Devlog #5 A game designer is never late

Well, well, well, If it isn't the consequences of my own actions. I completely forgot to write my devlog yesterday, but I want to keep up the tradition, and discuss what I've learned about game design this week, nonetheless. 

This week was a bit of a mixed bag, in terms of what we did and worked on, from making the final touches on our sports games, to learning about the playing card format of games. 

Let's start with the basics; The past weekend I spent a few hours forcing my roommates to play my volleyball board game. I ended up inadvertently using the iterative design process here, playing out a match, making a tweak, playing the game again with that tweak, so on and so forth, taking what analysis I could from the games to ultimately make something that felt very fun and functional (Macklin & Sharp, Ch.5). For context, dear reader, last week the major issue with the game was that the first turn of the game felt completely arbitrary and I was stumped as how I should solve this. After sleeping on it, we made a major decision in the games timeline and added two new "power-up" style cards that would allow a player to take a completely different first turn, on both sides of the board, this for the most part, solved the "first turn dilemma" that we were having.

Bringing the game into the official playtest on Tuesday a surprising discovery was made. For one reason or another, I'm sure a great psychological paper could be written on this, the play-testers all played significantly more defensive in their matches leading to games to be drawn out, and all the resources being expended on both sides. This led to me having to come up with a  rule for this very scenario on the fly. I took from this experience that every game needs extensive play tests, with multiple different groups in order to really know that a game is "done." My teammates really appreciated the work I did on the project, so shout out to Gil and Ryan, they were both excellent to work with and made great conversation. I think we did a solid attempt for our first real game, and it was in using labor division that we all were able to provide the best work we could for it (Macklin and Sharp, Ch. 8)

Closing out this week, on Thursday we had a brief lesson the history and evolution of the playing card, as well as having an excellent reading on the Playing Card Platform, by Nathan Atlice. In that reading the most interesting thing Atlice posits, is that the Playing Card, due to it's many inherent features, make it one of the greatest play tools for game design, citing Magic the Gathering as one of the major successes, but also dive into how the card is excellent even in a digital context, such as in Card Wars (Nathan Atlice, Playing Card Platform). We also took the time to play a card game as well, playing "Sushi-Go!" a deck builder game, focused on the slow accumulation of resources and card combos to earn as many points as possible. The greatest feature, one I'd like to ensure is in all of my games, is the focus on multiple playstyles in the game. 

Overall I loved working in this class this week, and am excited to see what I learn next in this class. Cya next week! :3