CAGD 170 - GAME DESIGN

Group 7
Maegen Ketchel
Maritza Barragan

Cold War Spies

Cold War Spies is a hidden roles game where the players take on the roles of guests at a diplomatic party who must come together and uncover the secret KGB agents that have slipped into their gathering with a plan to assassinate a diplomat. Players must persuade, lie, and vote on who they believe is the KGB agent while maintaining their own innocence as the diplomats. If the KGB agents are able to kill one diplomat they’ve succeeded in their mission and have won the game, but if the CIA agent can protect the diplomats and manage to kill a KGB agent they will have won the game and live to see attend another party.

               The biggest problem encountered was the lack of a clear starting objective for the players who all expressed that they did not understand where or how to begin the game once they had initially set up. They had their role cards and knew the main objective, but they couldn’t understand how they were supposed to figure out which player was what with no contextual advantage given as a jumping off point. Much of them expressed a desire for more roleplay elements to be introduced so that it allowed players to build up a persona while playing which in-turn could allow for them to catch each other in and out of lies regarding their role.

               Another suggestion which we have decided to implement in the next playtest is the introduction of character gestures which each role card would have to allow players the ability to try and discern who is on their team and who might just be a KGB agent. Such gestures could be touching their nose, brushing back hair or grabbing their ear, or even leaning forward. While concerned with how adding such things might hinder replay ability, as veteran players could easily spot out which role is which simply by remembering which role can do what, one playtester suggested there to be varying amounts of gestures listed on each card so that there was both variety and a level of challenge to the game. We brainstormed the idea of giving diplomats roughly 4-5 different gestures, some of which might be shared with the KGB agent who both have the same gestures as there are only two agents in the whole game, and the CIA agent only has a list of one gesture that each diplomat has so that it provides a level of challenge for the CIA who has to pick out who to protect and who to kill.

               Another idea we thought about was that the players were only able to choose one of the provided gestured during each round, so that the players would have to choose wisely so that the CIA agent could pick them out without confusing them for the KGB agents who are among them. This would give the game more replay ability since people would make difference choices each round and thus change the game each time it was played. 

               As a whole, we evenly split the amount of work we did. Since the game originally was my idea, I wrote up the rules and made the first iteration of cards for the game while my partner wrote up the procedures and was able to print the rules and procedures for the playtest. During the playtest, I took many of the photos while Maritza wrote down the notes and comments of the players while they played, later then digitized the notes before submission. 

Group 8

Maegen Ketchel

Malek Almarshoud

Peaches 

 playtest 2 

            Peaches is a roleplaying game based around the difficulties of owning and tending to a peach farm. Players must work together to overcome the challenges faced by peach farmers by managing their resources and working to reach a full harvest to win the game! This game’s intended audience was 15-20-yearolds who fill the Achiever Player archetype, as the core mechanics of the game are to overcome various levels to win the game, and enjoy chance-based gameplay, as the challenges are randomized, such as other titles like Oregon Trail and Mountain of Madness. This game is meant to pull players into the real world struggle farmers face to reach a full harvest while also being challenging and fun!

            Taking the input from the first playtest and implementing a few of our own, we added a board to help give players a better visual of how the game was to be laid out and to guide them through the intended flow of the game. The board itself was not difficult for me to put together as it was mainly just meant to be a rough guide to how the game was set up and help guide players through the game play, which from our observations it achieved as many players immediately were able to set up and get into the flow of the game without needing clarification or aid from either developers. This was a much needed improvement to help with the game flow as it seemed both groups had this trouble with the first prototype, so it was satisfying to know that it did help make the game easier to understand. Moving forward, the board could have more visual elements to just make it more attractive and perhaps add more to the immersive quality which, as a roleplaying game, it was meant to have.

            The main feedback we received from the last playtest was the need for resource separation which we did implement in the second prototype. Making the cards, for all three categories, was more labour intensive than the board itself as I didn’t have access to a printer and had to write down the details on the cards as legibly as possible so that players could read and understand what they needed to do. The separation of resources made the game much easier for players to understand and work with within the game itself as each were clearly listed and did not force the player to keep count of what resources they had on each card as the first iteration had. The main problem with the cards that out second playtesters noted was that they weren’t reading the dialogue on the card itself and only focusing on the resource they needed to discard to overcome the challenge which took away from the games roleplaying aspect and left them not feeling as immersed in the game as it was meant to be. Moving forward, I think it would be more effective if the cards forced the players to read the dialogue by putting the resources necessary to discard within the dialogue, such as saying “you need to build sand fences using 2 soil and apply 4 fertilizer to the areas that have suffered from erosion”. This might help to give the players a more immersive quality which they felt was lacking in the game.

            All tasks for this iteration of the game were completed with relative success as all the elements we learned needed to be done from the first iteration were implemented for this prototype and did affect the game. As this prototype was meant to mostly test the game’s core mechanics and immersive qualities, the pieces did lack a visual element which would have made them more attractive, but I believe that it helped the game as it didn’t distract players from the mistakes or problems which the game had. This meant the game had to work as a game without being pretty and ultimately it helped us to understand what would need to be refined to make it a more solid game.

Group 8

Maegen Ketchel

Malek Almarshoud

Peaches

playtest 1

Our randomly generated game genre was a roleplaying board game based on farming with a targeted audience of 15-20 year olds. We took this idea and after a bit of research came up with an idea based around team based resource management as a way to overcome common obstacles farmers, specifically peach farmers, face daily; our inspiration for such an idea came from other roleplaying games like Mountain of Madness and Oregon Trail. The premise of the game was for the players to survive and overcome these challenges together using their accumulated resources until they managed to reach the end of the game or, known in game, as reaching harvest.

Problems we encountered during the playtesting phase mainly stemmed from our last minute struggle to get a physical game in which to test as we spent so much time trying to focus on core mechanics that we ultimately didn’t manage our time well enough to include actually building a game. Even so, we did manage to get a roughly put together variation of our game together which allowed playtesters to hone in on the problems which my partner and I had with the core elements of the game itself.

Much of the feedback we received centered around the combined resource cards which proved to make the game harder to navigate as the injury and event cards specifically would call for a single resource which then left the players to remember what resources they had or had used rather than simply allowing for them to discard used cards when necessary. The idea to separate the resources into their own cards, i.e. much as a deck of cards are, was mentioned from both playtesting groups and was a mechanic we began to toy with in preparation for the second prototype.

Another problem facing our game was that there was little reward involved and that once players had become caught in a losing turn, they continued to lose resources rather than finding a way to get them back so that they could win the game. This became more concerning as it meant that the game didn’t have much appeal as it seemed too challenging and didn’t reward the players for playing and overcoming the obstacles in place. This led to a continued debate on whether to keep the game completely players vs. game or to implement a player vs. player element to the game which would allow for players to sabotage each other via holding out on resources or forcibly losing an event card just to give the other player an injury card.

As a whole, the process and task completion was fairly split betwixt both my partner and I as we collaborated via google docs in order to complete the assignments we were given and discuss our ideas for the game as a whole. For moving forward, I think narrowing the scope of our game ideas would have helped in the development process as that was our main failing in this assignment and focusing more on the formal elements instead of moving into the dramatic elements with only an idea and a few rules.