have been added to the game from the beginning.