This sprint entry marks the last week of the final project before the hand-in. I kickstarted this blog entry with my project supervisor meeting, and while I’m progressing along well, there are a few amendments to be made regarding my burndown chart and game rules. I showed Sue my current burndown chart which includes every must, should and could, and she suggested I make two burndown charts instead: one chart outlining all of the points for my musts/should for the physical game and digital demonstration (which I’ll be focusing my workload on), and to also keep my current one showing every sprint. This way I can break down my individual tasks even further, and talk about them in relation to my project management at the end of the project. Here are the two updated burndown charts exhibiting my current progress, with the musts + physical shoulds at the top and everything at the bottom:
As you can see from these charts, I’m very much on-track with my progress regarding my musts (with the last week being incomplete as it’s for my digital demonstration). The second chart however shows points for a lot of possible mechanics as shoulds and coulds in the digital game which I may not have even made in the first place. This makes it look like I’m behind schedule, but I’m not.
I also conducted a final playtest for the board game in lesson today for one last piece of peer feedback. Overall the general reaction to the game was much more positive, and Jason in particular stated ‘it was a lot more enjoyable and engaging to the last version of the game, the different characters made every player feel important with their own job role.’ Jon also said ‘I loved the characters, it’s a vast improvement from last week and feels more personal. I would however like a more diplomatic approach to winning the game (like bartering and trading)’. Isaac especially enjoyed it, and though the game was generally a lot less monotonous to play than last week now his previous suggestions have been applied.
Overall the game received a very positive reception from my fellow students, with the general consensus being that it’s a fun game to play. The main piece of feedback for improvement I received was regarding a trade system, where if I wanted to make a more strategic and hardcore game I could include resources and/or money to trade as well as having health tokens. Overall though I’m happy to see I finally created a quality product outlining all of the aspects I listed in my proposal’s quality plan, with the 5 main goals I wanted to achieve. I will now list these below and how I met them:
- “Be able to keep a player’s interest throughout the game”- The game’s variety with the random chance cards and back-and-forth tug of war with the capture zones meant that players were always on the edge of their seat, engaged into what could happen next.
- “Include a variety of game design techniques as researched in game design”- My game has evidence of all of these different techniques that I’ve researched. Such as endogenous value in the health/ capture zones, a good flow channel in the variety of events that can happen (random cards + combat) and balance in the different characters (each character has an advantage and disadvantage).
- “Have variety in the gameplay (like different characters and random events)”- I have both random events in the form of the cards, as well as the different characters with their unique traits.
- “Have accessible rules that aren’t difficult to learn”- The game keeps a level of accessibility with its nice looking board and rulebook, making it understandable to children and adults who may not play many games.
- “Have elements to increase the game’s replayability, and not be a ‘one and done’ deal”- I have the extra gamemode for professional players who are looking for something extra, but a game may have a different outcome every time you play depending on the characters chosen and the chance cards that appear. It promotes the player to play more than once.
Next-up I changed the game’s rulesheet to be much user-friendly. For the game’s rules as suggested by Sue, I will be giving myself an arbitrary word limit of 700, since right now it’s considered too ‘wordy’ and not many new users are going to want to read through it all with me including too much text. I don’t have to hit that word limit, but it’s something to aim for while ‘trimming the fat’ so I know I need to be more aggressive in removing unneeded words. In fact, with the feedback suggested above, not many people (except Clare and Jason) wanted to read the rules, and I explained the updated mechanics as we went along. So to start this process I initially researched and looked at some of the rules for some existing games to see what does and doesn’t work in a professional setting. The first rulebook I looked at was a game titled ‘Fluxx’ in class and online at (Looney Labs, 2016), which was incredibly clever with its listed rules. One of the first sentences it even says in its rules is that they know people hate reading them, and there’s an included card with minimal text on it, showing that the people behind it are very self-aware. This card shows the most basic of the game’s rules (shown below), and is easy to read for players that want to leap straight into the game and to skip the boring learning process. Even the presentation of the rules are pleasant to look at, utilising various colours and speech bubbles, which is something I’ve taken inspiration from that I will include into my own game’s rulebook.
Next is the rulebook in Monopoly, and for a board game that can be considered more complicated the rules are fairly accessible but much more extensive and wordy than Fluxx, and is an example of rules that I want to avoid for my own project. A typical Monopoly rulebook can contain paragraphs of text, however that’s really to be expected due to the complexity of the game. As seen from (Hasbro, 2007), on the official Hasbro website, the list of rules are incredibly extensive, and while it’s nice that there are cute yet relevant pictures littered around the page, it instantly disengages most players from reading. However most younger players may find themselves getting tired of reading through all 8 pages of text and play without it, only to find they don’t know what they’re doing later on in the game. So I will try to avoid being so wordy in my own set of rules to avoid what Monopoly has done.
(Jensen, 2014)
A card showing the basic rules,
and all that’s needed to play.
Lastly for this sprint in the final week I began my work on the digital demonstration of the game, importing all of my assets and beginning the plan introductory sequences (doing things like scripting the dice rolls, so they follow a planned format for a video tutorial as each space gets explained as somebody lands on them). Since I have all of my digital assets completed, it meant I could import them all into Sony Vegas to create a mockup high-quality animation showcasing the rules of the game, and it being played in an easily digestible digital format. I decided to choose Sony Vegas in the end over Adobe Flash CS6 due to the range of video editing tools at its disposal (compared to Flash being more strictly animation software). I used both pieces of software to get a feel for them, and have settled on Sony Vegas as a piece of software that also comes with very robust animation tools, as well as having other more streamlined features like exporting directly and quickly to an HD mp4 file (since Quicktime is a required piece of software for you to do the same thing in Flash). I also used various sound effects and music tracks for the animation, sourced from freesfx.co.uk with royalty free rights.
This brings me to the end of this blog entry, and in the next and final sprint I will finish the work on my digital demonstration, as well as me creating my 20-minute presentation/evaluation just in time for the hand-in.
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