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Postmortem
When we began this project I was pretty pessimistic about it. The idea that all of us were going to combine pieces from a bunch of crappy games and then separate them into three smaller boxes seemed kind of stupid, I must admit. I wasn’t really seeing any possible way that my group was going to make anything amazing out of the contents in the box we were given. We had a bunch of cards with pieces of a global map on them, a lot of geographic trivia cards, paper money, and some other plastic pieces. The first step was to separate those things into piles of what was useful and what was not.
Once we had all of the things that we wanted to utilize in our game, then we could start thinking of things we wanted to use. Did we want a trivia game, a conquest game, or a simple twist on a classic game like Checkers? We didn’t know. We had a lot of pieces and plenty of trivia cards. I think that we all had a little bit of difficulty deciding what direction we wanted to take the game and what pieces we were actually going to use. However I wouldn’t necessarily say it was a huge problem. All of us basically started throwing out a bunch of ideas and how we could use the pieces that we were stuck with. After a while we all pretty much agreed that using the trivia cards would speed up the process.
When designing the game, we wanted it to be available for all ages. Unfortunately during the design process we added something that only made it available for people 13 or older. The rules are very simple to understand but some of the questions may not be suitable for every audience. If we had to go back to the drawing board in order to make it appropriate for all ages it would only be a matter of making a few questions easier and deleting certain aspects of the limerick cards. Basically some guy thought it would be a genius idea to put limericks on the flip side of the money cards. Sure limericks are fine but if you want everyone to be able to play the game you look for the ones with cuss words and delete that shit.
As I stated before, we had so many trivia cards, it would be stupid not to use them. We also had a lot of money that we could implement into the game. Setting up the board was another thing we had some trouble figuring out. Would this board be separated into small pieces like some other revolutionary games or would it be one board like monopoly? This is a question that we dealt with for a while until we decided that it would be cheaper and easier to just keep the game on one board. In the end, I think it was one of the better decisions we made, it fits into the box nicely and no one has to worry about losing pieces that when lost make the game useless. We also had about four little mouse pieces from the awesome game Mouse Trap. Having these pieces gave us a good idea to how many people we wanted to make the game for.
So we had trivia questions that we were going to use, four mice and a bunch of cards with sections of earth’s map on them. There was however text on the back of these cards that corresponded to the different categories that the trivia cards were grouped into. Using the flip side of these cards made more sense, we didn’t have all sections of the earth so there would be pieces separated by awkward space. After these major decisions, we were left with a good way to use these trivia cards. We decided to use the cards with category text as pieces so when a player would land on one of these categories they would have to answer a trivia question that related to the space they were on. We all agreed that when players answered a question right they would get money for it.
By now, we had a pretty simple game on our hands. It needed something else though. We had half of a Checkerboard at our disposal that we didn’t know what to do with. One group member decided it would be best to use it in our game as a type of mini game. It added a new dimension. Since we were already using all of the mouse pieces, we were empty-handed. Fortunately we had six dinosaur pieces that we could use for the mini game. Getting all of the small details would prove far more difficult than the easier obstacles we had faced up to this point. Since we added another dimension to our game, we needed to figure out a way for the players to get to it. Making a warp point was what we came up with. The warp point was also what got us thinking of a theme for our game.
Out of all the different phases we went through when creating the game, I would have to say that creating a strong theme was one of the most challenging steps. It wasn’t necessarily difficult thinking of a good theme, because that part was really fun. It was all of us coming to agree on one thing. Like I said in a previous blog, it’s beneficial to have a lot of ideas at your disposal. Unfortunately it becomes difficult sorting out the ideas that can push the whole creative process forward from the ones that lead everyone down the wrong path. Even once everyone has decided on a good theme to use, it’s still important to ask yourself if the theme makes the game stronger or weaker. In our case, I think the theme of our game strengthened the design and vice-versa. It also gave us ideas for how to use our other pieces we hadn’t implemented yet.
After we had designed the game board and decided on a theme to stick with it was time to put it all together. Let me start off by saying that things didn’t turn out the way I would have hoped. We had a portion of our game professionally produced at moo.com, specifically the trivia and limerick cards. It’s too bad we didn’t know of any company that could make a game board of the same quality. The act of making the game board was the most frustrating and disappointing part of the project for me. We simply didn’t have the tools or materials we needed to make a professional looking board. Seeing the imperfections on the board we made was what frustrated me the most. We were faced with a few questions. How would the game fold up into the box? How could we protect it so it wouldn’t fall apart? How could we make it look just as good as the cards? We were able to answer these questions with one plan of attack. By cutting the board up first and then taping it back together with shiny packing tape we were able to have it stick together when it was folded, possess a professional like shine, and protect it.
In the end, the things that we saw as problems or challenges didn’t seem so bad. Those difficulties got us to the end product, which I’m really proud of. They were more like obstacles we had to work through in order to keep game development going. They almost made you think more creatively in an odd way. After all is said in done with I can’t help but think, “damn, I helped make that?!”
