Game Iteration

In the first working week of University we were asked to create a board game on the spot, and last Monday we were asked to iterate the design of the game to make the game better, improve the rules and all that, and so I did, however I felt that my game was so basic and unoriginal that there were very few changes that needed to be made, however after some feedback from my peers and Phil I decided what sort of changes I should make to my game.

My game is a very simple “Follow do the track” game with cards that you read after landing on a certain square; this is a very simple game to which many changes don’t have to be made, however, my feedback dictated that I need more cards which would give the player a chance to interact with other players to keep the game interesting, and so I did that. 

For the most part, the reaction I got from my peers to my game was good, however that’s not because it was a good game but because I included some crude humour in the game.

And that was half of my Tuesday in a nutshell; the second half of my Monday was the pitch for the game for our group project, I decided to pair up with Andre for the pitch and to say the least, the pitch went well for both of us. Though there was some severe lack of preparation on my part, I feel that Andre did a fantastic job briefing me before the actual pitch, enough so that I would have enough information for me to run my mouth off about the game we were pitching.

The game we decided to pitch was a little skill based spelling game for KS1 children called “Missing Arrows”, in this game you would take control of one of two characters, a boy or a girl and you would shoot down balloons with letters attached to them, the player would have to shoot the right word to fill in the blank of the word that is displayed someone on the screen.

This is a drawing I did for the pitch of roughly what the game interface would look like.

The story at the point of the pitch was something along the lines of “You’re an ace archer who has to shoot down food attacked to balloons for your hungry village.” And it was literally something we came up with on the spot.

This is roughly what the characters will look like in the game.

Apparently this game was well received and was chosen to undergo further development in a team of five, when I heard about this news I was really surprised and pleased at the same time. I didn’t expect our game to be chosen, and I was getting ready to do one of the other games that were pitched on the day.

But that doesn’t matter now, last Thursday we got together in our five-man group and begun the game iteration process of Missing Arrows.

We got somewhere with the original concept in the first half of the day during our break, however during the second half of the day when Rob prompted us to think about changing the game to make it less quiz-like, we did so and in the end the outcome was widely preferred by the group than the original concept.

We iterated the game outside of it’s original concept, while maintaining the core of itself.

We decided that it would be better to rather than have the children fill in a blank, shoot down letters to form a word, we’d provide three spaces for the children to fill in with letters in the correct order to spell a three letter word, on the first level at least, we also iterated the story to make more interesting to children.

These changes were something we were all happy with, of course, however there are some issues we are still discussing as a group and we hope to eventually eliminate.

I guess the point of this post is just me thinking about the game iteration cycle. When I was talking about the board game, it was following the cycle that Rob explained to us, this cycle included play testing; which makes sense, because to make improvements to a game you have to know what is wrong with it first by playing it.

However when we got together as a group and started making changes to Missing Arrows, which naturally was all still just in our heads, I got a thinking’ if we really needed to play test a game to figure out what’s wrong with it? Something that I and Andre though was a good idea was made better by the presence and opinions of others before anyone played it. Maybe imagining a game and then thinking about how it could be changed is a feasible substitute to play testing. But I feel that if you play test it or not, you can’t go without the opinions and advice of others during a cycle of iteration.

I'm very much looking forward to making a great educational game with my team, and also look forward to seeing what the other groups come up with.