This term, I am in a class called Game Changers. We have been studying how to design our own games, how to theme games, how to use game mechanics, and how to playtest games. Our Action Project for this unit was to design and market our own games. My game is a battle themed strategy game called the Invaders. I struggled with this project in trying to make my game totally unique and unlike others that have already been designed. I tried to make my game new by taking small mechanics from some of my other favorite games and putting them all together to make a mash-up of many games.
Game Pitch
You are a commander of a powerful army and your king has ordered you to invade a land rich with resources for the glory of your kingdom. Upon arriving at the beautiful land, you see that you are not the only ones attempting to take the wonderful land for your kingdom. Your goal is to capture a majority of the capital cities in this land and to stop anyone else who tries, by capturing cities before they do or killing them.
Reflection
When you start, making a game seems pretty easy. Just get a theme and some cards and a board and you have a fully playable, fun game. Not so much. Even though it was easy for me to come up with my theme and basic idea, it took me a lot of time to try and put it into action. While playing games, it’s easy to forget about the mechanics that make the game usable and enjoyable. You don’t tend to focus on why it works; you just focus on playing. That was why I underestimated the challenge. You have to come up with hundreds of ways that it could go wrong, and try to stop that from happening, while making it marketable, fun, and aesthetically pleasing. Even when you think that you have found all of the kinks in the game, when you start to playtest, players might use different strategies or ideas and come up with more issues.
These both happened to me when I started to playtest with my dad. He tends to be a very strategic person and while playing, he realized that with the rules in place, he could attack one of my characters, forcing me to lose my turn. Because I lost my turn, I couldn't move that character, which meant that my dad could attack that character every turn, leaving me with nothing to do. I had to spend about an hour trying to go over the rules to find the loophole and after all of that, I realized it was just because each character could use the same move twice. This project was one of the most rewarding things I have ever done. Even though it was at times confusing and stressful, I now have a fully functioning, fun, strategic game. I spent a lot of my time working on the specific rules because you have to realize that if people buy your game, you are not going to be there to explain it to them. My first draft of the rules made perfect sense to me, someone who had just spent weeks in a game design class, but to the average person, it was confusing and used too much gaming jargon.
Game Pitch
You are a commander of a powerful army and your king has ordered you to invade a land rich with resources for the glory of your kingdom. Upon arriving at the beautiful land, you see that you are not the only ones attempting to take the wonderful land for your kingdom. Your goal is to capture a majority of the capital cities in this land and to stop anyone else who tries, by capturing cities before they do or killing them.
Reflection
When you start, making a game seems pretty easy. Just get a theme and some cards and a board and you have a fully playable, fun game. Not so much. Even though it was easy for me to come up with my theme and basic idea, it took me a lot of time to try and put it into action. While playing games, it’s easy to forget about the mechanics that make the game usable and enjoyable. You don’t tend to focus on why it works; you just focus on playing. That was why I underestimated the challenge. You have to come up with hundreds of ways that it could go wrong, and try to stop that from happening, while making it marketable, fun, and aesthetically pleasing. Even when you think that you have found all of the kinks in the game, when you start to playtest, players might use different strategies or ideas and come up with more issues.
These both happened to me when I started to playtest with my dad. He tends to be a very strategic person and while playing, he realized that with the rules in place, he could attack one of my characters, forcing me to lose my turn. Because I lost my turn, I couldn't move that character, which meant that my dad could attack that character every turn, leaving me with nothing to do. I had to spend about an hour trying to go over the rules to find the loophole and after all of that, I realized it was just because each character could use the same move twice. This project was one of the most rewarding things I have ever done. Even though it was at times confusing and stressful, I now have a fully functioning, fun, strategic game. I spent a lot of my time working on the specific rules because you have to realize that if people buy your game, you are not going to be there to explain it to them. My first draft of the rules made perfect sense to me, someone who had just spent weeks in a game design class, but to the average person, it was confusing and used too much gaming jargon.
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