Devlog Journal 8

In class this week, we were finishing up our card game project, As I said in my last devlog, I was assigned the playtest lead role of our card game Gotta G.O. I was playtesting our card game with new players by asking my roommates to play our game and give us feedback for our game so that we make the changes we need to make for our game's rules. But before I got to playtest our game, we needed to create the rules and prototype what our game was going to be.  Jesse Schell describes some tips for productive prototyping in The Art of Game Design that our group could have used when we were prototyping our card game:

"Since your goal is to find problems immediately so you can solve them early, a polished prototype can actually defeat your purpose by hiding real problems, thus lulling you into a false sense of security." What Jesse says here really showed me how beginning the prototyping of our game more effectively required us to find the issues sooner rather than later. This way, when we playtest a more polished version of our game, we have already dealt with the gaping problems our game originally had. This means that when we finalize the rules of our game, we no longer have a false sense of security regarding the flaws of our game because we chose to deal with the main problems of our game rather than hiding them.

"Look at each prototype as a learning opportunity—as practice for when you build the “real” system. Of course, you won’t throw out everything—you’ll keep little pieces here and there that really work and you’ll combine them to make something greater." What Jesse says here really stood out to me because I learned that as we continued to finish up our game, we kept our original system of playing one card per turn and kept the functions of what each special card did in our game. We then would combine these two factors together to make the foundation of our game. As we continued playtesting, we decided to add another mechanic called the "Bag" mechanic to complement these two factors to create something greater within our game.

"If you are clever, you can prototype your fancy videogame idea as a simple board game, or what we sometimes call a paper prototype. Why do this? Because you can make board games fast and often capture the same gameplay. This lets you spot problems sooner—much of the process of prototyping is about looking for problems and figuring out how to fix them, so paper prototyping can be a real time saver." Jesse is talking about prototyping a video game in a paper version of the game. Even though we were making a card game, we were able to prototype our game by recreating the concept of our game using Uno cards. This would be a huge time saver for the group when we were polishing the rules of our game because we were able to detect the problems that our game had a first as fast and efficiently as possible.