Devlog #6 The "Rules" of Cool

Hello! Back at it again with the Devlog, this week focusing on how rules are made, and in the baby steps of making our first card game!!! 

For starters, this week I read through our readings, my favorite being "Writing Effective Rules" by James Ernest. Dr. S enlightened all of us by saying that, this reading will be core to how we develop rules for our future games, so I took it upon myself to constantly reference my notes in class while we were playing card games in class, those being Exploding Kittens, and The Crew. 

I started out on Tuesday playing Exploding Kittens, this is a very simple game focused on not drawing an explosive kitten from the draw pile. It include special cards that allow you to turn the tides in your favor, but ultimately it is a game with a lot of RNG. As such, the game is fast paced and the rules are incredibly simple to understand. The  rule book uses easy to understand language and pictures to get it's rules accross to the player, ultimately letting the players learn mostly through play. As my group was playing it, we made a lot of jokes on how the conceptualization process went for the game, but to tie it to game design, I do think there is something to be said about how a well done spontaneous brainstorms, like the idea speed date, or the "How can we"... methods can make amazing game ideas come through. (Macklin and Sharp, Ch. 9)

The next game we played was The Crew, a trick taking game in space! To say our feeble minds had trouble understanding the workings of this game would be an understatement. The Crew's rulebook is thick, coming in at 25 pages, it's daunting and worst of all do to it being a word wall, it requires a lot of focus to understand. The Crew is ultimately though, rather simple, everyone is given a task card, and they need to win the trick with that task card in the trick. If someone else wins said card the operation fails and you have to start again. Something I discussed with Dr. S, is how the game could really use a tutorial, or some way for the players to learn how to play a trick taking game, especially when almost no one in the play group has even heard of such a game style. In prototyping for this game, I would have tried to implement a few tutorial tasks for the players and seen what the reception to them had been, something other than the nothing that the game gives.  (Macklin and Sharp, Ch. 10)

Overall I think there's a lot to be learned from both of these games, in terms of how to write and create rules. Something I want to take from both the games and the readings, is that game rules should be inviting for the players, it should be something that doesn't take multiple revisits to the rules to understand, and more over allows players to play while reading the rules, something I think really allows players of all kinds of learning skills to pick up any game. (James Earnest, Writing Effective Rules)