Situation: The plan for this week was to continue working on documenting the core game features, prepare for a paper playtest, and hopefully conduct it.
Task: To do that, I want to complete the building system and score system high-level design document. Afterward, I want to create the paper playtest materials and try them out.
Activities: At first, I started by writing the design goals for the building system, as suggested by game design authors (such as Richard Carrillo in his book “The Role of a Great Game Designer”, who has worked for many studios, such as EA and Ubisoft). Afterward, I broke down the idea that we had from last week and broke it down into parts, each with attributes, values, and behaviors:
Part 1: Grid (attributes: size, space; behavior: placing/replacing buildings);
Part 2: Buildings (attributes: category, size; behavior: defers per category);
Part 3: Roads (attributes: state; behavior: connecting, population mobility).
This idea is the basis of having a systems-based approach, as outlined by game design authors, amongst which Michael Sellers, who wrote “Advanced Game Design: A Systems Approach”. This way helped me to structure the idea better and thus explain it more easily to the dev department.
Afterward, it was reviewed by another designer on the team - Max, who gave feedback to it and I applied.
I did the same thing also for the score system document. From there, we started with preparing the paper playtest materials, namely the grid and the icons, and printed those out. We conducted a few playtests, but we quickly found out that the paper version is inefficient, due to the many small parts that need to be constantly replaced and repositioned, which took too long. Based on the feedback, however, we managed to indeed confirm that there is no easy solution to the problem presented, as players spent a significant amount of time considering their options, before performing an action, and no two players had the same solution. By the time Max analyzed and documented the results, the engineer created a rapid prototype in Unity that we could use instead. At the same time, I was working on creating the playtest questionnaire for the prototype by setting goals and evaluation criteria and researching common questions.
Results: Building system high-level design document, Score system high-level design document;
Playtest Materials; First Prototype Questionnaire.
Reflection: I am happy with the progress of last week, I learned new things and practiced my knowledge. What could have gone better is that we could have predicted that the paper prototype would not be efficient and time-consuming, but it was a good learning experience and something to keep in mind for next time.
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