EPortfolio Post 6

 

• Group Number
  We were a part of group nine. 

• Game Summary
  On Halloween everyone wears a mask, some more realistic than others. The goal of tonight is no longer about watching scary movies and partying with friends, but about surviving the night and finding out whose costume is a little too good.

• Target audience (Player Types, Player Interaction Pattern) -
  Our game, Psycho Killer, has a unilateral competition player interaction pattern. The game functions based on the interactions between the main players and the GM, who is referred to in the rule sheets as The Storyteller. The player types our game appeals to are the Directors and the Competitors. The game appeals to Competitors as the goal of the game is to beat the storyteller by catching the killer and figuring out who it is. The game appeals to Directors as we have a game role and mechanic contingent on someone being the storyteller and helping the story move along, creating danger or obstacles for the other players to overcome. 

• How your game will appeal to your target audience.
  Our game appeals to the target audience because our game is character-driven the players have to interact with each other to propel the game forward. The players have to interact with each other to move the story forward, it’s nearly impossible to complete a playthrough of the game without interacting with the characters at all. 

• Detail any problems encountered in your entire Iterative Design process for this Unit

The biggest problem I ran into in the iterative design process was a lot of the feedback Psycho Killer received wasn’t about gameplay but was about the request for diagrams and the finished cards. We didn’t receive much critique about gameplay so it was hard to see what worked for other people and who didn’t. 

• Task completion within the group.

I think our task completion was fairly good. Our biggest issue was time management, we had a lot of projects to complete so things needed to be reworked and cut constantly. I found it fairly easy to rely on my lab partner to get things done when we divided the work up. 

• Solutions to any task completion issues in regard to gameplay as well as management of the project.
  I think having a more solid outline and timeline would be helpful when it comes to task completion issues. Making sure everyone who is on the game development team knows what tasks they are supposed to do and by when it is supposed to be done. Having an outline of what needs to be done and completed by a certain deadline also prevents scope creep, preventing the game from becoming bloated and unwieldy even before it is fully fleshed out. I think having a longer playtest time would also be effective, an issue we kept running into is the in-class period we had for playtesting wasn’t long enough to complete much game play if any, and because of real-life obligations, we were unable to schedule out-of-class play time.

• What would you change about your own development process going forward? I think I would definitely make a rough outline of the game (playstyle, similar rules, things that the game needs to function) rather than trying to figure out the fleshed-out version game as we are making rules for the vague idea we began with. I would also try to encourage my teammates, especially in the iterative design process, to put things in that they think might work for the game rather than not doing anything until they hear back from me. It’s easy to remove things that don’t work, but it’s even easier to have a game design process stall because if we were working independently not wanting to add anything in fear of messing something up or having a game mechanic that doesn’t work at all. I also would make more time to look at the rule sheets of similar games, one recurring problem I, personally, had was running out of time to complete everything that needed to be done. Leading to possible game mechanics being unimplemented or having to be removed because no one was able to get around to fully implementing them in the game.