Devlog Journal 7

This week's lesson was about creating a shedding card game. A quote I liked was "It’s not enough to ask players to make decisions—the designer must frame decision points in a way that is conducive to generating or maintaining flow for the player”. The flow of our game had become a lot easier than it did originally. At the beginning we knew what we wanted the game to be but, the complexity of it was a little hard to understand at least for me. But as we spoke about how we formed the game I slowly understood what the main objective of how it all functions. When then began play testing and with that a quote I really loved was "If prototype ask questions, then playtests provide the answers". We started playing with regular cards. The regular cards were a bit confusing for me as I kept thinking of the game as using the face card with different amount each card. But in the end it was just the face cards in general were viewed all as an amount of ten. The only thing that changed was that red and black having a value of adding or subtracting. I did play the Bartok game and one thing I found interesting was "Is the outcome of the game based more on strategy or chance?". Our game at first run through was more of a chance of making sure everyone places down the right number on the card to reach the right amount while shedding all cards. It was based on strategy but, pure chance that we would get the right number stacked. We did play two rounds of this game and eventually found a way to make it better. No talking during the game. You and the other players try to accumulate the right amount without losing. Taking out communication during the game just raises the stakes of the game.